Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Glenn Greenwald's Sock Puppetry!

I don't know if Glenn Greenwald uses sock puppets to defend himself in the blog wars of which he's constantly engaged.

I can point to what others are saying, arguments which make Greenwald look like a hack.

Karl at Protein Wisdom has a post up, "
Rick Ellensburg: The Silence of the Sock-Puppets," which suggests Greenwald's engaged in pseudonymous posting defending himself:

Rick Ellensburg is quite upset that Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner supposedly defended the establishment media in response to another recent Ellensburg screed, which complained that the media was more interested in covering stories like Barack Obama’s bad bowling score or his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright than the declassification of the 2003 “torture memo” drafted by John Yoo, then a deputy in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.

In reality, Drezner and McArdle did not defend the media so much as critique Ellensburg’s arguments.
Rick Ellensburg? Who's Rick Ellensburg?

As Ace of Spades notes, Ellensburg's Greenwald's "
magic boyfriend" who pops up at key moments to defend Greenwald in the blog wars:

It has already been proven that "Rick Ellensburg," Certified Greenwald Defender, blogs from the same area of Brazil that Glenn Greenwald does. And is active on the internet at the same time as Greenwald. And favors the same "to recap" construction and use of hyphens that Greenwald does.
But check out Patterico:

Glenn Greenwald is irate that conservative bloggers dared to take notice. Greenwald (also known as Thomas Ellers and Rick Ellensburg, among others) complains bitterly that conservative bloggers went digging deep into the comment sections of various liberal blogs, found inappropriate and hateful comments, and then began insisting that these isolated comments proved something.

To the contrary, Greenwald insists, anonymous comments by hateful leftists prove nothing about the left generally. Nothing!
Here's more, from Patterico:

If your mouth is agape at the shameless hypocrisy of this, then you must [not] be familiar with Greenwald.

These comments are staggeringly hypocritical, viewed in the light of Greenwald’s extensive history of spotlighting anonymous comments at conservative blogs to reach broad-brush conclusions about the entire conservative movement. Greenwald is a prime practitioner of this “transparently flimsy and misleading method” of tarring the other side. And, in marked contrast to Greenwald’s tender concern today for whether ugly leftist comments “are representative of the blog itself,” Greenwald is famous in conservative circles for highlighting extreme comments on conservative blogs — comments that in no way represent the views of the posts to which they are responding, or of the bloggers generally.
I think folks are clearly on to Greenwald's hypocrisy.

But if you don't have time to follow all the lines of circumstantial proof of Greenwald's sock puppetry, just read
McArdle's incredibly powerful logical takedown of Greenwald, and her immortal line:

Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure...
Touche!

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