Glenn Greenwald's 'Hairy Jocks' Porn Business

Well, well, well.

When you dig down, virtually all these prominent homosexual intellectuals have some sordid background as "RawMuscleGlutes" or "Hairy Jocks" pornography mofos.

And now it's Greenwald's turn for the depraved deep background to emerge, if he we didn't think he was depraved enough already.

At the New York Daily News, "Glenn Greenwald, journalist who broke Edward Snowden story, was once lawyer sued over porn business."

Read it all at the link. Greenwald was supposedly getting 50 percent profits in a porno outfit called "Hairy Jocks," in which he had a personal, ah, hands on role in creative content.

More at London's Daily Mail, "Journalist who helped Edward Snowden expose the NSA scandal was previously sued by business partner over running of 'Hairy Jocks' porn business."

This is great!

I've been waiting for a Glenn Greenwald "RawMusclesGlutes" moment. This is gold! Gold, I tell you!

ADDED: From Robert Stacy McCain, "Glenn Greenwald Is a Ridiculous Joke (And Alas, the Internet Never Forgets)."

“DomMascHry31”? Really? I always figured @ggreenwald as more the "SmoothLooseBottom" type ... http://t.co/lZ1zf5SOs9 #tcot
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 27, 2013

Blue Dogs Under the Bus? Go for it, Democrats!

You've got to love Glenn Greenwald. He provides conservatives with so much humorous fodder.

The latest example is Greenwald's call for progressives to target "Blue Dogs," the centrist Democrats who recently "caved" on FISA and are alleged to be "Beltway Democrats" increasing their own power by "mimicking Republicans."

The essay's gotten quite a response. Especially good is this from Jennifer Rubin:

In a piece filled with perfectly awful analysis and advice Glenn Greenwald says that the problem with Congress is that is was too accommodating of the evil agenda of George W. Bush. FISA passage is at the top of the list. If they hadn’t passed that bill, allowing terrorism surveillance to continue and had cut off funding for the war, they wouldn’t have poll numbers in the teens.

He offers no factual support for this, of course, and indeed polling showed that while the decision to go to war remains unpopular voters did not and still don’t favor a cut off of funds. And Greenwald assumes, again without data, that the public like Barack Obama is stewing that the surge worked — and now taking its wrath out on Congress. His solution? Punish the conservative Blue Dog Democrats, target them for defeat and run them out of town on a rail.

To that I say: oh please do. Let’s see them run Nancy Pelosi clones in the South, anti-gun advocates in Colorado and ultra-liberals in Pennsylvania and Ohio. (See, sometimes you forget that conservatives are not alone in their desire to so purify the party that they would winnow it down to a phone-booth size contingent of true believers.)

But, alas, I do not see any sign that the Democrats are following Greenwald’s advice. Unfortunately for the Republicans, Rahm Emanuel figured out that a party — at least one which seeks majority status — must be broad-based and willing to run people who can win in disparate parts of the country.

So on second thought, forget all the criticism. Go for it, Democrats! Throw the Blue Dogs out, vote to cut off funding for the surge and repeal FISA while you’re at it. And don’t you listen to those poll numbers about off-shore drilling either. It’s just a scheme by Fox news to get you to destroy the environment.

This is the biggest kick I've gotten from lampooning Greenwald since Megan McArdle noted that:

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

I took a bit more serious a stab at the progressive's attack on "Blue Dogs" in "The Left's Demonology of Vengeance."

Reading Rubin, though, is relaxing. I agree: Go for it, Democrats! LOL!!

Blogging Foreign Policy: Bereft of Credentials, Left Strains to Shift Debate

I argued in a recent post, "Diminishing International Relations: Left Bloggers and Foreign Policy," that most of the left's hardcore antiwar bloggers possess little knowledge of international relations theory.

While I would not say netroots antiwar types can't debate foreign policy, I would suggest that their arguments are mostly unhinged rants driven by post-Vietnam knee-jerk reactions to any and all considerations of U.S. military force deployment. As such, there's little that the antiwar netroots can add to the serious analysis of America's international relations.

For example, I recently took down Josh Marshall, the publisher of Talking Points Memo, for his disastrously shallow attempt at foreign policy analysis (see "Uninformed Comment: Josh Marshall on American Military Power"). Not only that, I've discredited Glenn Greenwald numerous times, although I must admit he does try hard.

To be fair, I do see some skills in Spencer Ackerman and his journalism, although he's so over the top in his blogging (which largely discredits his otherwise mainstream reporting), that he's a card-carrying member of the megalomanical blogging-fringe cohort under consideration here.

A good example of the substantive and theoretical shallowness among hard-left foreign policy bloggers can be found in this entry from Cernig at Newshoggers, "Hyping The Chinese Threat."

Cernig fancies himself as some modern Edward Murrow of the blogosphere, but there's little to sustain a self-appreciation of any such sort.

In "Hyping The Chinese Threat," Cernig uses recent debates over China's international standing to argue that "China's threat to American global military superiority has been greatly exaggerated by Pentagon planners," and thus fails to justify increased defense spending.

I'm not quibbling with Cernig's attacks on the Defense Department, variations of which are the staple of Chomskyite America-bashers going back decades. No, my point is just to indicate his total lack of credibility as a serious analyst of foreign affairs.

Cernig's "evidence" for his claim that the Pentagon is "desperate to justify billions on big-ticket development of new warplanes, ships and weapon systems" is a Newsweek commentary essay by esteemed Princeton University political scientist Andrew Moravcsik.

Moravscik's a leading scholar of European integration and theories of liberal internationalism in world politics. Prior to his Princeton appointment, Moravcsik was a Professor of Government at Harvard.

This biographical point is not insignificant, although one would have no any idea of the importance of Moravcsik's backgound in the Newshoggers post. In citing him, Cernig writes, "Newsweek's Andrew Moravcsik breaks down the figures," on China's great power status. It appears as though Moravcsik's just another journalist to Newshoggers, but he's obviously much more than that.

If you'd like, check the Newsweek piece for Moravcsik's argument against the China threat, for Cernig quotes him at length.

But what's really noteworthy about the Newshogger entry is its conclusion:

Admitted, China has done some amazingly reprehesible stuff [sic] - such as the recent crackdown in Tibet - but it's all part of a mainly domestic and entirely regional focus on preserving its own status as the biggest fish in the local pond rather than a threat to American national security. Hyping the threat is partly about a "need to justify R&D and procurement" and thus just yet another example of propaganda in support of corporate welfare schemes. Of course, it's also about a conservative need to keep fearmongering, both for political purposes and to assuage their own psychologically disturbed sense of "threatened tribalism".

This link to the right's "psychologically disturbed" sense of "threatened tribalism" is a reference to Glenn Greenwald's recent allegations of racist fearmongering against Glenn Reynolds.

The problem here?

Well, if Cernig knew a little bit more about whom he was writing he'd realize that Moravicsik's married to Anne-Marie Slaughter (who is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, where Moravcsik's appointed), who Greenwald himself mercilessly attacked in his recent post on academe's liberal war enablers. I can't resist quoting Greenwald's screed against liberal academics who "enabled" the Bush/Cheney war in Iraq:

Slaughter in particular has been an establishment pioneer in voicing this nakedly self-interested demand [in a long-term Iraq deployment]. Last July, she wrote an Op-Ed for The Washington Post praising the Bush administration for "reaching across the aisle" - seriously - and said that, as a result, "some sanity may actually be returning to American politics." By sad contrast, she complained, elements in the blogosphere - those "on the left" - have "responded to the foreign policy failures of the Bush administration by trying to purge their fellow liberals" - meaning those, like her, who supported the Iraq War and who constantly enabled the worst aspects of the Bush presidency. Everything would be perfect if all the mean partisan people stopped harping so negatively on their war cheerleading and started treating them again as the Wise and Serious Experts that they are.

Now, I'm not - I repeat - I am not engaging in any guilt by association, so lefty critics on this post can forget about that line of attack. Moravcsik and Slaughter are obviously distinct individuals, and the opinions of one cannot be used to impugn the views of the other (although there are always questions of associational judgment, for example, as is found in Barack Obama's Wright controversy, but not in this case).

What I am arguing is that I find it odd that Cernig at Newswhoggers would cite Moravcsik as evidence for his claims on Pentagon threat inflation, while in the very same post conclude with a post by Glenn Greenwald, who regularly attacks "fellow liberals" for war mongering, one of whom comes from the same left-wing foreign policy milieu as does Moravcsik. (Such relationships should at least be identified, so that Cernig might be able to deflect criticism that he's daft.)

For example, Moravcsik, who is a regular contributor to Newsweek International, is a proponent of the thesis that the Bush administration's war policies have badly damaged trans-Atlantic relations.

So, citing Moravcsik is good for bolstering a case for Pentagon war mongering, yet citing Greenwald in the same post at the least opens up Cernig to charges of analytical schizophrenia in his online posting.

But look more carefully: Cernig's got a conflict of interest in Newshogger's reporting. On the one hand, Cernig supports root and branch Glenn Greenwald's antiwar opinions on politics and the war (for example, here, here, and here), yet on the other hand it turns out that Moravcsik is exactly the kind of "liberal academic war enabler" Greenwald excoriates. Indeed, Moravcsik, back in 2003, argued for a stronger European defense so as to "complement" U.S. military power during the Iraq war build-up and deployment. Wouldn't this be enabling "the worst aspects of the Bush presidency?" Cernig, of course, has no clue.

This is just one example of Cernig's pure online expediency and hypocrisy, and, frankly, in my view such practice destroys Newshoggers' credibility. Cernig's an implacable foe of the Bush administration, and if he'd have known that Moravcsik's a liberal interationalist who supported "complementing" the Iraq war, the last thing he'd do is boost the circulation of a scholar whose views could be seen enabling that which he hates the most.

In any case, I question the expertise of all these guys, Cernig, Gleen Greenwald, Josh Marshall, Spencer Ackerman, and also Matthew Yglesias of the Atlantic.

Yglesias is a beer-addled Flophouse antiwar blogger who's feted around the left blogosphere like some wise man of left-wing foreign policy circles.

He's got a book forthcoming, "Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats," due out in April.

I normally don't tarry with "light" reading of this sort, but apparently the left's antiwar commentariat's eating it up, which might mean I've got some work upcoming in rebutting more of the left's foreign policy retreatism:

" A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care."
—Ezra Klein, staff writer at The American Prospect.

"Matt Yglesias is one of the smartest voices in the blogosphere. He knows a lot about politics, a lot about foreign policy, and, crucially, is unusually shrewd in understanding how they interact. Here's hoping that his new book will introduce him to an even wider audience. Once you discover him, you'll be hooked."
—E. J. Dionne, author of Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right and Why Americans Hate Politics.

"Matthew Yglesias is one of a handful of bloggers that I make a point of reading every day. Heads in the Sandis a smart, vital book that urges Democrats to stop evading the foreign-policy debate and to embrace the old principles of international liberalism—to be right and also to win."
—Fred Kaplan, author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.

"Reading foreign policy tomes is seldom included among life's pleasures, but Yglesias has concocted a startling exception. Heads in the Sand is not just a razor-sharp analysis cum narrative of the politics of national security in general and the Iraq war in particular, it's also an enthralling and often very funny piece of writing. Though he administers strong antidotes to the haplessness of his fellow Democrats and liberals, there's more than a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down."
—Hendrik Hertzberg, Senior Editor, The New Yorker, and author of Politics: Observations and Arguments.

Well, ahem ... that's some impressive testimonial ... one of "the smartest voices in the blogosphere." Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

I certainly hope something's worthwhile in the book, because Yglesias' blog posts aren't worth a damn.

As always, I'll have more rebuttals and take downs of the antiwar left in future posts.

Glenn Greenwald is Wrong About Iraq Public Opinion

Glenn Greenwald's mounted a hack and smear attack against David Kuhn and his piece today at the Politico, "Support for War Effort Highest Since 2006."

Here's Greenwald:

The Politico today published one of the most blatantly one-sided, journalistically flawed "news" articles on the Iraq War in quite some time and promoted it as its featured story, filled with dramatic proclamations certain to attract (by design) significant attention. The central theme is one which the political establishment is most desperate to believe -- that Americans are now supporting the Iraq War again and this will drastically re-shape the presidential race in favor of the pro-war McCain....

It repeats this pro-GOP assertion over and over. "The repercussions will be most acutely felt in the presidential contest." And: "Democrats' resolute support for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces may soon position them at odds with independent voters, in particular, a constituency they need to retake the White House." And: "The uptick in public support is a promising sign for Republican candidates who have been bludgeoned over the Bush administration's war policies. But no candidate stands to gain more than McCain."

You'll want to read the whole thing.

As I noted in my last post, I've been doing a lot of recent writing on public opinion trends, and the record shows that the Politico piece is not so outlandish as Greenwald alleges.

What's the beef here?

Greenwald essentially has a problem with the article's wording, where Kuhn suggests that "American public support for the military effort in Iraq has reached a high point unseen since the summer of 2006." That may be a poor choice of words (and the article's mistitled as well).

Why?

Kuhn's actually stressing a different issue, that a majority of Americans now believes that the U.S. will succeed in Iraq. The findings are from a late-February Pew survey, which I discussed in an earlier post.

So it's not so much that Americans "support" the war as it's that they see that we're making progress. When Kuhn's article is framed correctly as such, the analysis is uncontroversial. Kuhn notes, for example:

Democrats’ resolute support for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces may soon position them at odds with independent voters, in particular, a constituency they need to retake the White House.

Half of self-identified independents polled now believe the United States should “keep troops in Iraq until the situation has stabilized,” according to polling data assembled by Pew at Politico’s request.

These claims are in line with other recent surveys (which show very little support for an immediate withdrawal), so in that sense the perception of progress in Iraq can indeed hold implications for this fall's election, which is a major argument in the piece.

Now, you can see more to Greenwald's outrage in his comments about Michael O'Hanlon:

The whole article cites only one on-the-record source: the media's favorite all-purpose war cheerleader Michael O'Hanlon, who warns -- yet again -- that the public will soon come to see McCain's pro-war views as the "correct narrative."

Liberal bloggers have sought to discredit O'Hanlon for alleged apostasies (he's with Brookings, which is supposedly a left-of-center think tank, and he's recently been trumpeting U.S. military success in Iraq with his periodic progress reports).

But, while Greenwald is certainly entitled to criticize the Kuhn article for lack of balance, he's not in the right to dismiss the data presented there.

Greenwald goes to a lot of trouble to cite polling statistics indicating that a majority of the public thinks the war was a mistake, or that the Pew survey's an "outlier" contradicted by more recent findings. For example, Greenwald notes that:

A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted after the Politico's poll found that Americans believe we are "not making significant progress" in Iraq, by a 51-43 margin.

All of this is true, but incomplete.

Polls certainly indicate that Americans think the war's a mistake (check Greenwald's link). That's understandable: Iraq's been expensive, in material and human terms, and it's been less than a year that we've been able to show substantial progress. Americans like results, and sentiment on Iraq has followed public opinion trends in earlier conflicts, such as Vietnam, whereby support for the war fell as the level of casualites increased.

But what Greenwald refuses to acknowledge is the dramatic improvement in public perceptions of the war, which is what Kuhn's really addressing.

If you look at Greenwald's own polling data, the number of respondents indicating that the U.S. "is not making significant progress toward restoring civil order in Iraq" has fallen 15 percent since December 2006, which was a month before the initiation of President Bush's new surge strategy.

Moreover, Greenwald makes it sound as if the public wants to head for the exits, for example, when he says:

Polls - all ignored by the Politico - have continuously shown that even when American perceive that the "surge" has decreased violence, they still are against the war as much as ever before and support withdrawal.

But again, that's not complete.

American's don't support withdrawal. Particularly, only 17 percent of those polled in a recent Gallup survey indicated they'd like to remove "all U.S. troops from Iraq as rapidly as possible, beginning now."

To put this differently, a large majority of Americans opposes an unconditional retreat from Iraq. This is significant, because both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been pandering to the hardline retreatists in the Democratic Party base, even though that's a fringe position.

Frankly, those who are calling for an immediate withdrawal - which apparently includes Greenwald himself - are the outliers.

Note more from Greenwald:

How could a war that is so deeply unpopular - and that remains so regardless of claims of "progress" - possibly benefit the candidate and party perceived as being responsible for that war?...

What is the point of writing a big feature article claiming that Americans are moving towards support for the Iraq War again and this is dramatically re-shaping the political landscape in McCain's favor while purposely ignoring the mountain of extremely recent empirical data completely negating that claim?

Actually the war's not as deeply unpopular as Greenwald indicates. In fact, while
Gallup recently showed a moderate majority saying the war was a mistake, the data found a huge partisan split on public perceptions:

Attitudes about the war are strongly related to one's political point of view, ranging from 91% opposition among liberal Democrats to 80% support among conservative Republicans. Thus, while the war will be a major issue during the fall presidential campaign, its impact is less clear, since war supporters (largely Republicans) will most likely support the GOP candidate and war opponents (largely Democrats) will probably back the Democrat.

Overall, the problem for Greenwald is he's unprincipled in his analysis.

True, the war's not wildly popular.

It's not true, however, that American perceptions have not improved. As security in Iraq has increased - and as casualites have declined - there's been dramatic improvement in the number of people indicating that the U.S. is making progress (Washington Post) and of those saying that the U.S. is now likely to prevail (Pew).

Thus, Kuhn's piece in the Politico is not so off target after all. Democrats indeed may be at odds with trends in public opinion. If Clinton and Obama continue to push for a strategic retreat - at precisely the same time that public opinion acknowledges dramatic successes - the political advantage will fall to GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain. The Dems will be vulnerable to merciless attacks as hopelessly out of touch with the facts on the ground and in public sentiment.

Finally, Greenwald jumped the gun in attacking Kuhn, falsely claiming that the author relied on no other data than the Pew survey. He's now posted a retraction, but further down Greenwall offers methodologically flawed conclusions surrounding the Democratic pickup of Dennis Hastert's congressional seat last week:

Less than a week ago, Democrat Bill Foster was elected to Congress in Denny Hastert's long-time, bright red district in Illinois. The centerpiece of his campaign was opposition to the Iraq war, and he defeated a pro-war candidate whose policies mirrored those of John McCain. Might that development have merited a mention by the Politico in this piece? Public opinion on the Iraq War is "re-shaping the political landscape" alright -- just in exactly the opposition direction as Kuhn claimed here.

Greenwald's essentially committed a variation of the "ecological fallacy" in statistical research, which is the error of making individual inferences derived from aggregate-level data.

Actually, in Greenwald's case, he's extrapolating from a single-seat special election to a national level problem, victory in the general election. While it's certainly the case that this year looks to be a Democratic year, it's incorrect to say that John McCain won't be competitive nationally on the basis of the election results in one congressional election.

In sum, Greenwald's wrong about Iraq and public opinion.

Public opinion indicates that the war remains unpopular. The data also support the notion that we're winning. These are facts that are hard for the nihilist leftists like Greenwald to recognize, much less accept.

Schadenfreude in the Telecom Immunity Victory

Well, the partisan battle over telecom immunity is near an end, according to this New York Times piece, "Deal Close on Wiretap Law, a Top Democrat Tells CNN."

I haven't payed all that much attention to it, only to the extent that I've seen whacked-out hard-left blogger Glenn Greenwall getting worked up into an outrageous lather over the whole deal. To read Greenwald is to get the feeling that I should be expecting the "knock in the night" when I hit the hay every evening. This Bush administration is awful, I think...man, those Soviet Refuseniks never had it so rough!

In any case, Michael Goldfarb puts this all in perspective, especially this rowdy Greenwald smackdown in need of wide distribution:

The government shows up at your office just days after the 9/11 attack and asks for your help in the war on terror. What are you going to do? According to Glenn Greenwald, you should call a lawyer (isn't that always what the lawyers say). But telecom executives did the only thing they could do--assist the government in whatever way possible. I doubt any of them even had a moment of doubt in complying with the government's request--worst case, the NSA captures a call from some innocent, naturalized American talking to his al Qaeda-affiliated cousin in Paktia, not exactly an ethical minefield.

But the industry now faces as much as $7.243 trillion in liability, as practically every telephone customer in North America is to be considered a victim of this dastardly operation. After months of demagoguing the issue, the Dems in Congress are finally going to cave and grant the firms immunity from lawsuits that are not only frivolous, but a threat to national security.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who's devoted the last three months of his life to this issue, is despondent:

There's very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented and established at this point to be worth spending any time discussing. They were never going to take a stand against warrantless eavesdropping or the destruction of the rule of law via telecom amnesty for one simple reason: many of them don't actually oppose those things, and many who claim to oppose them don't actually care about any of it. That's all a given.

But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is. If the plan all along was to give Bush everything he wanted, as it obviously was, why not just do it at the beginning? Instead, they picked a very dramatic fight that received substantial media attention. They exposed their freshmen and other swing-district members to attack ads. They caused their base and their allies to spend substantial energy and resources defending them from these attacks.

And to think of all the other things Glenn Greenwald could have not achieved over the last few months were his energy and resources devoted to other hopeless crusades!

I've administered a Greenwald smackdown a bit here and there myself, but this Goldfarb piece is pure schadenfreude.

Wired Battles Glenn Greenwald

At The Atlantic Wire, "The Epic Fight Between Wired and Glenn Greenwald." And following the links takes us to Wired's big response to the Greenwald smears: "Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs." The debate is raging at Memeorandum as well. And see Karl at Patterico's, for example: "Wired gets tired of Glenn Greenwald." And here's the clip of the Jessica Yellin/Glenn Greenwald exchange that's also been buzzing:

Glenn Greenwald: Fort Hood Attack Not Really Terrorism, Or Else the U.S. Gov't is Terrorist, or Something...

Patterico's been going a few rounds with Glenn Greenwald, the hardline left's America-basher extraordinaire. At his post calling out Greenwald's recent attack on him and Allahpundit, Patterico notes, "Despite Greenwald’s history of dishonest sock-puppeting, there are times when I want to like him, because he sometimes shows an inclination to act on principle."

That concuding bit of decency toward Greenwald really struck me, considering how vile the dude is. Indeed, just take a look at Greenwald's post up this afternoon, "Can Attacks on a Military Base Constitute 'Terrorism'?":

The incomparably pernicious Joe Lieberman said yesterday on Fox News that he intends to launch an investigation into "the motives of [Nidal] Hasan in carrying out this brutal mass murder, if a terrorist attack, the worst terrorist attack since 9/11." Hasan's attack was carried out on a military base, with his clear target being American soldiers, not civilians. No matter one's views on how unjustified and evil this attack was, can an attack on soldiers -- particularly ones in the process of deploying for a war -- fall within any legitimate definition of "terrorism," which generally refers to deliberate attacks on civilians?

The obvious problem with answering that question is that, as even the U.S. State Department recognizes, "no one definition of terrorism has gained universal acceptance" -- despite the centrality of that term in our political discourse ....

More at the post, then this:

... a large part of our "war" strategy is to kill people we deem to be "terrorists" or "combatants" without regard to whether they're armed or engaged in hostilities at the moment we kill them. Isn't that exactly what we do when we use drone attacks in Pakistan? Indeed, we currently have a "hit list" of individuals we intend to murder in Afghanistan on sight based on our suspicion that they're involved in the drug trade and thus help fund the Taliban. During its war in Gaza, Israel targeted police stations and, with one strike, killed 40 police trainees while in a parade, and then justified that by claiming police recruits were legitimate targets -- even though they weren't engaged in hostilities at the time -- because of their nexus to Hamas (even though the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said the targeted recruits "were being trained in first aid, human rights and maintaining public order").

Is there any legitimate definition of "terrorism" that allows the Fort Hood attack to qualify but not those above-referenced attacks? The U.S., of course, maintains that it is incapable of engaging in "terrorism," by definition, because "terrorism" is something only "subnational groups or clandestine agent" can do, but leaving that absurdly self-serving and incoherent exclusion aside, how can the Fort Hood attacks targeted at soldiers be "terrorism" but not our own acts?

Hey, that's some pretty professionalized moral relativism?

The difference, as anyone knows -- most of all a constitutional lawyer like Greenwald -- is that the U.S. is a sovereign state-actor, possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, recognized under international law; and its military campaigns are internationally-substantiated legal actions in response to acts of war against this country. (See, "George W. Bush: Declaration of War on Terrorism.") Even Greenwald's own elaboration of the definition of terrorism infers the fundamental right of the U.S. to respond to attacks on its own terroritory and people.

So, what to do? Just denounce the United States as a terrorist itself. That'll do it. Raise a few rhetorical smokescreens and poof!, it's the American military that's the bad guy here, not a methodical fanatical Muslim who killed 13 Americans in cold blood.

You know, this morning Verum Serum used very strong language to denounce Anwar al-Awlaki, who hailed Nadal Hasan's ramage as a heroic act ("anyone who has empathy on any level for the actions of Hasan, or the views expressed by Al-Awlaki, does not deserve to be an American as far as I’m concerned," etc.).

I feel the same way about Greenwald, with all due respect for Patterico's generosity.

Louise Mensch Slams Lying Liar Glenn Greenwald!

I've cooled on Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, although this latest development --- where Greenwald's threatened to dump British intelligence secrets in retaliation for his partner's detention --- is pretty juicy.

Mandy Nagy has the background, at Legal Insurrection, "Greenwald says he’ll publish UK documents after partner detained in London." Plus, a bunch of links at Memeorandum.

But what really got me writing on this is the righteously angry post at Louise Mensch's blog, Unfasionhista, "The Smears of Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian – a primer."

What massive liars Greenwald and Guardian are. Miranda WAS offered a lawyer, refused one. Story unraveling at speed of light

— Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) August 19, 2013

And if you're unfamiliar with her, Ms. Mensch served as a Conservative Member of Parliament from 2010 to 2012.

Check her out on Twitter. A fascinating woman.

Pope Francis is Time's Person of the Year

I guess über-traitor Glenn Greenwald wasn't pleased, via Politico, "Greenwald mocks Time magazine":

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the story of Edward Snowden's National Security Agency leaks earlier this year, mocked Time magazine for picking Pope Francis over Snowden for their "Person of the Year."

In an e-mail to Talking Points Memo and on Twitter, Greenwald called Time magazine "meaningless" and "cowards of the decade" for not choosing Snowden, whose revelations have been and continue to be a major news story that has shaken the government surveillance industry.

"It's a meaningless award from a meaningless magazine, designed to achieve the impossible: to make TIME relevant and interesting for a few fleeting moments," Greenwald told TPM.

He's such a loser.

TIME Magazine: as edgy, bold, courageous and innovative as ever: http://t.co/L1tSbEbgeV - Edward Snowden "Runner-up" http://t.co/Hxq48AQZN9

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 11, 2013

With Newsmen Like You, 'Who Needs Government to Criminalize Reporting?'

That's Glenn Greenwald tearing into David Gregory on "Meet the Press" this morning.

See, "Glenn Greenwald DESTROYS David Gregory."

And on Twitter:

Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 23, 2013

I have never seen a "journalist" be so anti-journalism as @davidgregory interviewing @ggreenwald on Meet the Press.

— Judy Berman (@judyberman) June 23, 2013

David Gregory asks journalist @ggreenwald if he's a criminal for doing journalism: http://t.co/GHTDc2hUjD

— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) June 23, 2013

.@DavidGregory Not sure you should be suggesting criminal charges for a journalist. http://t.co/AkOIvnVkry #irony http://t.co/nJeSwPMYf2

— David Shuster (@DavidShuster) June 23, 2013

Has David Gregory ever publicly wondered if powerful DC officials should be prosecuted for things like illegal spying & lying to Congress?

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 23, 2013

Glenn Greenwald's Absolute Tyranny

I've got a new anonymous commenter, "Suzie Q," who left a response to my entry this morning, "Obama Connects al Qaeda to Jet Plot, But Fails to Connect Global Jihad." Ms. Susie Q asks:

So, how many liberties are conservatives willing to surrender to big government?? Because the conservative position is not to surrender liberties to big government. However, mention "al Qaeda" - and conservatives do a flip flop. That's why the whole thing is such a flop in the first place to a real conservative ....

Actually, no, Susie Q. These "real" conservatives you mention are folks like Daniel Larison who purport to be conservatives while allying with the left in destroying the nation. Nope, there's really little difference between these "true" conservatives (with burning hatred of neocons) and hard left extremists. For example, Glenn Greenwald, a regular writer at the misnamed American Conservative, addresses this same point today, by coincidence, regarding how much liberty conservatives are willing to give up for security. Greenwald excoriates the right's "pathology of fear" as his post, "The Degrading Effects of Terrorism Fears." And while Greenwald is often credited by those on the right for a modicum of consistency (since he's now attacking the Obama administration), I give Greenwald nothing but scorn. A blowhard and windbag, even his legal "expertise" can't save him from this disastrous America-bashing screed:

This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood. The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe. A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved. John Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put it this way:

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.

As Adams noted, political leaders possess an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels, as that is what maximizes their power ....

What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety. A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death. And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

Now, as fancy as that sounds, it's pure leftist drivel -- which is why both radicals and "paleoconservatives" eat it up. Even a cursory understanding of the nation's founding rebuts this simplistic -- indeed, devious -- proposition that liberty ALWAYS supercedes security. No doubt one could search around and find quotes from the founding generation to back one's arguments, but few sources would be more authoritative than Alexander Hamilton, author of some of the most important essays of the Federalist Papers. Here's Hamilton outlining the powers of the executive as facilitating the presevation not just of liberty, but ultimately of security and national survival. From Federalist #71:

THERE is an idea, which is not without its advocates, that a vigorous Executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government. The enlightened well-wishers to this species of government must at least hope that the supposition is destitute of foundation; since they can never admit its truth, without at the same time admitting the condemnation of their own principles. Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy ....

There are preconditions to both security and liberty, and thus Glenn Greenwald's absolutism is both wrong and immoral -- and certainly not conservative. (In fact, Greenwald and his allies are not unlike the extremists of France in 1792 who took absolute liberté to its ultimate solution of the gallows.) Not only do strong national instutions, in the case of a vigorous executive, serve the interests of basic survival, but they are even more fundamental to the classical political philosophy of constitutional governement. As John Locke understood, whose writing formed a leading theoretical foundation for our constitutional regime, the absence of order in the state of nature formed the chief threat to the rights and liberties of men. To create a state (a government with sovereign legal authority over its the people) was to enter into a contract for the preservation of society, and hence the acquistion of security. Locke even modifies the more aggressive social contract theories of folks like Thomas Hobbes. Without a "common power" in centralized government, no person's security can be safeguarded from both external and internal threats, and thus liberty would be purely extinguished as an artifact of the negation of freedom in the left's "progressive" tyranny.

Michael Goldfarb Responds

Even more so than usual, there was some serious unhinging on the left this weekend on Israel-Gaza, in this case as it relates to Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard. Goldfarb applauded Israel's targeted assassination of Nizar Rayan last week, which generated an exceptionally despicable (and effusively effluvial) rant from Glenn Greenwald (and RawMuscleGlutes joined in here).

Here's Goldfarb's response:

Glenn Greenwald, as hysterical and long-winded as ever, accuses me of possessing "the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It's the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings." Another blogger accuses me of endorsing terrorist ethics, and the Atlantic's in-house gynecologist calls me a thug.

In fact, I was explicitly questioning whether such violence can be effective against a group like Hamas. The target of this strike had already sent one of his own sons into Israel as a suicide bomber. Greenwald presumes that I see Palestinians "as something less than civilized human beings" because I question whether they can be deterred "like us." But I wasn't talking about Palestinians in general, I was talking about the Hamas leadership in particular. If Greenwald believes that Hamas, a terrorist group, is itself the avatar of the Palestinian people, then he is the one who sees the Palestinians as less civilized than the rest of us. If not, then I wonder whether he is illiterate or simply disingenuous. But the Hamas leadership is not like us: Americans may send their sons to war, but they do not send them to certain death for the sake of slaughtering civilians.

It's also striking that Greenwald and his fellow travelers would use words like terrorist and thug to describe me while defending the rights of Hamas, an organization comprised of genuine terrorists and thugs. It's become common for the left to describe its ideological opponents as thugs, and the result, apparently, is the inability to recognize real thuggery when it's staring them in the face.

There is no doubt that Israel has the right to strike Nizar Rayan, even at the cost of killing so many women and children -- these civilians were not intentionally targeted. The question is whether or not this strike, in addition to eliminating a leader of Hamas (and the weapons depot in which he chose to house his family), will also deter Hamas from so brazenly ending the next cease fire. The fact that Greenwald & Co. would react so bizarrely to the mere posing of that question is precisely why their voices are being ignored in this debate. Just the other day Greenwald wrote of how he was perplexed by a poll showing that a majority of Democrats shared his views on Israel's assault, but still the Democratic party was almost uniform in its support for the action. Well, its possible for large numbers of people to hold views that simply aren't serious -- though of course a plurality of Americans still supports Israel's actions in Gaza -- and on this issue, like on telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping, a large portion of the left simply isn't serious.

Glenn Greenwald's Guilt by Association

There's a lot of talk about guilt by association this week, with Obama's Wright controversy still dominating the media chatter.

Obviously, one ought to be careful in making overly broad denuncations of Obama's ties to the hate-filled fringe of his party. My view is that the Wright issue has fundamentally clarified matters for us, and that Obama's embrace of his pastor as family - and his claims that he can no more renounce him than he could his own grandmother - suggest that the closeness of the Illinois Senator to the most anti-American theo-ideological currents should not go without notice.

So what's the tactic of the some of the left blogosphere who cheer sentiments like Jeremiah Wright's? Well, how about demonizing the GOP for its own alleged base exclusionism and racism? This is exactly what Glenn Greenwald does in his entry this morning?

It turns out that Glenn Reynolds has linked to a blog called "Instapunk," which has an interesting Easter post up this morning. Make what you want of it. For Greenwald, however, some additional Instapunk postings apparently open up a purported subterranean world of conservative evil essence:

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds today linked to what he called "EASTER THOUGHTS" from one of his favorite right-wing bloggers, his namesake, "Instapunk." That Easter post has a large picture of a crucified Christ along with a lovely religious poem.

Immediately beneath that righteous celebration of Easter is a somewhat less charitable post purporting to take up Barack Obama's invitation to speak about race. After listing a few black entertainers and sports figures he says he likes, here are some of the thoughts Instapunk offers on race:

On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

Here's the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE niggers. Black people know it. White people know it. And only black people are allowed to notice and pronounce the truth of it. Which would be fine. Except that black people are not a community but a political party. They can squabble with each other in caucus but they absolutely refuse to speak the truth in public. And this is the single biggest obstacle to healing the racial divide in this country.

This is disgusting, obviously.

Now, while I would argue that Instapunk's indeed way out of the mainstream of the appropriate bounds of conservative discussion (or more precisely, language), I too feel like "smacking" guys with their pants hanging down to their hamstrings.

Am I a racist because I find that culture not only offensive, but one of the greatest challenges to black progress in the post-Civil Rights era?

Hardly. Bill Cosby makes many of the same points.

But here's more from Greenwald on how this is supposed to be representative of conservative ideology:

This is just a slightly more explicit version of what one hears on so much right-wing talk radio, beginning with conservative hero Rush Limbaugh. Why is there so much hatred and extremism in black churches? Let's talk more and more about all the racism and radicalism among isolated black people and ignore the endless bile that has long spewed forth from the far more powerful appendages of the right-wing noise-machine, exemplified by Instapunk's Easter meditation on race.

While the dominant political faction in the United States built itself and continues to feed and nourish itself with this sort of endless exploitation of racial resentments and grievances -- and while it openly embraces far more powerful religious fanatics who espouse ideas at least as radical and repugnant as anything Jeremiah Wright has ever said -- let's spend the next eight months talking about the controversial comments of a single, comparatively powerless black preacher and have our presidential election decided by that.

Greenwald then updates with some thoughts on the remarks of one of his commenters, who argues that modern conservativism is marked by a sense of "threatened tribalism":

There is no better phrase to describe the animating feature of the modern Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction than "threatened tribalism." The belief that they are good and pure, yet subjected to unprecedented systematic unfairness and threatened by some lurking Evil Other against whom war must be waged (the Muslim, the Immigrant, the Terrorist, the Communist, the Liberal, the Welfare Queen) is the centerpiece of their ugly worldview.

The sentiments expressed here by Instapunk are now most commonly expressed towards the New Enemy -- the Muslim -- but the Wright episode is a nice reminder of how seamlessly it gets directed towards a whole host of other threatening, bad groups. Hence the blithe application of the term "sleeper cells" to black Americans. That's what coalesces them and justifies everything. What matters is that there be some scary, malicious group about to harm them and America. The identity of the particular scary group at any given moment is really secondary.

This is classic Greenwaldian analysis. He sees in every element of conservative cultural criticism a millenarian worldview puportedly geared to the ultimate revival of some 1000-year reich.

Note how Greenwald never denounces the terrorists. He never distances himself from those who leveled the Twin Towers in 2001, from those who beheaded Daniel Pearl in 2002, from the Islamic funamentalists seeking to establish a caliphate across the Mideast, from the Palestianians who work toward the destuction of Israel, from the suicide bombers in Iraq today who kill American soldiers in their nihilist bids for eternal martyrdom.

Nope, it's always the evil Bush/Cheney regime in Washington, and the Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction, who pose the greatest threat to America.

Don't believe it for a second.

Greenwald is feted around the left blogosphere as some deep thinking intellectual pathbreaker, unlocking the keys to some subterranean conservative power elite seeking to implant a far-right theo-fascist dictatorship in the United States.

Instapunk's post is intemperate in its choice of words. The "n-word" is disgusting. The point in question, on the other hand, needs way more discussion in this country. One of the main reasons we don't see such frank discussion is that those who open up this can of worms are labeled racists and modern tribalists. Most people are harassed into silence for even raising such sensitive but troubling topics.

It's too bad too, because the goal of Greenwald and his allies on the left is to install their own version of a far-left wing utopian state. The unflinching support for Obama on the far left - amid the tremendously clarifying round of racial politics in the Wright affair - shows how close the radicals are to achieving their aims of establishing multicultural collectivism as the dominant ideology of Democratic Party governance this year.

Think about that when reading Greenwald's attacks on the Republican Party, and the alleged free ride its getting on the issues of race and politics today. Now that's some guilt by association.

See more at Memeorandum.

Charles Johnson, Ron Paul, Stormfront, and Glenn Greenwald

I've forgotten all about Charles Johnson this last couple of months. He may have peaked with the fawning Los Angeles Times piece a while back, but he was doing some serious damage control on his blog following the surprisingly non-fawning New York Times write up sometime thereafter.

But King Charles is looking for "racists" and "Birchers" as intensely as the likes of Keith Olbermann, and in the case of the latter that interest is mainly a periodic one to keep in good graces with the Daily Kos hate-masters. For Charles Johnson, the search for the ever-elusive key to the alleged GOP/white supremacist connection is all consuming. And because of that, this post (a safe Google link here) is extremely fascinating, "Neo-Nazi Sites Love Ron Paul." Here's the Stromfront quotation from King Charles' post:

Polymath
Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 3,966

Re: Ron Paul Wins CPAC Poll

There is a Jewish Supremacist hate site called “Little Green Footballs” and this kind of thing drives them crazy, because they PRETEND to be conservatives and when a real conservative and all-American man like Dr. Ron Paul wins so many conservative polls, they go crazy with whining.

These LGF Jews are the most unpatriotic Israeli-first traitors the United States sees in the blogosphere. They are vile and disgusting rats. “Charles Johnson” is the shabbat goy that fronts this obvious Zionist hate site, and even if this “Charles Johnson” moron claims to be Christian, he could care less about Christianity in the Holy Land, which is getting wiped out by Zionists, and it fared far better under the Arabs before the Khazar (Ashkenazi) fakes came to the Middle East.

Now reading this, it's extremely perplexing to figure out the lines of ideological affilation or repudiation.

Charles Johnson wants to destroy the tea party movement as an extremist neo-Nazi falange. But this Stormfront guy -- if that's who he really is -- is smearing King Charles with the worst anti-Semitic hatred. Which itself goes to show, frankly, that the tea partiers have absolutely nothing in common with such legitimate hate groups.

It's ridiculous, but that's not all. Glenn Greenwald, the radical leftists who claims to be a constitutional libertarian, has a post up today claiming that the original tea party activists were "Paulbots." See, "The GOP's "Small Government" Tea Party Fraud":

There's a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the "tea party" movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be -- recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America's conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism -- yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, "small government" political movement.

The Right is petrified that this fraud will be exposed and is thus bending over backwards to sustain the myth. Paul was not only invited to be a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference but also won its presidential straw poll. Sarah Palin endorsed Ron Paul's son in the Kentucky Senate race. National Review is lavishly praising Paul, while Ann Coulter "felt compelled [in her CPAC speech] to give a shout out to Paul-mania, saying she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy -- a statement met with cheers." Glenn Beck -- who literally cheered for the Wall Street bailout and Bush's endlessly expanding surveillance state -- now parades around as though he shares the libertarians' contempt for them. Red State's Erick Erickson, defending the new so-called conservative "manifesto," touts the need for Congress to be confined to the express powers of Article I, Section 8, all while lauding a GOP Congress that supported countless intrusive laws -- from federalized restrictions on assisted suicide, marriage, gambling, abortion and drugs to intervention in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life state court proceeding -- nowhere to be found in that Constitutional clause. With the GOP out of power, Fox News suddenly started featuring anti-government libertarians such as John Stossel and Reason Magazine commentators, whereas, when Bush was in power, there was no government power too expanded or limitless for Fox propagandists to praise.

A long quote, I know. But the context is needed when reading Greenwald's next passage:

These fault lines began to emerge when Sarah Palin earlier this month delivered the keynote speech to the national tea party conference in Nashville, and stood there spitting out one platitude after the next which Paul-led libertarians despise: from neoconservative war-loving dogma and veneration of Israel to glorification of "War on Terror" domestic powers and the need of the state to enforce Palin's own religious and cultural values. Neocons (who still overwhelmingly dominate the GOP) and Paul-led libertarians are arch enemies, and the social conservatives on whom the GOP depends are barely viewed with greater affection. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul are about as far apart on most issues as one can get; the "tea party movement" can't possibly be about supporting each of their worldviews. Moreover, the GOP leadership is currently promising Wall Street even more loyal subservience than Democrats have given in exchange for support, thus bolstering the government/corporate axis which libertarians find so repugnant. And Coulter's manipulative claim that she "agrees with everything [Paul] stands for outside of foreign policy" is laughable; aside from the fact that "foreign policy" is a rather large issue in our political debates (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia), they were on exactly the opposite sides of the most intense domestic controversies of the Bush era: torture, military commissions, habeas corpus, Guantanamo, CIA secrecy, telecom immunity, and warrantless eavesdropping.

Now you can really see the ideological lines coming back together. Charles Johnson hates the tea parties, and links them to neo-Nazi Ron Paul websites. Glenn Greenwald hates the tea parties BECAUSE he thinks the movement's trying to co-opt Ron Paul. It's amorphous, but I'll tell you: I've been to dozens of tea parties, political rallies, and protests over the last year, and the only place I saw a major Ron Paul (antiwar) contingent was at the communist ANSWER demonstration at the Wilshire Federal Building last October. Indeed, the folks from Antiwar.com were marching, and their organizer, Nick Hankoff, commented at my report.

So folks can now figure out where they'd like to draw up ideological lines: Would you prefer to be associated with the leftist/Ron Paul/Stormfront strange-bedfellows alliance (that in fact includes all of these folks, C.J, Greenwald, and Ron Paul) or with Sarah Palin and the tea parties? For despite Greenwald's long list of indicators suggesting that the tea party movement is going all in for Ron Paul and his protege, it's foreign policy that'll be the dividing line. Ann Coulter said it best, and I noticed this over the weekend: "she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy." Exactly!

And pay special attention to Greenwald's excoriation of the "neocons." Stormfront folks hate the neocons (for their support of Israel). But Sarah Palin's a neoconservative hero, as I've long noted. And that makes it easy to figure which side of the ideological line you'll find me. Genuine conservatives favor a strong national defense, for without security, all of our freedoms here at home are at risk.

The Left Blogosphere vs. The Foreign Policy Community

David Frum has a neat piece on (antiwar) blogging and foreign policy at the new National Interest.

Frum looks at the frustration among a number of top left-wing bloggers with the "foreign policy community," or "FPC." Why should these sheltered mandarins have the final word on the direction of American international affairs? Moreover, what gives them the right?!!

Read the whole thing (Frum provides some juicy quotes on hard-left outrage over the FPC's alleged enabling of Bush administration foreign policy "disasters").

I liked this part, however:

Here, for example, is a marvelous demonstration of the mutual torment practiced upon each other by the bloggers and the FPC.

On August 14, 2007, Brookings Institution scholar Michael O’Hanlon was asked on a radio show about Glenn Greenwald’s lengthy and highly personal attacks upon him. He replied,

Well, I don’t have high regard for the kind of journalism that Mr. Greenwald has carried out here. I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time rebutting Mr. Greenwald because he’s had frankly more time and more readership than he deserves.

This put-down was featured on the left-leaning website CrooksandLiars.com and provoked 71 responses, including this one:

Dear Michael O’Hacklon, Armstrong Williams wants his job back, the one that you are currently occupying. . . .Anyway, there never seems to be a shortage of your special brand of treasonous frauds running around. Enjoy the ride while it lasts.

And this one:

Oh my goodness Mr. O’Hanlon, so sorry the caviar was not up to your supreme standards. We’ll have the beluga beaten immediately.

And this one:

two words for you o’hanlon: f--- you (sorry for the language C&L)

glenn greenwald is a true patriot, working to ensure the continued viability of our ever-so fragile democracy. and, ohanlon? nothing but a blowhard caught in inaccuracies and, like armstrong williams and gannon/guckert, a tool of the administration. the question i have for o’hanlon is just how much money it took for you to sacrifice your integrity.

good job mikey, you have done serious damage to the brookings institute. from now on any ‘finding’ or opinion stemming from this now-compromised “think” tank will be followed by an asterisk, saying: beware, some brookings fellows spew govt propaganda and try to pass it off as independent conclusions. . . .

Bitter! And also strange. Michael O’Hanlon, as readers of The National Interest will know, is the editor of the Iraq Index, a source relied upon by people of almost all points of view. He served in the Congressional Budget Office during the last Democratic majority and has strongly criticized the Bush Administration almost from Inauguration Day. What makes him such a detested target?

To find the answer, revert for a minute to a key point in Gideon Rose’s above-quoted paragraphs: The bloggers’ attacks are generally aimed at the think-tank world. Which is to say: at members of the FPC who are currently out of power. Which is to say: at Democrats. Especially at moderate Democrats, internationalist-minded Democrats, Democrats who in 2002–2003 expressed support for the Iraq War. The bloggers hurling the invective are Democrats too, usually more liberal Democrats.

The blogosphere of 2007 is a predominantly liberal and Democratic place. This was not always the case: As recently as 2005, former Vice President Al Gore castigated “digital brownshirts” who bullied and intimidated critics of George Bush. He would have no such complaint today. Today, it is the critics of George Bush who do the brown-shirting.

Thus, the generally liberal journalist Joe Klein complained in June 2007 of the

fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn’t move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable.

While online readership surveys are notoriously unreliable, such data as exists suggests that the liberal site Daily Kos outdraws Rush Limbaugh’s website. Traffic on participatory conservative sites like Free Republic and Red State has plunged, and as this election cycle opens, one senses greater energy and sees more comments on big liberal blogsites like TalkingPointsMemo.com and the WashingtonMonthly.com than on their conservative counterparts. Technologically, liberal sites like the HuffingtonPost and MediaMatters seem a generation ahead of counterparts like Drudge and the Media Research Project.

So when we talk about the antagonism that has arisen between bloggers and the FPC, we are really talking about liberal bloggers and the Democratic half of the FPC. This is a family feud, one that bears more than a passing resemblance to the great Democratic schism over Vietnam.

It's an interesting analysis, but incomplete.

I think the left's outrage is directed at any and all support for the Bush administration. There's nothing possibly redeeming about "the Bush/Cheney regime" to the hard left. So for those scholars who would normally be consided natural left-wing allies, the controversy's tantamount to an online ideological inquisition.

Now, it's true that most of the foreign policy professoriate resides on the left of the spectrum. There is some diversity, however. Daniel Drezner, a right-of-center international relations scholar at the Fletcher School, took Glenn Greenwald to the woodshed in a series of posts a while back, a debate which provides some data for the Frum discussion.

Neoconservatives, naturally, as Frum rightly notes, come in for the lion's share of abuse. But the left blogosphere's not exclusively outraged with liberal turncoats: It's anyone who's backed the Bush administration's foreign policy, left, right, or center.

Beyond this, an interesting hypothesis would be to argue that the radical netroots will hold an inordinate level of influence in Democratic foreign policy in 2009 (should the party come to power).

If we take Frum's discussion to the next level - starting with the notion that the leftosphere's not content to sit on the sidelines in foreign affairs - the Democratic Party's assumed inclusiveness should propel the netroot hordes to the status of an elite "Bloggers' Council on Foreign Relations."

I hope I'm proven wrong.