defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

idgaf about people's opinions when they were in high school. have you ever met a teenager? they're idiots.

i similarly don't really care *that* much about someone's beliefs before they became a public figure. when your opinions and decisions actually start to mean something (for example, you're a US senator), i care a little more about the thought you put into things and the conclusions you come to

i knew plenty of ppl back in 2002 and 2003 who were sufficiently confused or awed by the amount of propaganda coming out of the administration (often helped by the press) that they didn't oppose the war. i don't judge them the same way i do politicians, pundits, or any other public figures who jumped on the bandwagon and loudly advocated for the invasion. (one of whom, btw, was the candidate frederik b stridently advocated for here during the primary season last year.)

I was completely snowed by the Bush admin throughout 2002-3 and have never forgiven them for it. I was basically an unwitting Colin Powell and I'm sure some evidence of that is all over ILE.

yeah i read too much hitchens after 9/11 but i thought reading the nation and slate was where it was at

Ah, the frantic sound at goalposts being moved by kev k and j d. I don't care how much you care about, or how you want to judge, GG's support for the Iraq War, but it's a fact that he did support it. I notice it because he seems a bit like El Tomboto, as someone whos anger at neo-cons has to do with the fact that they feel personally deceived.

I demonstrated against both the Iraq and Afghan wars, do I have extra cachet to tell you you're being an asshole

cosign

I supported Afghanistan, didn't support Iraq. Do I get a cookie?

You're pulling Greenwald out of context, Frederik. I've been quoting here and elsewhere since 2006 and never saw him as anything but a non-politician overwhelmed by propaganda and, who knows, motivated by patriotism.

I never supported the war. Before we learned the extent of Karl Rove's cynicism and perfidy, I couldn't figure out what the goddamn rush was. If Saddam had nukes, why not let the UN weapons inspectors do their job? It stank from the beginning. However, I shut up after the occupation and for a time in 2003, buttressed by generous doses of Kenneth Pollack, Hitchens, and Paul Berman, thought as a liberal we should see what kind of lasting peace these cynical and perfidious men made -- a thought-experiment that showed my own cynicism. I gave up in 2004.

most americans, in 2003, were not prepared to swallow the idea that their president and his entire administration -- who had been covered by much of the press in a less-than-critical light since 9/11 -- would straight-up lie to them about something so important.

I don't take any credit for my opposition, I was a typical anti-authoritarian punk (9/11 was one of my first days of high school). That said, I wouldn't trust either the American (or Canadian) militaries' judgment, planning, or justifications for basically any armed action in the Middle East at this point so maybe not that much has changed lol

i was in yeshiva at the time so i was pretty out of touch with everything that happened except for seeing newspaper headlines in vending machines on friday when we out went to put tefillin on ppl. but i remember feeling for weeks like war was inevitably coming - that it just seemed stacked that way and the GWB administration just seemed v full of shit like obviously trying to sell a war while pretending they didn't want one. lots of bellicose statements about how this is the last straw etc.

i was listening to a lot of chomsky lectures at the time and was probably against it on principle. the whole time after 9/11 was just exhausting tho - and being sequestered i felt especially helpless.

I think the patriotism aspect is really interesting, the way Greenwald explicitly evokes it in his book title as well. The Patriot Act is doubly wrong because it hurts patriotism, almost, as if patriotism isn't a corrosive idea to begin with. I mean, is it really that surprising that he is now writing about Bannon as somehow representing the vote of the people?

link?

As the Atlantic’s Rosie Gray reports, McMaster has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy and anti-Muslim worldview Trump advocated throughout the election. As Gray notes, this has provoked anger among Trump supporters who view the assertion of power by these Generals as an undemocratic attack against the policies for which the electorate voted.

[...]

The combination of the “Goldman Boys” and the Generals has taken over, Wilson crows, and is destroying the Bannon-led agenda on which Trump campaigned.

[...]

Whatever else is true, there is now simply no question that there is open warfare between adherents to the worldview Trump advocated in order to win, and the permanent national security power faction in Washington that – sometimes for good, and sometimes for evil – despises that agenda.

[...]

the military triumvirate of Kelly, Mattis and McMaster has been cast as the noble defenders of American democracy, pitted against those who were actually elected to lead the government.

[...]

In terms of some of the popular terms that are often thrown around these days – such as “authoritarianism” and “democratic norms” and “U.S. traditions” – it’s hard to imagine many things that would pose a greater threat to all of that than empowering the National Security State (what, before Trump, has long been called the Deep State) to exert precisely the power that is supposed to be reserved exclusively for elected officials.

From upthread

the king of bad faith strikes again.

bannon's fp is what trump ran on.

Are you joking?

Trump bought into a lot more of Bannon's ideology than his fp, lol

Not that that has anything to do with what I'm getting at.

gg is either supporting the democracy principle even when it results in things he doesn't like, and/or he is more in favor of bannon's isolationist/nativist fp than the "deep state's" - both seem justifiable positions to me. what's insanely stupid is that he's talking about mcmaster and mattis as tho they're unelected officials undermining the potus's agenda but the potus appointed both of them and can fire both of them - they are a result of the democratic will, not some kind of anti-trump alliance.

he is more in favor of bannon's isolationist/nativist fp than the "deep state's"

This is my assumption (because your first solution is undermined by your explanation in the next few sentences), and I'm noting there might be some overlap between his frustrated patriotism and the isolationism/nativism.

Bump

Expanding scope of thread to include general douchiness and asshattery at The Intercept:

https://www.theroot.com/hey-i-can-play-this-game-too-guys-1819822866

FOIA requests are a tactic used to expose vast corruption, dirty cops and human rights abuses, not to snoop after other journalists who say things you don’t like. I guess Fang was hoping to find some type of nefarious collusion between me and the Stacey Abrams campaign (which is ironic, since I thought The Intercept didn’t believe in collusion).

I’m surprised that Fang thinks I’d be dumb enough to communicate with any political source on my work email. That’s Journalism 101. He might need to retake that class; I’ll save him a seat when I teach it next fall.

I honored the FOIA request, but I didn’t have anything to give him because there was nothing to give.

lol @ Angry Loomis though

Recent great hires at The Intercept have forced me off of my position to never read anything sponsored by that site curated by racist Rand Paul-curious dishonest libertarian Russian stooge Glenn Greenwald.

I was wondering if you bumped this thread because of Loomis.

I read LGM every morning but Loomis' old-dude-discovers-Facebook prose style gets on my nerves at times.

I get aggravated at Loomis because he is so prolific and knowledgeable it makes me feel like a bum

I thought The Intercept didn’t believe in collusion

ooh "sick burn" I believe it's called

boring thread, boring Democrats, boring world

"a bunch of frustrated Bernie Bro friends"

(psst, stopped reading here)

this sensationalist bullshit wasn't fact-checked with anybody who actually works in the field - but as soon as they got some scans on russian hackers targeting election systems, they immediately went to their IC buddies for corroboration.

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/19/voice-recognition-technology-nsa/

fuck the intercept, fuck omidyar, and fuck greenwald. the entire first look media enterprise is a unprincipled tabloid trash fire that makes the new york times editorial page and chris cillizza smell like fucking roses

do you mean the NYT op-ed page

yeah, being serious, I'll take that part back - nyt editorials are implicated in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths so, fine, first look media is superior

Dude shared an article from The Federalist today.

need more data

With an open mind, please read @MZHemingway on how the US media's mindless, shocking acceptance of every claim from "Hamilton68" - a group formed by Bill Kristol, CIA officials & various neocons - has deceived millions w/false stories. It's a scandal https://t.co/Gn6w398cVA

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 22, 2018

here's the piece in question if we're interested in more than just gotcha stuff - which on this thread ilx basically isn't

best things about the piece: has a link to a video of Adrien Chen appearing on MSNBC and a link to this Masha Gessen article.

I was looking for support in the article for the claim that Hamilton 68 has deceived millions , but I didn’t see it.

Would have been better to just link the Gessen piece (although there’s some super questionable cherry picking in that) instead of effectively endorsing someone’s argument that Nunes should be taken at face value. Chen was good on Hayes but his pints probably shouldn’t be appropriated for the goal post shifting of others.

Reading the piece with an open mind. First line: Last week, Laurence Tribe suggested, without evidence, that a plane crash in Russia was related to fallout from the Russian dossier operation orchestrated and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Um no, we're done here. What the fuck is wrong with this dude?

you have fucking evidence for everything, dontcha, Fuckerik?

but lol you do have an open mind (I can feel the draft from here)

What on earth is wrong with you to?

here doll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier#cite_note-WaPo-paidresearch-14

I was gonna say, if that's the controversial part, I thought that was pretty well known?

I think Fred took issue with the linkage to a plane crash in Russia without evidence

IIRC Tribe tweeted about the crash that supposedly killed a political enemy, who it turned out wasn't on the plane? (I can't recall if he explicitly suggested it was tied to the dossier's contents.)

Holy christ that anyone on here would be okay with calling this 'the Russian dossier operation orchestrated and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign'

That's like Benghazi-level right wing conspiracy language.

buuuut it's troo?

so ja i'm OK with it

the gessen piece is worthy of some discussion on a different thread imho