defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

I don't know, he seems to stand for plenty, it's just that it's either aligns with, or is easily co-opted by, right wing authoritarianism.

He is one step away from realising that, hey, the establishment is pretty Jewish? And then there will be no contradictions in his thinking anymore.

Sorry, he is two steps away from that. It's probably 'rootless cosmopolitanism' next, or something like that.

Some fun quotes from back when he was every lefty's favorite Bush-basher:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dhd6R8bUcAEDV_z.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dhd6SmIU8AAE8jj.jpg

It's really hard to imagine how he ended up supporting Trump, isn't it?

Wow

Does anyone really doubt anymore that the reason it seemed as if he did anything he could in autumn 2016 to hurt Clinton and help Trump was because he supported Trump?

― Frederik B, Saturday, July 7, 2018 4:18 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No

― El Tomboto, Saturday, July 7, 2018 5:53 AM

put down the Danish crack pipe

GG supported the candidate who called for his friend Snowden's execution -- got it! That makes Obama's "rope-a-dope" look like... well, a much smaller Centrist Democrat fantasy.

sadlol

I enjoy dismissing your irrational defensiveness about this racist Fox News nincompoop more than you enjoy calling me a centrist

You're really basing your defense on a fantasy of GG and Snowden being bffs?

What principles of Greenwald's do you think Morbius actually supports? Or is it just Greenwald good, Clinton and Obama and the Democrats bad, Trump a non-factor?

“principles of Greenwald's”

Scott at LGM points out this gem, which is delicious

G.G: No, if anything, it’s convinced me that it’s more unlikely than ever. There are factions within the intelligence community of the United States, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI that hate Donald Trump and will do anything to destroy him, including leaking classified information against him. I believe that if there were evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russian government, when it comes to the hacking of the DNC or the John Podesta emails, we would have seen it by now.

ha hahha what in the actual fuck. unless his objective is just bare-faced accelerationism then I’m worried he may be suffering from a brain parasite

the Clintons = racist Goldman Sachs nincompoops

(also enthusiastic recipients of Trump cash)

But what do you think that has to do with anything? And would you, like GG align yourself with straight op Italian fascists to combat Clintonistas? That's the point.

i dont know what youre talking about. i havent even read a Greenwald column in weeks/months. so grind away.

So it really is exactly what I said above. Greenwald good (you don't even have to read his work to know so), the Clintons, Obama, and the Democrats as a whole evil, Trump a non-factor unless he can be used as a weapon against the Democrats. Quite a worldview you've got there, Doc.

my worldview is ilx can eat shit

Morbs is a committed blue voter he just hates his options most of the time, and I think he reflexively defends GG because the-enemy-of-my-enemies etc

he goes on DemocracyNow too btw... so is he a racist Amy Goodman nincompoop too?

Half a mil per year isn’t interesting enough so he takes paid time on Tucker and RT.

Note that according to First Look's IRS filings, it appears Greenwald is receiving 3 times the salary his Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras is. Which is outrageous, considering that Greenwald's career was made by the Snowden story, which was Poitras's scoop, not Greenwald's.

— Idrees Ahmad (@im_PULSE) July 15, 2018

dog kennels are expensive

xpost dumb take. Greenwald was a pretty big deal pre-Snowden.

gonna risk stepping in it majorly here and ask: is Poitras actively doing stuff? I feel like I haven't heard much from her since Citizenfour.

poitras stepped down from the intercept in 2016 iirc

this is an important conversation

she runs- is exec producer and co-creator at https://fieldofvision.org - still under first look.

without knowing what the expected relative wages for their respective roles would be this is just wild conjecture used to dismiss a hate figure

She had that Assange-related film that came out two years ago (essentially the arc of her disenchantment with him, apparently).

Should have linked to the beginning of the thread instead of the tweet about Poitras. Oh well.

"Western masochism," that's cute... sounds like a Bush

The idea that Greenwald earns 500.000 $ to blog about the deep state and how he himself did nothing wrong in 2016 is ridiculous. And also, isn't 500.000 $ from Ebay 'corporate money'?

New profile in the New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/glenn-greenwald-the-bane-of-their-resistance

“They’re just using the law as a political weapon against Trump, just as Brazilian élites are using it against Lula.” He was referring to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist former President, who had just begun a prison term for corruption and money laundering.

they're just *squints* enforcing the law

He was wearing shorts and flip-flops

this again

As I sit in my b-boy stance
With flip-flops and socks, and sweatpants
I finna enhance your brain, check it out

i actually knew parker a little years ago and have a low opinion of him thus-wise: he took over as editor of a small part of a long-dead UK newspaper's weekend section and proceeded to reject a bunch of excellent proposals i'd sent to his predecessor (who i got on well with). parker and i had a little pre-online fight abt them, i went elsewhere truculently, he quite soon after got a job as a new yorker writer and wrote (in my entirely unbiased opinion) some v mediocre longform pieces, i now forget what about but they were bad not good

anyway, it's strikes me as entirely typical of parker's (and the modern new yorker's) laxity that the quote tombot highlights is all that's said abt lula: bcz an examination of how lula and trump are perhaps superficially similar but actually VERY different would (it strikes me) tell us quite a lot more abt greenwald's politics, and also highlight similarities and differences between US and brazilian elites

(adding: i think there's a ghost of an argument to be made here -- but parker doesn't require greenwald to make it, so i have no idea if my version of it overlaps with GG's)

(garry wills's version of it is here -- may be sub only, apologies if so)

https://deadspin.com/tennys-sandgren-now-enjoys-a-very-intense-friendship-1828626154

not sure if he's become friends with PGA Tour vet and 9/11 truther Golph Schultz yet.

really looking forward to reading this profile, hopefully it’s at least somewhat critical. GG was a writer who meant a lot to me in college but I haven’t read him regularly in years; I do think his beat is a legitimate one even if it’s annoying and seemingly increasingly tendentious. he has lost some credibility with me over the years and I wish he were better at putting things into perspective and being less of a troll

It's more ironic than critical, but it's delicious.

It's great stuff like this:

In the Trump era, Greenwald seems to be most energized when he discovers flaws in Democratic messaging, or in the output of an MSNBC contributor; this summer, he wrote a piece about a single uncorrected error by Malcolm Nance, a former intelligence officer, who had mistakenly said that Jill Stein had a show on RT; Greenwald used the words “lie,” “fabrication,” and “falsehood,” and their variants, twenty times, and proposed that “NBC News and MSNBC have essentially merged with the C.I.A. and intelligence community,” and that “anyone who criticizes the Democratic Party or its leaders is instantly accused of being a Kremlin agent.”

yeah, how dare he

The Lula prosecution is bullshit btw

the lula prosecution is on behest of radical right-wing forces who are also corrupt and is a parliamentary coup because the right couldn't beat the PT in an election. comparison with trump is glib of course, though accurate in a very superficial way (both won elections, both having opposition trying to take them down for their criminal activities)

If, for many years, a writer has described his fears about the state of America, does he find it galling when others make much of their sudden new fear? Embedded in Greenwald’s hostility to Trump’s critics seems to be the aggrieved question “What took you so long?”

“Yes, yes!” Greenwald said, emphatically, as he drove. Years after he began writing critically about expanded Presidential powers, “all these powers are now in the hands of Donald Trump,” he said. “He gets to start wars. So I do get a sense that, O.K., people are going to finally understand that this model of the American Presidency—this omnipotence, this lack of checks and balances—is so dangerous. But the problem is they’re being told that the danger is endemic to Trump, and not to this broader systemic abuse that’s been created. And that’s why I’m so opposed to the attempt to depict Trump as the singular evil. It’s not just partial or incomplete—it’s counterproductive, it’s deceitful.”

This is actually true of, like, 95 percent of MSNBC's coverage, which might as well be "Trump is vulgar" and Russia Russia Russia all the time.

Trump did not win an election, unless you're counting the GOP primary

I can't get past the thought of how his home no doubt stinks of wet dog (twenty-four dogs!).

xp. if this is a pedantic he didn't win the popular vote or a russian hacking thing then this ain't it, chief