Matt Taibbi

as someone who thought obama's anti-whistleblower shit was the worst thing about his administration, i agree with a lot of where taibbi is coming from here. and tbh i still find him worth reading a lot of the time -- he's often wrong, but he's not a complete clown like tracey.

otoh, there are significant differences between the whistleblowers taibbi (rightly) defends and this story. for one thing, at least some of the cases he mentions involve leaking classified information. i don't think a trump phone call qualifies, or half the ppl bob woodward interviewed for his book would be in prison. (and yes, leaking classified info is sometimes the right thing to do, if it demonstrably serves the public interest -- i still think snowden is more or less a hero for what he did.)

and yeah, the column basically falls apart once he makes the jump from defending whistleblowers to "trump is being taken down by the deep state, folks!" based on...very little, other than something a random guy said on CNN and taibbi's own barely concealed belief that america actually kinda sorta deserves donald trump, and any attempt by mainstream politicians to take him down will just be "the elite" protecting their interests, nothing more.

Taibbi has devolved into a replacement level Glenn Greenwald parody account

Which is sad because I very much enjoyed him taking the piss out of Friedman & co on a near-weekly basis. Those were the days

any attempt by mainstream politicians to take him down will just be "the elite" protecting their interests

you just reminded me that Pelosi interrupted herself at a press conference last week to say "I love the Bushes."

“Sure Kissinger is bad, but this Ellsberg guy worked for the war-profiteering RAND corporation, so the important thing to remember and focus on is that l neither side is so pure!”

Snowden got shit for the audience he took his info to, with the guess that official channels would never care! And I don’t defend the guy across the board, but he wasn’t wrong. I mean, emphatically bad at not filing inter-office reports and rolling eyes at what most bureaucrats would see as normal bullshit

Really if he was a hero he’d have worked into promotions for an interminable time and then had his ethics twisted to the point where a real breach of ethics to report was a drone pissing on the wrong side of the road instead of a cross-governmental surveillance racket (boring)

yeah, idk, i think it was important for the american public to know they were being spied on. the creepy thing about that was no one was surprised--we all assumed that was happening anyway. i also think there was some misunderstanding about just what it was he uncovered. i remember an episode of the new girl where one of the characters doesn't want to use a smartphone because his data will be beamed "straight into snowden's pocket," as if snowden was the one spying on people.

I never understand ppl who sneer at Snowden

Yes, some secrets are necessary to governance, but Snowden revealed clear and unambiguous illegality on the part of the NSA that was taking place with zero Congressional oversight. In doing so he essentially chose an uncomfortable exile from his country of birth rather than stay silent and complicit in that illegality. I can't say that was anything but a courageous act that reflected a far higher regard for the US Constitution than those who ordered those criminal acts and sought to keep them a secret.

I wonder what % of the snarkers are at it cause on some level they know they'd have done jack in his position

he's not a complete clown like tracey.

Tracey is so bad that any engagement with he reflects negatively on anyone that even engages with him with any level of credulity. He's a genuine sinkhole

lol @ snowden should have just filed a report, good stuff

I’m sure the senior staff at the NSA would have really had a change of heart after being informed that the entire surveillance apparatus was illegal

being informed that the entire surveillance apparatus was illegal

Their apparatus was not illegal. Congress authorized it and funded it. But using that apparatus to conduct surveillance of US citizens within the USA was clearly and specifically prohibited by Congress. When Bush told NSA to do it anyway and not tell Congress, they all flouted the US Constitution and their oath to uphold it. Suck it.

"Suck it" being directed at Bush and his esteemed political appointees who directed this criminal shit.

how have we gotten this far into the revive without a fred post

Taibbi has become cloddish, not as dangerous as Greenwald appearing on Tucker Carlson.

This post and its comments are my favorite recent dismissals.

so does Tombot manage a team of Snowden-like contractors or nah

he's assassinated more Snowden wannabes than you can imagine

drowned em in a toilet for not being hard enough

hard to find good help around there I heard

Greenwald's been quiet on US politics for a while now which is A Good Thing

that LGM post....fretting over tone is fucking boring imo

I’m a little surprised alfred likes the hippie punchers at LGM so much. they’re ok but you can get similar analysis at any hippie-punching blog

whoops lol you get the point

Lemieux's a sharp analyst from the left with no patience for posturing. He and many of its posters are Warren supporters, but they're also excellent on labor/union history -- areas in which so-called hippies have no interest.

I don't know what "but" is doing there.

One of the topics the site's educated me about is labor's decline and its effect on the Democratic polity and what the party has to do to get it back. This ain't a topic in which Chait and Ezra Klein have much interst -- and, yeah, LGM punches them more often than "hippies."

I like (most of) the graves, the natsec posts by Farley, and Campos’ rants. RIP SEK. Some of Dnexon’s posts are really good too. Lemieux and Loomis can be really one-note, for sure. I wish I found more of interest in Nelson and Nussbaum’s posts. Dave Brockington popping in to bitch about Corbynists is thankfully infrequent.

I like Lemieux and Loomis too but dear god do they have the worst sports takes.

I like (most of) the graves,

Excellent one on Josephus Daniels today! And a couple days ago on Grover Cleveland's evil attorney general (a redundant phrase) Richard Olney.

labor/union history -- areas in which so-called hippies have no interest

I guess I am not a hippie then.

The effect of post-revolutionary USSR under Stalin, the show trials, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on the international labor movement was tragically bad, but the effect of the Cold War and McCarthyism on the USA labor movement was a steady movement from bad to worse. This doesn't even touch on the reactionary suppression of labor organizing in the USA, from before the Haymarket Massacre, up through WWI, then the Chehalis Massacre, right up up to 1934.

US labor history is one of massive beat downs followed by massive co-option. Sad.

not to mention Taft-Hartley.

erik loomis's posts on labor history are consistently excellent and probably the main reason i keep going back to LGM at this point. unfortunately loomis is also a total asshole. like, i've seen him be rude to ppl who comment on his posts to tell him how good they are.

the comments sections are pretty horrific at this point, basically just a bunch of dweebs who sincerely believe anyone who disagrees with them is on putin's payroll or whatever.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup

Impeachment is bad because life under Trump is stable.

Seriously, what is wrong with this dude? The legitimacy crisis he is describing will come from Trump refusing to play by the rules, but the real problem is the guys who wants to ask him to play by the rules, because when he refuses, it will be chaos?

Imagine if a similar situation had taken place in January of 2009, involving president-elect Barack Obama. Picture a meeting between Obama and the heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the DIA, in which the newly-elected president is presented with a report complied by, say, Judicial Watch, accusing him of links to al-Qaeda. Imagine further that they tell Obama they are presenting him with this information to make him aware of a blackmail threat, and to reassure him they won’t give news agencies a “hook” to publish the news.

I'd kinda hope Obama would be informed that Judicial Watch was compiling such a dossier? This is so so stupid

Could it be possible that whistleblowing and leaking is happening because agents in the intelligence and defense departments are actually concerned that Trump is a next-level lawbreaker/threat?

I could understand Taibbi's position during the russiagate years, but its more difficult to keep that up now there are stronger cases and now that public opinion is broadly behind it and likely to increase further

I'm not sure if he's being disingenuous in cautioning against his removal, that doesn't seem a particularly realistic outcome and he must know that (though I guess if his popularity tanks enough it could be a possibility)

He and his ilk are just all-in on the enemy-of-my-enemy angle, and Taibbi's enemies are three letter agencies and the Democratic Party

RIP SEK.

Knew him at UCI when I worked in the library and he was a grad student. A fine fellow, and very much missed.

https://www.salon.com/2019/10/13/donald-trump-is-a-criminal-and-impeachment-is-a-murky-amoral-struggle-both-these-things-are-true/?fbclid=IwAR3Uw5sQyL-h4t1qJ-7yxWY6vubZknda875toEURP8MlnD4ChruA5MkGAY4

this is really good

... what Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani and their even less savory underlings are pursuing, in their globetrotting snipe hunt for imaginary enemies, is the shadow of a real question: Is Trump being impeached because he’s a threat to democracy, or because he’s an overly obvious threat to democracy, too stupid or too stubborn to play the game by the rules? Are his attackers defending the remnants of the peculiar republic bequeathed to us by Jefferson and Madison, as they claim, or just posturing amid the ruins for political advantage? We won’t know the answers, I suspect, until all this is over.

Is this bank robber being prosecuted by people who have profited off of corruption? Probably. But who fucking cares?

Taibbi's enemies are three letter agencies and the Democratic Party

good enemies

I really don't get the idea that impeachment is an amoral struggle. It seems an absolutely normal part of any democracy to have a process for getting rid of anyone who is just too odious. And this story, where Trump is literally abusing his power to hurt potential opponents in the next elections, is exactly what it's made for. I just don't get it at all. I mean, Taibbi tries to say that it's because other Americans don't know 'coups' the way he does, but he instead seems like someone who knows nothing in-between the US and Russia. Completely blinkered.

We had the Danish prime minister forced to resign in 93, and the country survived.

Serwer assumes — you knew there was a “but” coming, right? — that the apparent or proximate issue in the Ukraine scandal is the true, underlying issue. I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption. Was it really Trump’s attempt “to use his authority as president to pressure foreign countries to criminalize his opponents” that pushed the whistleblower forward? Or was it rather the fact that Trump was going rogue on foreign policy, in an area (Russia vs. Ukraine) that is of intense interest to the national-security establishment of both parties but is almost never discussed or debated in public?

All these things can be true, in the realm of “through a glass, darkly.” Donald Trump has committed numerous impeachable offenses, and after the Mueller report fizzled out had clearly gotten cocky about it. He said some truly dumbass things on the phone with the Ukrainian president, no doubt egged on by Giuliani and his moonbat friends, and White House flunkeys made a desperate attempt to cover that up. The CIA whistleblower — I agree with Taibbi's suggestion that he is best understood as part of a team — seized on an opportunity to weaponize the objectively disastrous Zelensky phone call, in a way that appealed to different factions of the anti-Trump coalition for different reasons.

the fact that trump is recklessly and randomly making foreign policy decisions that depart from the historical stances of the US is terrifying. i am sympathetic to figures in the national security world who are trying to stop this mayhem. but at the same time, i don't think those people are "good." they're at best more predictable than trump. i don't want them to have unilateral authority to dispense with a future president who might depart from the party line for real reasons.

i think this is what's confusing people about russiagate and ukrainegate.

i'm quoting o'heir here not taibbi btw. o'heir takes a middle line between taibbi and, like, mainstream liberals in the vein of the "mueller she wrote" podcast

I like the O'Hehir piece but I think he misses the main thrust of my distaste for intelligence-community shenanigans, which is that if they're successful they will 1000% repeat this process with an even nominally leftist president (if that ever happens). At this point I'd much prefer to see him voted out, though I'm fine with Senate proceedings keeping him occupied.

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