defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

Tbf I only skimmed his article because life is short.

His reasoning is so tortured and bizarre - "nobody claimed that a deal had been consummated so the inability to confirm it does not negate the story" or w/e - that its like being trapped in some MC Escher version of journalism where the gravity is always shifting, and the premise for what constitutes a newsworthy idea is always changing to be the opposite of whatever he imagines a critic would say. Engaging with it is just so exhausting. Tbh it reminds me of the frenzied disordered thinking of ppl in manic episodes - "I stayed up all night filling a notebook with reasons why YOU ALL are the ones who need help, not me!"

I just can't imagine why anyone would spend their precious time seriously reading him or Taibbi when there are actual media critics out there doing the actual work instead of whatever cosplay these two are engaged in. J.D. otm, it's honestly depressing.

this very public resignation seems well planned out. GG has probably been looking to break into the crowdfunded newsletter game for some time, and the Intercept has probably been getting annoyed with him for a long time as well. He's been on podcasts for the past couple of months carping about how he got blamed for the Reality Winner debacle when it was really the fault of the editors. Looks like he was just waiting for some pushback so he could dramatically break ties and complete his IDW heel turn.

This dude resigning right now in this way is an even less effective, more inside baseball October surprise than Hunter Biden bullshit itself.

new email Re: ornaldo bloomps for presidetn
From:
Glenn Greenwald <glenngreenw✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧>

8:01 AM (49 minutes ago)
To: h******✧✧✧@protonm✧✧✧.c✧✧
Show details
This message is automatically generated as a response to a previous message.
Learn more
Please note my new email address:

Gl✧✧✧.Greenw✧✧✧@ris✧✧✧.n✧✧

I got real excited there for a second.

Glenn.Greenwald at risingdick.net

Imagine the Hunter Biden story is the hill you choose to die on.

This is the thing to me. Greenwald's been evolving toward this point for a long time but what a casus belli. It's funny, I don't even see mainstream Republicans picking up the Hunter stuff, it's mostly the loony Trump base and the hardcore Berners.

The notion that this is anything more than would-be October surprise material of the lamest type imaginable would be hilarious even if it hadn't been telegraphed months ago in giant sky-high red letters. It's like we're supposed to forget that peddling this exact bullshit is what got Trump impeached just 10 months ago.

You must believe that we're not going to hear endlessly about Hunter and his deals for the next two years

just like Killary

Without congressional majorities it will be harder to call for sham hearings

Yeah, I don't know. The Hunter thing feels like such a nothing, and is so tied to Trump, that I'm not sure elected Republicans will try to push it much further, if Trump loses. I'm sure it will stay alive in the OANN/Fox universe.

end of day I think it's as simple as they thought they could run the same Killary playbook against a white male and it didn't work

otmfm

I'm digging into the Greenwald archives on Salon, and thought this was a fun time capsule.

https://www.salon.com/2008/03/08/carlson/

In this piece, he's saying the same shit about Tucker that he more recently says *on* "Tucker."

Jeet Heer has been saying that Trump just doesn’t know how to attack a white Christian male.

it turns out when you can't be racist or sexist you have to use your brain. sad!

The GOP definitely knew how to destroy Al Gore and John Kerry

The Hunter thing feels like such a nothing, and is so tied to Trump, that I'm not sure elected Republicans will try to push it much further, if Trump loses

Yeah I don't wanna jinx it but I suspect there are some rank-and-file Rs who will breathe a sigh of relief if T loses and they don't have to pretend-peddle his bullshit 24x7x365

Kerry didn't take much tbf xp

The Gore and Kerry playbook was kind of the same: attack the candidate as an aloof, out-of-touch, rich liberal elite. They've tried to do that a little with Biden, but it doesn't stick as much because Biden's public image is Good Old Middle-Class Scranton Joe, rather than a windsurfing French speaker who married an heiress or a boring sanctimonious tree hugger.

The GOP definitely knew how to destroy Al Gore and John Kerry

― Wayne Grotski (symsymsym), Friday, October 30, 2020 12:56 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i honestly don't remember the day to day campaigning from gore/bush enough to say...though gore did win and that election was straight up stolen.

wrt to kerry i think it's a little different than hillary because i don't think there was any real animus towards kerry

they were able to neutralize one of the things kerry thought would be a strength - his military service - with the swift boat stuff

i think kerry didn't foresee that but more important he and the DNC fell into this trap where they think "oh well all these republican voters say support our troops" so they will have a respect for kerry's service

of course, they don't really give a fuck about veterans unless "support our troops" is being used as a cudgel to shut down any criticism of the u.s. military's endless wars

i feel like in general trump's gop base doesn't have the appetite for u.s. world cop operations, and honestly hillary's hands are way more dirty in that respect than trump's were (and are really)

When even Tucker is tired of beating this horse: https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-suddenly-says-its-time-to-leave-hunter-biden-alone

obviously Greenwald has lib-derangement syndrome but the one point he sorta has is this hunter stuff is just dismissed entirely and censored from twitter etc. but on the other hand the Steele dossier was covered by all the respectable papers

Biden's public image is Good Old Middle-Class Scranton Joe, rather than a windsurfing French speaker who married an heiress or a boring sanctimonious tree hugger.

Yeah but those images of Gore and Kerry were created by GOP attack ads...it's weird to me that they never even really tried to change that image of Biden. Karl Rove must be rolling over in his grave.

wrt to kerry i think it's a little different than hillary because i don't think there was any real animus towards kerry

oh there was definitely hatred toward Kerry by those who remembered his testimony on Vietnam.

Yeah my aunt swears up and down she remembered it and had hated him ever since. I suspect her ‘memory’ was being filled in heavily by the unrelenting rightwing mediaverse at the time but hey i guess it worked

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-zell-millers-rnc-speech/

I'm sure it will stay alive in the OANN/Fox universe.

...and on the Trump network that will surely launch in mid-2021. But yeah this will be the new Solyndra, living on as a mutant, half-born zombie scandal.

Funny to read that old Salon column. I remember reading GG during the W Bush years and thinking christ this guy has a hair trigger about stupid shit, even for a blogger. Just these massive columns full of quote-blocks and oceans of bolded emphasis text, too-often spent making hay of some minor factual error by some other columnist or someone who quoted him, using the same lazy rhetoric that he's still using today. "I can only assume that [nobody huffpo blogger] is either too illiterate to comprehend the simple point I made in that column, or they are willfully misreading it in order to smear me! Much like the FBI smeared Martin Luther King and other truthtellers with COINTELPRO!" Have a very vivid memory of reading him tearfully rending his garments about some intra-columnist argument or other one day and thinking "yeah... I dont know how much I'm gonna learn from this guy." Amazing to think that his levels of peak hysteria were still over a decade away.

h8 greenwald but feel compelled to report he is looking pretty cute for 2020 in the vid i just scrolled past

A statement from Jeremy Scahill https://t.co/UdZ20tNmRF

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 1, 2020

Scahill has always struck me as a straight shooter.

i could do with far less 'comment' on the intercept. their investigative stuff makes it worth reading and it would be more powerful with less editorialising.

like bullshit clickbait thinkpieces for the nytimes etc only please, this is serious.

longread (from march last year) on the single most significant act of the omidyar-greenwald gang = the public shuttering (or let's say privatisation) that same month of the snowden archive, and how this shuttering jigsaws into omidyar's changing interests as a billionaire:

https://washingtonbabylon.com/why-did-omidyar-shut-down-the-intercepts-snowden-archive/

greenwald purportedly still has a copy (as does poitras) but of course no one knows what the agreement now is about its further use between greenwald and omidyar (who i think in effect now owns it) -- and anyway gg's basically a pundit-aggregator and absolutely not the kind of journalist or scholar who could explore the archive productively

The news appeared in The Daily Beast, a center-right entertainment publication that’s known for its slanted, neocon-tinged reporting on Russia and North Korea.

lol. Writer would fit in around here.

I'm gonna take the tweeter's word for it and not read 50,000 words of Greenwald's bullshit to find out for myself.

He finally admits it. Greenwald says Trump was a better president than Obama LOL https://t.co/gBIBQ1dmIm

— Get the kids out of cages (@ADC_PHL) November 8, 2020

It sorta says that . My skim of it leads me to think Greenwald believes that Trump droning more Non-American civilians than Obama is less evil than Obama droning an American father and son. Plus Obama did droning before Trump so that somehow makes him worse. Also since some of Trump’s other evil deeds were previously done by Obama and Bush, that makes Trump less bad. But Greenwald seems more obsessed with journalists and never Trump former Bushies turned cable news commentators talking about Trump than with condemning actual evil deeds.

did Glenn not read the fucking story published in the goddamn Intercept about how civilian casualties had vastly increased under Trump

Does Glenn Greenwald seem like a guy who reads to you

I expected better from someone whose name is an anagram for, uh, "glen glen nw read"

ever-tauter and more persuasive prose now that gg's shaken off the tyranny of all those deep-state intercept editors

Does Glenn Greenwald seem like a guy who reads to you

― The Bosom Manor Michaelmas Special (silby)

He seems like a guy who shouts at me

I think GG definitely reads anything with the words “Glenn Greenwald” in it

When is he going to rip off the mask and call Obama a nigger

Premium content

If Trump is responsible for “killing 235,000 Americans” because they died of the coronavirus while he was in office, can the same be said of the governments of France and Spain which, despite much smaller populations, presided over almost 40,000 deaths each, or the governments of Belgium, Peru, Argentina, Mexico and Chile which have comparable or higher per capita death rates from the coronavirus than the U.S., or WHO officials who told people not to wear masks even when the CDC said the opposite?

when you think about it its really true, the governments of france and mexico and the WHO are the real villains of the trump era, you neolib bootlickers

if trump spent the past year working with experts and both state and federal officials to craft a coherent national response, and we still had this number of deaths, it would be a different story.

the reason is "blamed" for the abysmal outcome is because he has spent the past year picking fights with governors, insulting his own pandemic response team, flouting health regulations, and generally acting like the virus is a liberal hoax, which is a dangerous belief that many of his supporters hold. he's pouring gasoline on it.

like everything else, he made the virus about himself. it's ridiculous that someone cannot see that.

is it "fair" to "blame him" for "all the deaths"? no, i guess not. but is it fair that we had a president who didn't even try to protect the population from the largest health crisis in a generation?

he withdrew from the WHO during a global pandemic for petty personal reasons. it's crazy. you don't need to like obama to recognize that trump's behavior has been obscene. he is an obscenity.

trump-is-bad content off the greenwald-is-bad thread plz

Greenwald is right that Trump did not start the Iraq War