GQ published an interview with Glenn Greenwald that is sure to provide copious fodder for his supporters and detractors alike. Here are two excerpts I found interesting:
GQ: You mention in your book that Snowden’s moral universe was first informed by video games.
GG: In Hong Kong, Snowden told me that at the heart of most video games is an ordinary individual who sees some serious injustice, right? Like some person who’s been kidnapped and you’ve got to rescue them, or some evil force that has obtained this weapon and you’ve got to deactivate it or kill them or whatever. And it’s all about figuring out ways to empower yourself as an ordinary person, to take on powerful forces in a way that allows you to undermine them in pursuit of some public good. Even if it’s really risky or dangerous. That moral narrative at the heart of video games was part of his preadolescence and formed part of his moral understanding of the world and one’s obligation as an individual.
NSA as Bowser and Snowden as Super Mario: fascinating. Do video games provide a better or worse moral compass than traditional religions? Discuss.
And then there’s Greenwald’s description of the upcoming grand finale of his star turn:
GQ: How much more is there to release—and what burden do you feel to get it out there?
GG: We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.
There’s a focus on optics that runs throughout the piece, including a description of GG’s anxiousness to hustle Snowden out of Hong Kong before the media pack found him: He feared that a picture of Snowden skulking out of a hotel with his hand in front of his face like a common Kardashian would undermine his pure whistleblower image.
Interesting data point in the perpetual “you assholes always focus on personalities!” vs. “motivations are directly relevant, asshole!” debate? I don’t know, but it’s clear GG understood from the beginning that Snowden’s image was important. Show biz!
Greenwald had some really harsh things to say about Hillary Clinton and predicted that women voters will line up behind her anyway, which some folks are taking as straight-up misogyny. I don’t think that’s what he meant — he’s criticizing the theater of identity politics to the exclusion of issues, while engaging in theatrics himself of the “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” variety, which is bullshit, in my opinion. But sexism? Nah.
However, the story also revealed that Greenwald really loves dogs. And I don’t have to tell you who else loved dogs…
Booger
I will never forgive the Kardashians for what they did to Bajor.
Walker
These types of stories are not unique to video games. Young adult fiction has had them even longer.
Baud
Not going to read because I don’t care, but I am curious why no one says white males supporting Rand Paul (or the GOP generally) are engaging in identity politics.
Roger Moore
This is like asking whether shit or piss makes a better perfume.
burnspbesq
Hoisted from the prior thread.
Anonymous Targets Greenwald
And
Lewis on Snowden
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Don’t they? I think people make that insinuation frequently, and they’re not always wrong.
burnspbesq
@Baud:
It’s not “identity politics” if you approve of the identity.
Tommy
Going off to read the piece but ….
I am a huge GG fan. Huge. I don’t mind saying that in the least.
But that first quote about “gaming” has me worried. I’ve played about every game since “pong.” I love video games. But they are just that, games.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Well, very serious people don’t.
ulee
When I was playing pong as a kid, I thought I might become a spy. And I did, in a treehouse in Maryland.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
DFHs say that all the time, but nobody takes them seriously. VSPs would never suggest such a thing, and that’s what matters.
Hawes
Well, that explains why Snowden thinks he is bravely standing up for liberty by standing close to Putin.
He’s a maroon. A highly educated maroon.
Betty Cracker
@efgoldman: Someday I’d like to post a discussion about what constitutes a “reporter” and if the new media players like Greenwald, et al, are really a credible alternative to traditional media, even baggaged as Big Media is with Village stenographers. But today is not that day.
Cacti
What he actually said that Betty chose to omit:
You see kids, those confederate flags and pictures of the Obamas as apes that you see at Tea Party rallies, or Republican-appointed federal Judges forwarding bestiality jokes about Obama’s dead mother…
People just “depict” those as racist.
And women will support Hillary, because girls are all stupid and emotional when it comes to other broads.
GG is totes not your typical, blinkered, privileged, libertarian dudebro.
Keith G
@Baud:
But we are Blanche. We are.
A good deal of all political decisions are informed by identity or groupness. – and will be thus, for the rest of humanity’s run on this orb.
A number of voters supported JFK due to his religion, Obama due to his race, and HRC due to her gender.
So ‘fucking’ be it. Let’s be adults and get over it. There is no shame in it.
hildebrand
@efgoldman: Bingo. Just tell us what you’ve got, and then we can sort it out. It is not a god-damned movie – you are not Robert Redford, Snowden is not Dustin Hoffman. Get over yourselves.
Hunter Gathers
Must have gotten my moral compass from Madden ’95.
John
You really can’t claim to be some moral crusader and then announce that you are saving the biggest story for last so that your “fireworks show” has a thrilling climax. It seems that if the story is that big, the moral thing to do is to get it out to the public as early as possible.
nickrud
@Walker:
Andre Norton comes to mind.
Baud
@Keith G:
No shame in it, but I was commenting on the fact that the media, as far as I have seen, pretends that only some groups engage in it.
Cacti
Personally, I’m looking forward to the contortions that will go on here at BJ when St. Greenwald endorses Rand Paul for POTUS.
ulee
Jeez, Cracker, that was fast. I guess the BalloonHeads were ready to have their say.
Roger Moore
@efgoldman:
Publishing more documents isn’t good enough. He needs to make all the documents available, at least to reputable journalists if not to the public at large. I don’t trust him because he has a well established tendency not to acknowledge any information that contradicts his preferred narrative. That might be tolerable when the rest of us have access to the same basic information he does, but it means he can’t be trusted at all when he’s also controlling access to the documents.
Hunter Gathers
@Cacti:
So I should totally ignore it when Rand Paul bitches about Lewinski, Benghazi!, Vince Foster, Benghazi!, and Benghazi! ’cause Rand Paul is concerned about the NSA. Paul may be an unreconstructed bigot, but he’ll reign in the NSA! Libertarian Uber Alles!
dmsilev
George W. Bush?
Also, he’s got a pretty blinkered view of video games if he thinks that the Hero’s Journey is the only plot structure available.
seaboogie
Surely not this guy:
http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/cgi-bin/seigboardbest.pl?4319:1
Schlemizel
I did appreciate the fact that GG called out Tim Russert as a giant ass-kisser in the interview. Smacked ol dancin dave too. I get the hate against him but damn he is willing to say stuff in interviews that the rest of the blabatariat seems incapable of.
Baud
@dmsilev:
I bet Snowden played Grand Theft Auto.
Cacti
@Hunter Gathers:
When you’re as pure in heart as GG, the concerns of entire populations can be hand waved away in a single sentence.
In a stunning coincidence, they always happen to be the concerns of groups to which GG doesn’t belong (i.e. those with lady parts and non-European melanin levels).
Botsplainer
@Cacti:
Just in case nobody brings up that big, sloppy, wet public blowjob the Snowden delivered to Putin on the Ukraine (with GG playing the silent third dolphin), let me chime in…
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Booger: I approve of this post.
Bobby Thomson
I don’t know how you can avoid picking up his sexist vibe. But then a number of people are blind to his stone cold racism.
ulee
@Schlemizel: Yes, Russert was awful. It was painful to read that he was a hard hitting journalist, when he really was just a runner.
Tommy
@Betty Cracker: I’d like to see that. I have a MA in Journalism. Never really planned to use it in the traditional sense, of you know reporting. Working at a paper. But I did it to get my degree. Baton Rouge Morning Advocate. They gave me a lot of space to write cause I was a “Yankee” living in Louisiana. They wanted to hear what I had to say.
At the time, many years ago I was a fan of Hunter S. Thompson. So I put myself into the stories I covered. I now see, 20+ years in hindsight, that was dumb ass shit. I am a huge fan of GG but he needs to put his head down and report. Stop making the story about himself. I’ve read about every profile on the dude I can find and I am sick of hearing the same things over and over again. Like I get you got a lot of dogs.
Just my two cents with might not even be worth two cents ….
Cacti
@Botsplainer:
Or that GG’s “Freedom of the Press Foundation” can’t be arsed to publish a single sentence about the numerous journalists who have been assaulted and abducted by the Putin-friendly separatists of eastern Ukraine.
Botsplainer
@dmsilev:
When I’m playing San Andreas, it’s the moral model to emulate. Screw a hooker, take her money. Shoot the PO-lice, jack their ride…
Roger Moore
@Tommy:
It’s not just that he makes the story about himself. He is terrible about making his mind up first and looking for data that fit. That’s fine for a lawyer, which he is by professional training, but terrible for an investigative journalist.
ulee
@Bobby Thomson: Oh, give it a break.
scav
@Baud: It really gets crass when the media only reports it as a moral flaw, an intellectual failing, a social problem when performed by certain actors. White males voting for white males are the invisible default of free from bias pure rational actors.
Botsplainer
@Cacti:
He’s too busy tweeting snark to bother with that. Pierre might want to review that autodraw on the paychecks as well.
Keith G
@Baud: Well, maybe it depends on who one reads or listens to. There have been no shortage of very frank descriptions of who the Tea Party supporters are and what ALL of there motivations seem to be.
GG isn’t saying anything new, or edgy, or mean. In fact, I imagine that Camp Hillary would be pleased as punch if GG’s general description turned out to be accurate.
MomSense
@burnspbesq:
It’s the accepted and often the assumed identity.
Roger Moore
@efgoldman:
I think we’re saying about the same thing. Greenwald knows the story he wants to tell, and he’s mining the documents for supporting evidence. I want a reporter who’s going to read through the documents and report the story they tell, even if it’s not what they expected or hoped to find.
Betty Cracker
@Bobby Thomson: You can certainly interpret it that way — clearly a lot of people do. I don’t think that’s what he meant, though. I think he meant politics has become a reality show extravaganza with competing narratives that don’t really mean that much while the permanent power structure hums along unseen in the background.
I don’t think he’s 100% correct — it matters A LOT whose hands are on the levers of power, as anyone who remembers US history from 2000 to the present should know. But he’s not altogether wrong about the permanent power structure either.
Baud
@Keith G:
Agreed. We discuss it all the time here, as Betty pointed out.
No comment on what GG said because I haven’t read the article.
MomSense
@Roger Moore:
I find that I disagree with his interpretation of some of the documents.
the Conster
@Keith G:
Yes there is. I want the best president possible. I don’t want Hillary Clinton for that reason- as a middle aged white woman I don’t give a shit about a woman president, unless she’s the best possible candidate. I don’t think she is – I don’t trust her judgment at all and for GG to insinuate that Obama was elected because of his blackness says everything I need to know about GG and his judgment. He was elected because John McCain was an irrational unpredictable hot head with poor judgment who was unable to generate enough confidence as a leader in a crisis. The fact that GG STILL can’t acknowledge that says all I need to know about him, and apparently you too. Shame on both of you.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
Yep. Women, GLBT, and racial/ethnic minorities (among others) are Special Interests who engage in “identity politics.” White men have no special interests and don’t have an identity, so therefore anything they say or do is free of “identity politics.”
Pull the curtain back around all of those white guys who voted for Romney because he’s white, willya?
Tommy
@Roger Moore: Well he is a lawyer. I was reading him on his little blog long before he went to Salon or the Guardian. I am a huge fan of his, which seems in this thread makes me a minority. I just want to yell to him stop talking about yourself. This isn’t about you. This is about the documents you have and those need to be vetted and reported on. He is getting in the way of his own stories. That is sad IMHO.
Tommy
@Roger Moore: That is Journalism 101.
Mnemosyne
@scav:
This, too. It’s not really the fact that white voters are a special interest group that gets my goat — it’s the pretense by the media that everyone except white people is a special interest group.
Villago Delenda Est
Wrong. Snowden may gravitate toward that particular genre, but it is not at the heart of most video games.
Far more video games are about killing a virtual guy and taking his stuff.
Greenwald is, per usual, full of shit.
Calouste
@Tommy:
I read a comment once (by a good writer, can’t remember who) that you have to be a really good writer to insert yourself into stories, so that you end up with the reader seeing things through your eyes or with you in the picture pointing things out. If you’re not good enough for that, you will just end up in the picture blocking the reader’s view.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
OT, but the open thread is long dead.
Clay Aiken will likely face Renee Elmers this fall. The recount goes on, but his primary opponent died suddenly this afternoon. Not sure who would be selected if Crisco ends up winning.
Botsplainer
@Tommy:
A really shitty one who couldn’t make a living at it, or serve either his clients or justice well,
JustRuss
@Cacti:
It’s entirely possible to criticize Obama without being racist, but that doesn’t mean that all criticism of Obama is non-racist, or that it’s wrong to call it out when it is. You’d think Greenwald could figure that out.
Regarding video games, it’s true that the ordinary person standing up against powerful forces for the greater good is a common theme. But that theme has been around far longer than video games. I give you: Lord of the Rings, or to go back a bit further, Thag vs. the Stegosaurus.
Cacti
@Mnemosyne:
The essence of privilege can be distilled to the fact that while non-Hispanic white males make up less than 1/3 of the US population, they are the societal baseline by which every other group is measured in the US, and the interests of the remaining 68-69% are described as “minority” interests.
It’s the sort of privilege that allows certain writers to ignore “trifling” topics related to race and gender.
MomSense
@Calouste:
It comes from the preaching tradition–a form of offering testimony. Barack Obama is really skilled at this. He uses his personal story as an access point through which you can understand and feel empathy for someone else.
Arclite
Uh, John G. Cole? Not bad company for Mr. Greenwald. =D
Villago Delenda Est
@John
This is not about morality. It’s about fame, and money.
Keith G
@the Conster:
Really now?
So let’s say that the 2008 vote was breathtakingly close, but that the 4% that put Obama over the top in several states voted came out to vote for him purely because of his race.
Would you refute the results of the election? Or would you just be willing to be happy as hell that it turned out the way it did?
How about Hillary v Paul?
Mnemosyne
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
I guess that’s what happens when someone tries to oppose the massive empire of Simon Cowell.
Bobby Thomson
@ulee: needs antecedents.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
You realize that this is the exact same argument that racists have been making since 2008, right? Black people only voted for Obama because he’s black and/or White people only voted for Obama because of white guilt, so therefore the election should be voided.
different-church-lady
Botsplainer
@Cacti:
Well, when those certain writers have a verifiable history of presenting gratuitously over the top defenses of white supremacists and engaging in victim trashing in the course of their prior career of mediocre lawyering, you might expect misogyny and racism from their journalistic endeavors.
He’ll eventually wind up scribbling with guys like Taki and Vox Day.
Amir Khalid
I see that Glenn Greenwald is very impressed by Glenn Greenwald, while being a harsh judge of other people who are considered impressive. We won’t know for a while yet what the Snowden thing will come to, but GG’s talk of Snowden’s boyish entertainments shaping his moral universe seems highfaluting. Those entertainments — comic books, video games, whatever else comes along in the 2020s — are power fantasies for kids, who lack power and control over their daily lives. Good and bad come already labelled; the kid playing the game doesn’t stop to ponder the morality of anyone’s actions, he just sides with the good guys and beats up on the other side.
different-church-lady
@the Conster:
That last word wherein lies the rub, no?
ulee
@Bobby Thomson: I’m not trying to prove your point. I’m just tired of people saying sexist, racist everytime they get a chance. Mnem will agree with you. She cultivates a reactionary attitude.
different-church-lady
Well, obviously this is just my opinion, but I think I now have an understanding of why Snowden’s world view — as taken from his own statements and not filters — is so goddamned over-simplistic.
the Conster
@Keith G:
Let’s say if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle. Obama won in a landslide because of his temperament and not his skin color, but if you need to believe that he won because of white guilt, or black identity, or whatever else the RWNJs tell themselves to make sense of Obama’s election then knock yourself out, but you’re only kidding yourself. The choice between the two candidates was stark, but it wasn’t about skin color regardless of what little fable you and GG are able to concoct to justify your identity politics.
ShadeTail
Naturally. You are, of course, referring to Mr. John Cole.
Roger Moore
@Tommy:
And Greenwald’s problem is that he’s a litigator by training (and apparently by temperament) not a journalist. He is clearly letting his desire to be an advocate interfere with his need as a journalist to let the facts speak for themselves. That is a far bigger flaw than a desire to be the center of the story.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne:They can make a point such as that as much as they want to. It matters not.
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid:
Sounds a lot like the Usual Supporters on this thread, doesn’t it?
Botsplainer
@different-church-lady:
Gamer dork is all that need be said. The mook is too stupidly unselfaware to recognize that Putin was actually needling him, as well as to recognize that Griftwald is using him.
Can’t catch social cues, lurves him some Pauls, forms his worldview from gaming….
El Tiburon
@John:
Perhaps if that story is the instant cure for AIDS or cancer. Al of these stories are stories in the past. IOW, we can’t stop them from occurring.
So their drop-date delivery and pecking order really has no relevance.
So funny everyone bitches and moans about the current state of journalism; and someone like GG who practices a form of advocacy journalism, who is a creature of the Internet Tubes and the BLOGosphere, gets somewhat excited that he is part of a historical, game-changing event, and you can’t believe it! Ok, GG is not Seymor Hersh. So what? I’ll take a million more GGs than….just about 99% of all hack journalists out there.
Ash Can
@efgoldman:
@Betty Cracker:
The new media players are most definitely a legitimate source of news, and they most definitely are real journalists/reporters, in that they research topics and uncover information that tell the rest of us more about the world we live in. I don’t consider them an alternative so much as an extension of traditional journalism, since the real difference is in the publishing venue rather than the process.
However, given his performance — or lack thereof — in his new gig, I wouldn’t lump Greenwald in with the other new media players. Regardless of how he tries (desperately) to portray himself, his priorities are simply not in line with those of a genuine journalist. His priority is self-promotion within the context of his role of doing as much damage to the US government as he can — arguably more so since Obama was elected, since he came out in favor of the war in Iraq and against leftist regimes in South America during the Bush admin. And he’s come right out and said so with this interview — his revelations aren’t for the benefit of anyone but him. Journalism be damned; he’s doing nothing these days but resting on his cache of stolen documents, arguing with detractors on Twitter, and, now, promoting his book. His news site is crickets and tumbleweeds. And his readership be damned; he’ll release his information when he feels it’s to his own maximum benefit. And journalistic principles be damned; he spins and biases his information nearly beyond recognition to promote his personal agenda.
Other concerns such as Vox and Pando Daily are certainly the new faces of journalism. The Intercept not so much.
Botsplainer
@Roger Moore:
Not much of one. A good litigator remains realistic and doesn’t go out on factual rhetorical or legal ledges like Griftwald so recklessly does.
Had I represented Gluteus Maximus Matthew Hale, I probably would have gotten his admission to the bar granted. True, Gluteus Maximus would have had to clean up his act and demonstrated contrition, but it would have happened. Griftwald was incapable of advising that – GG didn’t discourage the display of the freak flag, and therefore failed.
El Tiburon
@Roger Moore:
And this ridiculous rule of yours, you insist all journalists practice it as well, right? You want the New York Times to share all with USA Today and the Washington Post?
And I believe countless news organizations have had access to much of the material.
Finally, I believe Snowden selected Greenwald after other news organizations refused to engage with him. Taking on the NSA and other related governmental agencies is not for the easily intimidated. We see what the Obama administration is doing to whistleblowers and their attempts at doing the same to journalists.
But, GG is such an asshole! AAAAAAAAAAARRGGGGGGGHHH I just hate him!!!!
JMV Pyro
So, let me get this straight. You have spent the past year or so flogging this issue nonstop, going on about what an incredible threat this is to liberty, democracy, and the future of free discourse. You have pointed out multiple times how bad these NSA policies are and what a malignant presence the national security state of the USA is to the world. And you decide to save the most juicy, damning, presumably harmful to the surveillance state piece of information for last?
Glenn, fuck your light show. The world is not a drama play with you and your colleagues at the center of the universe and everyone else as a background character. These policies affect real people with real lives in real ways and if you actually gave two shits about them you’d have leaked this information first so that people could presumably build a movement around fixing the goddamned problem you claim is the “biggest”.
Christ, what an asshole.
Keith G
@the Conster: @the Conster:
Try not to be so totally dense.
That was not what I was saying.
If you eject your need for outrage and read slowly (feel free to move your quivering lips), you will see that this is a commentary that identity politics are a very normal part of the human condition and the results of which are not automatically evil or unwanted. My Obama hypothetical was just that, a hypothetical to illustrate that good things might be able to come out of such a vote. and I worded it as such.
Take a pill and settle down.
Botsplainer
@El Tiburon:
Name them, El Kabong. My recollection was that Snowjob approached his co-conspirator (unindicted, yet) Greenwald about ripping off the docs before he got the job.
El Tiburon
@Botsplainer:
What fantasy land do you reside in?
That you insist on saying ‘Griftwald’ tells us all we need to know about you.
RandomMonster
It’s clear that GG is timing the release of the biggest stories and more documents just in time for the release of the book he’s writing, which will appear in May. It’s all about successful marketing for maximum book sales.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
Well, it does, though, because the implicit argument is that voters other than white male voters don’t count. White voters are the “real” voters, and anyone not white, male, and straight is not a “real” voter and their vote shouldn’t count.
The point that the Conster and I are making is that straight white men are a special interest group by just about any definition and have been voting as a block since at least 1980, but they’re never treated as a special interest group. Only nonwhite, non-male voters are “special interests.”
A Humble Lurker
Can anyone tell me what it is that’s horrifying about the U.S. getting involved with Nigeria’s kidnapped girls?
Botsplainer
@A Humble Lurker:
Yuck, girls. Who happen to be black.
Double yucky (said in Pee Wee Herman sotto voce).
SiubhanDuinne
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
I replied with a comment in the old, dead thread — but then, it always takes me hours and hours to catch up (by which time the West Coast/night crew is on, and I’m drifting asleep).
eemom
Freddie de Boob is to Greenwald as _____ is to ______.
Just a thought.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
I’m not sure what you mean by this. The Washington Post published everything Snowden gave them except for the cryptographic key that Snowden wanted to use to prove his identity to a foreign embassy:
Remember that whole thing? Snowden wanting to confidentially prove his identity to a foreign embassy? But he’s just a simple whistleblower, not a spy.
ruemara
You guys really need to stop giving cover to GG. Look, he’s a misogynistic, bigoted, self-absorbed piece of work. He didn’t give a rats ass about people of colour, nor women’s rights. He’s derisive, thin-skinned and only because he taps into that vein of a certain populations egomaniacal delusions, is he awarded any notoriety. It doesn’t stop the security state as being something we need to fix, it doesn’t prevent him from being right-albeit in a general way-about personal freedoms. But it also doesn’t stop him from being a giant package of hyperbole, now with 10% real content.
FDRLincoln
Hmmm. Well my moral universe was formed by Original Series Star Trek and some parts of the New Testament. I suppose that’s no weirder than Snowden really.
ruemara
@El Tiburon: Factually, you are incorrect. Snowden approached Greenwald, Greenwald thought it was a scam, Poitiras said it wasn’t. Why are so many of GG’s fans, so lacking in clarity as to how this came about? It’s like I read with more of an eye to detail.
Ash Can
@A Humble Lurker: The 800-pound gorilla in this thread-room is Greenwald’s racism and misogyny. Many commenters here are quick to pillory — and rightly so — (other) Republicans who say and do the kinds of things Greenwald has said and done, but then turn around and give Greenwald a pass because OMG NSA BOOGA BOOGA.
Betty Cracker
@A Humble Lurker: Someone here (can’t remember who) said GG is a reverse-ethnocentrist, which I think is dead-on. He sees neo-imperialist plots behind everything the US does. To be fair, that’s not crazy given our history. But like most knee-jerk assumptions, it leads to false conclusions.
@ruemara: Better avoid Colbert Report tonight — GG is a guest!
El Tiburon
@Ash Can:
So much f*cking stupid in just one snippet of one comment.
He never came out in favor of the Iraq War in a hawkish, neocon sense. That you continue to insist on this is just cowardice and worthy of right-wing nonsense. As someone who foolishly believed in our government in 2001 and supported the war in Iraq, I can say without equivocation that I was not in favor of the war, but trusted my government. Due to folks like Al Franken, David Brock, Digby, so on and so on up to Glenn Greenwald, I will never trust my government ever again with just about anything.
And so, I believe this is why Greenwald is so excited: he is exposing the very government that had him and millions of us so buffaloed for so long.
And for those of you who had Divine Knowledge from the git-go?? Well good for you.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne: ?
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
The request to publish the cryptographic key to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the source has stuck with me. This is not the behavior of a whistleblower and the WAPO was correct in refusing to publish it.
Botsplainer
@ruemara:
Poitras had a stronger connection to Wikileaks,which is pretty much a direct conduit to Putin’s goons.
SiubhanDuinne
@A Humble Lurker:
Black.
Next question?
different-church-lady
@ruemara:
Look, you’re dealing with people who are convinced US military aircraft forced Morales’ plane down. They appear to be just lacking in clarity of any sort whatsoever.
It takes almost an impossible amount of imagination to think of how this would be different if so many willfully deluded people weren’t cluttering up the landscape. Say Barton Gellman was the only one filtering the info. Would people be more willing to listen to the charges against the NSA?
(Edited to add link)
Roger Moore
@El Tiburon:
I don’t dislike GG as a journalist because he’s an asshole. I dislike him as a journalist because he isn’t a journalist by training or by temperament. He decides what the story is first, finds data to support that story, and hides anything that disagrees. That is not an acceptable practice for a factual journalist, and I won’t trust anything that comes from Greenwald as long as there is nobody else who can check what contradictory data he’s hiding.
aimai
@Baud: Yes, unless he is arguing that women who would otherwise vote for the Republican candidate will vote for HRC because she’s a woman that’s just such an asshole thing to say. I also resent the implication that women’s votes for her “don’t count” in some sense or are made out of vaginal loyalty while votes for male candidates are somehow based on principle or rationality. Its all so much like white people discounting black american’s votes for Obama as mere tribal loyalty when they’ve been voting democratic pretty steadily for decades–so their willingness to vote for a white democratic candidate doesn’t stand for their amazing principled decision but their vote for Obama signals that they always vote on race.
ulee
Nigeria has a shitload of oil.
Ash Can
@El Tiburon:
Greenwald’s own words — not for your benefit, because you’ll continue to stick your fingers in your ears and say LALALALALALA, but for the benefit of everyone else here.
scav
@FDRLincoln: Moral compass installed by Sherlock Holmes (print), Doctor Who and probably a fair bit of Emergency, although I seem to have lost the sirens. Analytical with a lot of fire retardant foam whenever possible. Love the running.
rm
Sandor Clegane?
the Conster
@ruemara:
Gay white males?
El Tiburon
@Mnemosyne:
Well, my faulty recollection was that Snowden tried, at first, some more mainstream orgainizations, but was rebuffed.
I guess he reached out to GG first, then to Poitras when GG ignored him. He also reached out to Gellman at the Post.
I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic here.
Betty Cracker
@Ash Can: I’m willing to be convinced. What is the evidence of Greenwald’s racism and sexism in the interview? I see crappy word choices and dumb assumptions but not outright racism or misogyny. Here’s the context around the quote most people seem to be glomming onto:
He should have noted that Obama / Hillary / Hypothetical Gay Candidate have / will face real racism / sexism / homophobia. But his point isn’t that Obama only got elected because he’s black, or that Hillary will only be elected because she’s a woman, etc. — it’s that symbolism trumps substance no matter who is the candidate, and the permanent security state continues unabated.
Like I said in the original post, I think that’s bullshit — especially the implication that it doesn’t matter who’s running the country. But to infer from what he said there that Greenwald is a racist / sexist / homophobe strikes me as an unwarranted leap.
Sly
Yes, it’s sexism.
The phrase “identity politics” is used as a pejorative; to cast a set of political causes as trivial and illegitimate, while masking the “identity politics” of the critic as somehow emergent from a politics of Pure Reason (i.e. divorced from any discernible political culture) and therefor both serious and legitimate. And this nonsense is being peddled by a man who in the same interview engages in dimestore anthropology to connect video games to the political identity of Edward Snowden.
JustRuss
@Roger Moore:
Hardly limited to Greenwald, sadly, that’s been SOP in our national media for quite some time. I went to journalism school 30 years ago with a fairly well known TV correspondent, I’ve seen her run stories that would have got her reamed by our profs in J-school. They know better, but they’re well paid not to. Exhibit B: Lara Logan.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker:
That doesn’t sound sexist so much as a point of view Hipster Kitty might hold.
El Tiburon
@Ash Can:
These claim [sic] are absolutely false. They come from a complete distortion of the Preface I wrote to my own 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act? That book – which was the first book devoted to denouncing the Bush/Cheney executive power theories as radical and lawless – was published a mere six months after I began blogging, so the the purpose of the Preface was to explain where I had come from, why I left my law practice to begin writing about politics, and what my political evolution had been..
The whole point of the Preface was that, before 2004, I had been politically apathetic and indifferent – except for the work I was doing on constitutional law. That’s because, while I had no interest in the fights between Democrats and Republicans, I had a basic trust in the American political system and its institutions, such that I devoted my attention and energies to preventing constitutional violations rather than political debates. From the first two paragraphs:
read here
Betty Cracker
@Sly: Actually, I don’t think Greenwald used the phrase “identity politics” — I did. But yeah, he is saying that identity politics is symbolic and trivial because the real, important issues are the surveillance state and US imperialism. I think you can credibly argue that it makes him wrong and a privileged ass, but sexist / racist / homophobic? I don’t think so.
chopper
@Cacti:
I’m amazed he referred to the president by his name, rather than “Dear Leader”.
A Humble Lurker
@Betty Cracker:
Well, he wasn’t at the time of the Iraq war. And he still hasn’t admitted as much.
Sly
@Betty Cracker:
And he arrives from that conclusion from the political culture that formed him, making him no different than any human being who has ever lived. If one’s political opinions being rooted in one’s political culture makes those opinions trivial, then anyone who prioritizes the surveillance state is just as vulnerable to criticisms of frivolity.
And Glenn Greenwald shall be the last to credibly lecture anyone on the stupidity of purely symbolic electoral decision-making.
Sexism, racism, and homophobia are all variations on being a privileged ass. They are the glimmering facets of the larger diamond.
srv
I get all my morals from blogs.
Bobby B.
@John: Like Maddow’s “here’s the best new thing in the world!” right after these messages…
Bobby Thomson
@Betty Cracker:
That’s well documented in his overall body of work.
jayjaybear
@El Tiburon: That “divine knowledge” was apparently with a lot of people. There were massive protests against the war in Iraq, from the very beginning. The “liberal” media covered almost nothing of it, so most people have no idea it happened.
To be honest, it didn’t take divine knowledge to know that Bush was lying to attack a country that hadn’t attacked us. It was known that the hijackers were mostly Saudi, not Iraqi. It was known that Hussein’s Baathist regime was secular and had no truck with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. It. Was. Known.
The viewpoint that required an awful lot of willful blindness was the one that willingly went along with the Bush Crime Family lies like they were Holy Writ.
Betty Cracker
@Sly: Certainly privilege and racism are connected, and one is a precondition for the other, but I don’t think they’re the same thing.
@Bobby Thomson: I haven’t read everything Greenwald has ever written (I find him a tedious writer), but I’ve read a fair amount and haven’t seen it.
TG Chicago
@A Humble Lurker: He didn’t say that trying to help the girls is horrifying. He said, “The ability to ignore virtually all history when advocating for The Next Western Intervention is as impressive as it is horrifying.” That’s different.
Is it not wise to consider the history of past interventions before entering into a new one?
TG Chicago
@Bobby Thomson: Yeah, his racism and sexism were never more evident than when he applauded Obama for nominating Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@El Tiburon:
I knew the Iraq War was bullshit from the day it was floated in the press. I knew Powell was lying his ass off in front of the UN. I knew Saddam had no WMDs.
Interestingly, what I learned from that episode is that Republicans and conservatives are lying rat bastards and that cowardly Democrats will sometimes go along with them. This is a very different lesson than the one you learned, you might notice, and one that’s more useful in fixing the damage of the Bush years than deciding to hide my head in the sand and tell myself they’re all the same.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I swear, every time I see that GG quote, I read it as, “Bush lied to me, and Obama’s gonna pay for that.”
TS
@RandomMonster:
Which puts him on the same path as Pierce’s Princess Dumbass Of The Northwoods – his knowledge of language may be marginally better.
Kevin
Normally a lurker, but….
Fun fact, re: Edward Snowden (I knew him as Eddie) and video games. When I was 8, I competed in the local Blockbuster video game tournament for the Super Nintendo — there was one for the Sega Genesis too.
It was called the “Blockbuster World Video Game Championships” if I remember correctly. I have a screenshot of an 8-year old me finishing ONE SPOT HIGHER in our local tournament than 11-year old — Eddie Snowden (my brother went to school with him and remembered HATING him).
I have photographic evidence of this, as well:
http://imgur.com/3P2qqq7
AxelFoley
@Keith G:
I guess it’d be fair of me to say you agree with GG because you both a gay white males, right?
Kevin
That blockbuster was the one from Crofton, Maryland by the way. I don’t remember exactly where Eddie lived, but I know it was near us somewhere.
Rex Everything
@Betty Cracker:
No, he’s not saying that, and you should quit pandering to the asshole gallery so much. He’s saying the concerns of the powerless will mostly only be addressed (by the political machine) in symbolic and trivial ways.
Betty Cracker
@Rex Everything: Get bent, asshole. How’s that for pandering? As for what GG meant by his remarks, you could be right, but your interpretation is an exercise in clairvoyance. He didn’t actually address minority concerns at all except to allude to the pull of identity politics as a mask for the power and corruption of the permanent government, which seems to offend him primarily by trampling civil liberties broadly, not oppressing minorities specifically.
Rex Everything
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, pre-NSA he wrote endless columns about anti-Muslim prejudice and how “terrorism” never applies to the MacVeighs of the world, but hey, I’m just being clairvoyant.
(And yeah, calling me an “asshole” is, of course, a prime example of shit-lipped bunglickin’ pandering to the very crowd you’ve been pandering to all along, as you well know.)
MJ
@Kevin:
I could be the internet’s biggest dupe, but if that photo is legit, it is frickin awesome! The eight-year-old you looked wicked smaaart!
Betty Cracker
@Rex Everything: You’re right about GG writing “endless” columns alright, which is why I’m perhaps not quite as conversant with his work as you are. I don’t remember him specifically calling out anti-Muslim prejudice, though he may well have. But what’s at issue here is what he said in the interview we’re discussing.
I called you an asshole because you’re acting like an asshole. As for the crowd I’m supposedly pandering to, would that be the Greenwald haters? If so, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about; I’ve gone toe-to-toe with pro-NSA, anti-Greenwald types countless times. If they engage me politely, I’m polite back. If they act like assholes, as you’re doing now, I have no problem calling them assholes. Asshole.
Rex Everything
@Betty Cracker:
He not only “may well have”; he did. The briefest of searches on his Guardian page brings up this…
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/25/racism-war-on-terror-awlaki
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/boston-marathon-explosions-notes-reactions
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/06/syria-israel-bombing-moral-relativism
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/11/bill-maher-muslims-islam-benghazi
The point is there’s a whole lot of real estate between what the GQ interview reveals and me being “clairvoyant.”
And who you’re pandering to is the commenters, heavily represented here, who insist GG only cares about & only writes about white-privileged-people problems. The facts, which are easily obtained, obliterate this lie in a second.
Lori
@Bobby Thomson: That reminds me of a particular snowbilly who reads “all the papers”. You got a reference, state it. I call bullshit.
nellcote
so are the profits from GG’s book going to the ACLU or similar non-profit reporter’s group?
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: A litigator is required to acknowledge and respect facts and precedent. Greenwald does not. More that anything else that his supporters say the idea that he provides lawyerly arguments is easily the most offensive.
Joseph Nobles
The biggest revelations of the NSA story are yet to come. OK, so the NSA has been hiding these revelations all these years so they maintain their power, and Greenwald has been hiding them for over a year for his own personal profit.
OK then.
Morzer
@Tommy:
A blog in which the Great and Powerful Greenwald did not talk about himself would be a very, very little blog indeed.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Tiburon:
Just maybe, you might want to step back a bit on foreign policy.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Great, Snowden is a headcase being exploited by this dubro hack Greenwald. So we’re never really going to find out what is going on with the NSA because Greenwald made sure it will also be about him when the NSA comes up.
wonder gir.
@efgoldman: why all the animosity against GG, Geesh there’s a ton of assholes out there and we know who they are. Is it that he just rub’s you the wrong way with his delivery or what? Really I’d like to know.
The Usual Suspect
@Kevin: That was awesome. Love the haircut too!
ulee
@wonder gir.: Because they’re a lot of hyenas around here. They smell blood and they start howling and laughing. No real reason. Just pack mentality.
Larv
@Tommy: @Tommy:
This is my problem with Greenwald. He’s trained as a lawyer, and his style of argument is advocacy. He takes a position, and then he goes searching for information to support it. This isn’t a problem when you have a client, and there’s a counterparty on the other side with his own lawyer doing the same thing. But now that Greenwald has decided he’s a journalist, he just does the same thing. It’s like the picture a defense attorney paints of his client and his actions – nobody really expects it to be an accurate picture, as it’s primary purpose is not to depict the truth but to serve as a counterweight to the picture the prosecutor is presenting. Greenwald does journalism the same way, but it’s not always clear who the counterparty is, and that means he has to be read very carefully and critically. It is, IMHO, a major flaw for somebody who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist.
Larv
After more reading, I see Roger Moore beat me to this at #76. Great minds…
I’d also add that part of the problem is that GG seems to have convinced himself that he’s advocating for “truth” or “freedom,”, when in reality he’s often advocating for Glenn Greenwald. And you know what they say about a lawyer who represents himself…
Betty Cracker
@Rex Everything:
I’ve disagreed repeatedly with that assertion and said there’s no evidence for it, not only in this very thread but in many others. That word “pandering.” I don’t think it means what you think it means…
Larv
@Kevin:
Very cool, small world. Gambrills kid here, but I’ve been in that Blockbuster more times than I can count. Are you also an Arundel grad like Snowden and me?
Rob in CT
Greenwald: more good than bad, as far as I can tell. And the whole “he’s a sexist/racist” is massively overblown and rather obviously an attempt to discredit him so one can avoid dealing with the Snowden leaks. GG may indeed be privileged and thus not perfect on all issues, but find me somebody who is (and yeah, his comment re: Hillary would’ve been improved by noting that actual racism & sexism are active forces in US politics, not just excuses to deflect criticism.). I read him a lot back in the Bush years and I don’t recall him being an idiot about gender and race so much as really focused on particular issues (flipside: does it make sense to criticize Ta-Nehisi Coates for not writing about some issue that’s not his beat?). And yeah, he’s pretty obviously a lawyer who builds a case rather than a journalist, but that’s not all bad. The journalist can easily fall into the he said/she said both sides do it trap. Greenwald, on the other hand, tends to write polemics. Know his tendencies and react accordingly, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
El Tiburon
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
That’s peachy, seriously. I wish I had the knowledge base back then. I didn’t know there “unknown unknowns” I understand what it means to be a “low information voter” because I was one of those people.
I recall feelilng like a grown up when I began watching the news in my 30s and felt if I watched some Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly I was getting a well-rounded news experience.
And as Greenwald stated, the Bush presidency radicalized me. I devoured political books and whatever else I could find and quickly came to the conclusion that Republicans are full of shit and that MSM is useless.
So, I don’t apologize for my ignorance. And I certainly don’t feel intimadated or a lesser political observer due to my past ignorance. I know without doubt I have more knowledge and understanding of the political world today than 98% of the yahoos on this site. And it manifests itself clearly eveytime a Greenwald post is submitted. The morans come out in full-force like a gang of childish squirts.
Rex Everything
@Betty Cracker: What you’ve done is state he’s not actively racist/sexist/homophobic (or there’s no reason to believe he is from what he’s written—why not go all the way, Betty, & say you have no reason to believe he strangled JonBenet Ramsay)—then immediately hedged this faint assertion with statements like:
“But yeah, he is saying that identity politics is symbolic and trivial…I think you can credibly argue that it makes him wrong and a privileged ass…”
The hedging part is the pandering. You want to contradict them, because you know they’re wrong as hell, but you can’t bring yourself to go through with it. In essence, you’re telling the asshole commentariat “Now now, red meat is bad for you… here, have a bone!” And it comes out to you doing nothing to oppose this rampant lying about and smearing of someone who, admittedly, can’t write very well (horrors!).
Rex Everything
@El Tiburon: It’s a good thing GG wasn’t a congressional Democrat in 2002-2003. Think how bad he would have made them look.
drkrick
@RandomMonster:
This is exactly what respected Village journalist Bob Woodward has been doing for 30 years now. Make of the comparison what you will.
drkrick
@Mnemosyne:
You misspelled 1780.
Betty Cracker
@Rex Everything: So you’re clairvoyant after all, with a perfect understanding of my thought processes and an accurate inventory of my stores of knowledge on the subject of GG. In that case, I guess there’s no point in my claiming to be genuinely conflicted on the subject of GG and engaging in good faith dialog with the other participants on this thread, nosiree bob. Glad we cleared that up.
Rex Everything
@Betty Cracker: I am engaging in a good faith dialogue. And I’m helping you to do so, too. I’m just not being polite about it, or pretending not to notice what’s glaringly obvious (I mean, really: calling GG a homophobe “strikes [you] as an unwarranted leap”? If you want a good faith dialogue, you need to work on your bad faith detection skills. Do you think you can have a good faith dialogue with the kind of people who call Chomsky antisemitic?)
Death Panel Truck
@El Tiburon:
Go fuck yourself, dickhead. Support GG all you care to, but don’t even try to convince me of your superior understanding of politics. I’ve been reading the comments here for years, and it’s quite apparent to me that a vast majority of the “yahoos” are light years smarter than you.
I didn’t need to be “radicalized” (whatever the fuck that means) to know that the GOP cannot be trusted with foreign policy in any way, shape or form. Ever.
James Hare
@El Tiburon: The case for war against Iraq was so unimaginably crappy that anybody who got caught up in it needs to do more than examine their feelings about the US government. Folks who supported that war had to ignore every bit of evidence that contradicted Bush’s product rollout.
One should never trust the government when it decides to sell you a war. If the war needs selling it doesn’t need fighting.
Rex Everything
@James Hare: It’s a good thing GG wasn’t a congressional Democrat in 2002-2003. Think how bad he would have made them look.
Betty Cracker
@Rex Everything: Yes, I can see from your own demonstration of superior good faith dialogin’ skills that it’s far more effective to repeatedly and obnoxiously attribute bad faith to others and glean their innermost thoughts by way of internet ESP. Convinced me, ya did!
mapaghimagsik
@nickrud: The Bible comes to mind ;)
Rex Everything
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, kinda like you repeatedly calling me “asshole” and saying “get bent,” while I NEVER called you any names or expressed ill will toward you, shows what a peach you are. Have fun with these buddies of yours who so politely feed you patent lie after patent lie. I haven’t seen so much good faith outside a car dealership.
Betty Cracker
@Rex Everything: I never claimed I was engaged in good faith dialog with you. Why should I be when you started the conversation by calling me an ass-kisser and then escalated that claim quite crudely in subsequent replies? (Not that I give a rat’s ass — just calling bullshit on your current “who me?” act.)
The truly demented thing about this conversation is that, as far as there is a “side” involved here, I’m on yours since I don’t believe Greenwald is a homophobe, racist or sexist and have repeatedly refuted those claims. But demanding more vigorous clapping is certainly an important pursuit too, and you seem uniquely suited to it, so carry on.
YAFB
I think you need to cut Rex Everything some slack here, Betty.
He’s used to steaming in here late, late on, when he presumes he’s safe because everyone else has hied off to threads new, so he can drop insults and exercise his esprit d’escalier at those who’ve partaken in the earlier discussions secure in the presumption that he’s basically taking to himself. He’s sorely out of practice when folks are still around to actually, you know, answer back and all that.
And El Tiburon – congratulations on your awakening in the 2000s. Sequences of events like that are how many of us reached some sort of awakening. I note that Glenn Greenwald’s evolution followed a similar trajectory. But all the reading in the world is no substitute for experience, and that takes a helluvalot of time to develop. If it’s any consolation, you’re by no means the only neophyte who’s assumed they know it all, or indeed that all is knowable.
Kevin
@Larv: You know it, buddy! GO WILDCATS CLASS OF 04