non-smug dem politics sites

no no of course greenwald's (almost) always right, and inbetween the righteous blowharding it's possible to learn lots of interesting stuff, but his problem is the same as with chomsky, that other guy who's always right - he appears to believe the world is divided into three groups: evil machinators who are intent on destroying the universe; imbeciles whose intellectual sloth makes them complicit; and them

just on a stylistic level--its difficult to read 10 800-wd screeds a week, even if i agree with all of them

he appears to believe the world is divided into three groups: evil machinators who are intent on destroying the universe; imbeciles whose intellectual sloth makes them complicit; and them

Well, again, what's "reality" – what the Rahm claque says it is? A scold isn't supposed to be nice. Since we have no reason to trust politicians, even the ones we voted for, why give them the benefit of the doubt (and, to be fair, in the first few months of Obama's term Greenwald said "wait and see" many times).

really dont think i should be forced to choose between greenwald and rahm re reality, theyre both so appealing

greenwald is harsh but fair to obama and the administration.

but hes also always 100% convinced of his correctness, which, regardless of whether or not its true, is grating--when he waded into the health-care debate defending jane hamsher he was like super irritating and not convincing

i like my bloggers to have a little bit of self-doubt which is why ackerman and klein and tnc are appealing. yglesias can have a little bit of the "im always right" feeling.

Just imagine them in a bar arguing about the tab.

kind of a funny side effect of greenwaldian tendencies on the left is that republicans are more powerful than democrats - it took like 6 years for the right to start hating bush and he was the biggest fuck up ever - now just to be clear im not at all telling greenwald et al to get in line and fight the war - i believe people should follow their hearts - but it is an interesting structural phenomenon in our political setup that the left is much more willing to eat its own

yeah don't think Greenwald fits into the non smug category

I'm sometimes glad for the banalities that TPM and Drudge turn into stories. Today's example: John Roberts' comments, which will dominate the cable talk shows this morning and get health care out of the pundits' heads for twenty-four hours.

btw if "smug" in this context means: "I know I'm right because here are the facts," how is that annoying?

wait, TNC blogs about WoW???????

woah i hadn't seen that--what a dildo

lol

btw if "smug" in this context means: "I know I'm right because here are the facts," how is that annoying?

― The Magnificent Colin Firth (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 10, 2010 10:13 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really man

but hes also always 100% convinced of his correctness, which, regardless of whether or not its true, is grating

Alfred, here you go

and w/o TPM's taste for banalities, gonzales would have been AG until january of this year.

xps

Dan: yes, he really does and now I am just trying to remember if he likes the Cure or not.

I'm not going to date Greenwald, so he can be as grating as he wants.

wait, TNC blogs about WoW???????

― we call him black Nev coz he's black & his names Neville (HI DERE), Wednesday, March 10, 2010 10:13 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

less than he used to but it still comes up a lot

not that anyone cares but my dildo comment was directed toward John Roberts

i'm sure people care about where you direct your dildo (comment)

Need Roberts-dildo gif soon.

Ah, Google

Here’s an interesting factoid: it was illegal to buy and sell vibrators in Texas and Virginia until 2008. Texas made them legal right in time for Valentine’s Day though. I would in fact love to see John Roberts and Samuel Alito come down on vibrators. CNN Money win! Anyway, Mississippi, Alabama and (questionably) Virginia still have the same law (Haha Virginia, I screwed you!). My research indicates that these laws are in fact enforced, though not if you’re just traveling with a vibrator. The authorities in these states might go that extra mile to humiliate you though. My favorite comment about the former Texas vibrator law: “That aint jus stoopid. That is dawn rite retarded.”

hee hee

It's sort of wrong that I am eagerly awaiting the point when our elected officials start dueling each other, right

or rather, elected/appointed

dildos at ten paces.

iirc the one time he was mentioned on an election thread he got torn to bits but i like michael tomasky a lot. probably a pretty big overlap with ezra.

i get kind of a whiff of the village with tomasky as well - he has some good stuff sometimes but i hardly ever learn anything new. his pointless, paragraph-long posts on guardian.co.uk don't help i guess

i guess i'm wondering if these sorts of sites have changed tone in the last two or three years. i used to think of digby as being interesting and reasonable and well-considered.

used to love obsidian wings but hilzoy quit and it's not as good

Tracer, you're baffling. What's "interesting, reasonable, and well-considered to you"? Digby is twice as didactic as Greenwald but just as informative. Is the truth not "interesting" or "well-considered"?

From yesterday:

I don't want to write about Eric Massa but I guess I have to. I've met the guy a couple of times and admired his strong position on DADT and the wars in raq and Afghanistan. I assumed his opposition to health care reform (for not being liberal enough) was a way to thread the needle in his conservative district. I'm not sure how well that works, but I probably prefer it to having "no" voters use conservative talking points. I actually assumed he was one who might be persuaded to change his vote in the final days.

But that's all I know except for the fact that he was from a military family, as I am, served in the Navy for decades and seemed to be something of an eccentric iconoclast.

Now he's in the public eye having a very messy, very personal meltdown. In fact, his actions seem to me to be the work of a very troubled man who is in a lot of emotional pain. I certainly don't endorse his behavior if it's true. But I do have sympathy for someone who has to endure such a personal journey in front of the entire world, especially as he hasn't, as so many do, allowed his own confusion and self-loathing to deny others the equality they deserve.

So, I'll leave it to others to excoriate him for his erratic and self-destructive behavior. I just don't have the stomach for it. Howie Klein wrote a moving essay on this today that you might want to read. No excuses. But understanding.

Is that not reasonable and well-considered?

enh, i like reading greenwald for a little fire, tbh. i don't keep up with this nonsense nearly as much as you nerds, so if i do take the time to read a blogger, i may as well get my money's worth

haha leave it to greenwald to spend four paragraphs explaining why he's not writing about the thing he's, uh, actually writing about after all

the three sites i listed at the top are good examples of what i like, alfred - entertaining, informative, interesting - "the truth" is pointless if it's delivered with clubby eye-rolling, and possibly even less than pointless

(from a certain point of view the dailyhowler is chockablock with eyerolling, but it's not clubby, it's not tribal)

part of what pisses me off about greenwald is that he's such an unbelievably meticulous writer, capable of instantly vaporizing any subject he trains his gaze upon, but his blog is weirdly OCD - he will literally write about whatever the thing du jour is - i wish he'd focus more in a long-term sense

he used to write mostly abt constitutional law and it was awesome

haha leave it to greenwald to spend four paragraphs explaining why he's not writing about the thing he's, uh, actually writing about after all

that was Digby I quoted (my fault for not citing her).

TNC's posts about WoW and his totally evil Dallas Cowboys fandom are very endearing.

In the same entry, Greenwald observes that he has been openly gay for 20 years and that, while he has lived in the United States all his life, he divides his time between New York City and Brazil, the country of citizenship of his Brazilian male partner:

Revealingly, American law prevents the recognition of our relationship as a ground for him to live in the United States, while Brazilian law recognizes same-sex relationships for visa and immigration purposes. As a result, for the past year [2006], I have spent substantial time in Brazil while also having a residence in New York. Spending substantial time in another country does not make one an 'expatriate.' And even those American citizens who do give up American residence and live abroad retain full rights of citizenship, including voting rights. But I have not done so.

According to Ken Silverstein's interview with Greenwald published in Harper's Magazine on February 22, 2008, conducted by telephone while Greenwald was in Brazil, he lives there "much of the time."[18] On July 22, 2008, when Greenwald participated in a debate with Cass Sunstein, an adviser to then Senator Barack Obama, moderated by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, their exchange was also conducted by telephone from Brazil.[19]

In a May, 2008 interview, Greenwald explained that "even though Brazil has the largest Catholic population of any country in the world" and "was a military dictatorship until 1985": "I’m able to obtain from the Brazilian government a permanent visa because my Brazilian partner’s government recognizes our relationship for immigration purposes, while the government of my supposedly 'free,' liberty-loving country enacted a law explicitly barring such recognition."[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald

greenwald is the greatest -- he's a bit apocalyptic but i don't care

i guess i don't really see how daily hower is more/less smug than greenwald

kind of shrill and very self-righteous

I call dibs on screen name

greenwald tweet holla @ j sarge today

http://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/10369114520

marvelous!

damn sarge is making big friends on twitter recently

haha yeah -- this one was slightly less of an adrenaline rush than jose canseco's murder & torture threat

i bought this for $4 on amazon

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5169rbmeK4L._SL500_.jpg

it's nice to know & also lol that greenwald bolds and italicizes seemingly at random even in his books

He's definitely not an idiot.

link? not that i don't trust ya

"wow"

I just always wanted to have guts and tell the truth, and I did my best at both. I can live with that.

http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/stop-hillary-2/

gimme the page, dude, i read that 20 months ago, and life is short (esp mine)

y'know, don't. I absolutely don't give a shit, all real estate is a cesspool, fuck private property.

if you can bear to get through henwood's summary of what happened, he basically says that hillary clinton didn't do anything wrong, and then blames her for being "secretive" about it

And then there were the scandals, many of them Hillary’s. The most famous was Whitewater, a word it pains me to type. Democrats love to say that there was nothing to that scandal. While it was certainly not the diabolical conspiracy Republicans made it out to be during the fevered days of the Clinton impeachment, it was not nothing. ...

But the Clintons, of course, were also investors in McDougal’s schemes. The fact that they appear to have lost money on Whitewater, and were never convicted of any criminal behavior in connection with the scandal, hardly excuses this farcical round-robin of ethical conflicts. Yet Whitewater itself is of far less interest than how Hillary handled it: with lies, half-truths, and secrecy.

http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/stop-hillary-2/7/

What an outrage, that cur Henwood.

You can hear the Clintons' presentational gears grinding like Meryl Streep's in midperformance, always.

Bill's a better actor than RoboStreep, give him that

I don't think "ethical conflicts" = "didn't do anything wrong"

I have next to no memory of the entire Whitewater affair! i have exit velocity, launch angle and other recent baseball metrics to store in this noggin, not to mention Robin Wood's critique of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as a queer text.

Bubba's hyperventilating at BLM was more like Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night

i read LGM every day but i could do without ever reading them on anything except current electoral politics and labor history ever again

case in point: erik loomis's occasional posts about a famous writer he's never read, but has opinions about:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/11/erik-visits-american-grave-part-360