defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

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

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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

The frightening spectre of a Dictatorial Menace also led liberal advocacy groups such as the ACLU to drown in previously unimaginable quantities of #Resistance cash, frenetically donated in the name of stopping Trump’s incomparable evil. Rotted and discredited institutions like the CIA, NSA and FBI re-branded themselves as patriotic guardians of liberal democracy and stalwart protectors of a besieged population. Leaders of those security state agencies went from toppling governments, engineering clandestine coups, disseminating disinformation campaigns, illegally spying on citizens, and entrapping young Muslims in manufactured terror plots to being lavished with book deals and cable news contracts and celebrated in liberal parlors as saviors rather than destroyers of democratic institutions and Enlightenment values.

Bit of a stretch to put ACLU in with CIA no?

Hard to articulate as I'm hungover but, GG's catalogue of Bush and Obama era horrors didn't seem incorrect so much as missing the particular 'nervous breakdown' character of the Trump presidency - smashing up CDC, EPA etc.

Or to put it another way, Bush and to an extent Obama used the spaceship to do loads of stupid, terrible shit whereas Captain Trump just deliberately rammed asteroids and threw people out of airlocks on a whim. Greenwald seems to not like the spaceship and think it just needs to be blown up?

Like what does GG actually want America to be, or do? A kind of pre-WWI style isolationist foreign policy, with socialist domestic policy? I know 'Well how would you do things differently' is a sucky answer to a criticism of something but after getting through ten paras I find myself thinking it

Yeah the media went after trump for a four-year feeding frenzy, and yeah, some of it was bullshit, but the idea that Trump is basically Obama is hot-take BS. Trump literally got onstage after his team recommended mask-wearing and proclaimed he wouldn’t be wearing a mask. That alone probably added 50k to the body count. And as Noam said recently, Trump is the only world leader to call for MORE fossil fuel consumption, which is inexplicably spiteful and evil.

weird seeing glenn bashing the ACLU considering how vigorously he defended them from criticism when they were demanding respect for the nazi free speech that killed heather heyer. I guess he just goes where the racism is

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?

I don’t know about other nations but as someone with a french passport, yes, the same can be said of France, absolutely.

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

― turn the jawhatthefuckever on (One Eye Open), Sunday, November 8, 2020 10:34 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

you can’t just pick the non-US countries with the worst outbreaks and say ‘since Trump only did a bit worse than them it’s not so bad’. that’s called selecting on the dependent variable, and it mechanically creates a bias. the relevant counterfactual for the US is some average over all other comparable countries. canada for example, which would have a high weight in such a counterfactual, has tiny death per capita relative to the US

given how rich, warm, and dry much of the US is, you’d actually expect it to have less deaths than an average european country

It’s really dumb because the answer is clearly “...yes, of course the same can be said of those countries”

All govts with shitty pandemic responses can be held responsible for them, who’d argue otherwise

Maybe it’s more common than I think but it’s seems to me that a vast majority of Trump haters, also hated the Bush administration, right?

It’s really dumb because the answer is clearly “...yes, of course the same can be said of those countries”

All govts with shitty pandemic responses can be held responsible for them, who’d argue otherwise

― Gab B. Nebsit (wins), Sunday, November 8, 2020 4:18 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not every country with a bad outbreak had a bad response. that’s most true for the first wave (when tests didn’t even exist and everyone was in the dark while it spread) but still very true for second and third. there’s a large element of randomness in which outbreaks will get bad due to things like network positions of the initial seeding and populations compliance with tracing. most of the cross-regional variation in deaths can’t be explained by policy

Maybe it’s more common than I think but it’s seems to me that a vast majority of Trump haters, also hated the Bush administration, right?

Yeah the people GG is picking a fight with here - people who haaaaate Trump but lurrrrve Obama and Bush - don't sound like a very large bloc

Also people tend to get most annoyed with today's horrible disaster rather than yesterday's

Like what does GG actually want America to be, or do?

to pay attention to him

idk about lurrrve but there are definitely quite a lot of "I never liked him but at least he brought dIgNiTy tO tHe OfFiCe" people out there xp

Are you talking about W, because the most common take I've seen is "I thought W was embarrassing but Trump blows him out of the water" which is not at all the same thing

I've seen plenty of both tbh

Most of the W luvvin comes from semi official propaganda and pr slush pieces afaik - though it is there - more so than from like actual people

I just think most people who call Trump a white supremacist authoritarian are also very likely to see the Iraq and Afghanistan war as disasters.

and I would agree with GG that, as a society, it’s time to let go of Frum.