I was fortunate enough Thursday to interview Glenn Greenwald about his new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. In this podcast exclusive, we discuss the major theme of his book in the context of John McCain and the press’ reverence for him, as well as the successful campaign we waged to kill the AT&T bill and what it says about the emerging power of the blogosphere.
I’ll post the transcript once it’s complete. In the meantime, you can find some excerpts here and here, as well as some of the other reviews from around the blogosphere:
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
“Yoo and torture” - 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079
The sad thing is that the mainstream press really does believe that things like Obama’s poor bowling skills and the Clinton’s tax returns are more important stories than, say, the trillion dollar war that continues to rage on with no end in sight or a collapsing economy. Like Glenn says, people care about the petty stuff because the media loves to tell themselves that they do.
We all helped Glenn’s book reach #12 today when it was #212 yesterday. Go Blogoshere. It would be great to push him into the Top Ten list. Jane makes an excellent point: “Nobody rips the right like Glenn Greenwald. Since there’s no Richard Mellon Scaife to buy boxloads of books and force it onto the New York Times bestseller list, you can help do it the democratic way by buying the book.”
It would be great to move it into the top ten on Amazon. And I agree on this point all the way:
In a minimally rational world, a Republican presidential candidate like John McCain who has enabled all of that would have no chance. But — in the absence of anything changing the way this works — the establishment press will remove those considerations from its election coverage and the GOP’s exploitation of bottom-feeding personality-based psychological, cultural and gender themes will predominate. In 2008, the GOP will dedicate itself single-mindedly to these same personality-based, manipulative electoral tactics because that is their only hope for winning.
There simply cannot be any greater priority than preventing a John McCain Presidency, one which would empower the same faction and continue the same policies that have been slowly though inexorably destroying this country, its institutions and political values. Understanding and neutralizing these tactics and the enabling media behavior is a prerequisite for preventing that…read on
The wingnut welfare queens have their books bought onto the New York Times bestseller list, and their ideas thus are able to penetrate much further than if they had to survive on their own merits. Please help us do the same for our team’s very best, Glenn Greenwald — without whose heroic efforts I have no doubt we’d have retroactive telecom immunity today.
…but the media ignores the candidate, does it really happen?
Glenn Greenwald looks at the media narratives that can’t say enough about McCain’s “rise from the dead” but ignore John Edwards’ rise completely. (h/t Atrios)
Aside from the fact that these endless prediction games completely overwhelm any substantive discussions, their guesses — which are really wishes — are almost always dreadfully wrong and plainly designed to advance their concealed agenda for which candidates they like and dislike. Why is any of that something that reporters ought to be doing at all? Is there any distinction between what a “reporter” does and what a “pundit” does covering this campaign? There doesn’t seem to be any.
As but one example, consider this new daily tracking poll today from Rasumussen Reports. At least according to this poll, it is true that there has been one candidate who has been genuinely surging in the last week or two among Democratic voters nationally — John Edwards [..]
Yet to listen to media reports, Edwards doesn’t even exist. His campaign is dead. He has no chance. They hate Edwards, hate his message, and thus rendered him invisible long ago, only now to declare him dead — after he came in second place in the first caucus of the campaign.
The summarized version is that there were two competing bills which Reid could have brought to the floor — the Senate Intelligence Committee version engineered by Jay Rockefeller and Dick Cheney which gives the administration most of what it wants, and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which does not contain telecom amnesty and contains far more extensive oversight protections. Reid could have brought the bill to the floor using whatever process he wanted, and he has decided — contrary to weeks of assurances — that the SIC bill will serve as the “base” bill, meaning that improving it (by removing amnesty and increasing oversight) will require 60 votes, rendering such efforts virtually impossible. In doing so, Reid is brazenly ignoring the demands of 14 Senators — including all of the Democratic presidential candidates — to have the Judiciary Committee bill be the base bill.
and Glenn sums it up this way…
The criticism isn’t that Harry Reid is being insufficiently aggressive in opposing the White House. It’s that he’s doing what he can to support the White House, serving as their key ally. Read more…
As usual, we can also count on FireDogLake to keep us all up-to-date.
And if being “Democratic” “majority” “leader” is too much for Mr. Reid, maybe we can find another Senator. Just saying….
Oh and if you’d like to give Senator Reid a call (remember to be on-topic and respectful), his numbers are here (thanks, FDL).
Attentive readers of Howard Kurtz’s washingtonpost.com weekday media column may have noticed that on the fifth and final page of his 3,000-word December 6 post, Kurtz finally addressed the media controversy that erupted when Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald highlighted an egregious error made by Time magazine columnist Joe Klein. Klein had mocked a supposed Democratic legislative maneuver in Congress for being “well beyond stupid” and stressed how Democrats remain soft on the war on terror.[..]
The story, which raged online for more than two weeks and was commented upon by virtually every major liberal blogger, unfolded at the intersection between politics and media — the same intersection that Kurtz writes about for a living as perhaps the most-read media writer in the country. Yet for weeks Kurtz remained silent about the Klein story; nothing in the Post, nothing in his online daily column, and nothing on CNN’s Reliable Sources, the weekly media program that he hosts.
The deafening silence was baffling. As Greenwald noted in an email to me, “The story involved the most-read political journal in the country and one of the best-known pundits. It entailed numerous key media issues which Kurtz is assigned to cover, including the corrupt use of anonymous sources, uncritical reliance by reporters on partisan spin, and a media outlet’s refusal to correct its errors honestly and clearly.”
Unsurprisingly, nearly 3 pages of Kurtz’s 5 page post was about either Bill or Hillary Clinton, neither getting particularly flattering coverage.
Glenn Greenwald has been following Time Magazine’s Joe Klein and his increasingly bizarre (and demonstrably false) assertions on FISA and the Democratic majority.
Joe Klein has just posted yet again about his FISA confusion, and it has now moved well beyond farce into an almost pity-inducing realm. If Time has any dignity at all, someone there will intervene and put a stop to this. It’s actually difficult to watch.
In the last five days alone, Klein has now written five separate times about his FISA debacle, and is further away than ever from having any idea what he’s even talking about — first was the column itself; second was the Swampland post the same day in which he emphatically defended the accuracy of what he wrote in response to my post; third was the post yesterday in which Klein said he “may have made a mistake in [his] column this week about the FISA legislation” — the understatement of the year; fourth was an Update he added to that post this morning claiming that he did speak to a Democrat but “may have misinterpreted a Democratic source’s point” and “if [he] did, a correction will appear in the print magazine next week”; and now, his fiftheffort in tonight’s post, actually worse than all the others, in which he still professes confusion after “spen[ding] the past few days nosing around in the ongoing dispute about what the House FISA Reform bill actually says.”
The result of all this “nosing around”: “I’ve reached no conclusions.” And he then unleashes this:
I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right.
Yeah, Joe. God forbid you do some research before smearing a political party falsely. But wait, there’s more. FDL’s Jane Hamsher then wanted to check which editor at Time let untrue and unresearched assertions go out under Time’s flagship banner multiple times, and guess what the editor’s response was?
I finally confirmed that the editor was Priscilla Painton, and called her and identified myself. I asked her what the editing process was, and how a piece with so many errors made it into print.
“That assumes that there are errors,” she said. And hung up on me.
So again, the question must be asked: why would anyone give any credibility to Joe Klein or Time Magazine when reporting factual and researched stories are so patently unimportant to them?
The subject line of the email — which I am publishing in full, unedited form here — is “The growing link between the U.S. military and right-wing media and blogs,” which is the title of the post I wrote earlier this week regarding the politicization of the Army in Iraq, as evidenced by its constant coordination with, and leaking to, the likes of Matt Drudge, The Weekly Standard, and the most extremist right-wing blogs — in the TNR/Beauchamp case and also more generally….read on
The military leadership in this instance is acting very—biased—as Cole points out.
Compare the almost matter-of-fact responses that right-wing PR bots like the Confederate Yankee get, and the taunting and juvenile tone Boylan uses when addressing Greenwald…
I’ve been writing a lot about the propaganda the military has been using to try unsuccessfully to promote the Iraq war to the American people. We need to thank Dan Froomkin bunches for his fine work also…And then there’s the fine documentary called: “War Made Easy,” that spells it out for us too….
As we learned from both our Senate and House last week, in the United States we must never “attack the honor and integrity . . . of members of the United States Armed Forces.” All good patriots from both parties agree on this.
That is why I was so shocked and outraged — and more than a little upset — when I went to FoxNews.com this morning and saw this:
I naturally assumed that the “disgraceful military leaders” attacked by the Fox headline must be those of another country, not those of the United States leading our Nation, putting themselves in harm’s way, during a Time of War. Yet when I clicked on the item, this is the anti-military filth that I found:
And the text of the article — by Fox News Contributor and frequent O’Reilly guest David Hunt — is even more Despicable, as it repeatedly attacks the honor and integrity of members of the United States Armed Forces in one smearing paragraph after the next, beginning with this first sentence:
Our generals are betraying our soldiers . . . again.
And yet, Brit Hume still couldn’t keep himself from making a few anti-MoveOn.org slams this morning on FOX News Sunday. Et tu, Brit?
Ledeen is perfectly content to urge war with Iran based on the moronic slogan — now a right-wing article of faith — that they have been “at war with us since 1979,” but he is completely unwilling to account for his own behavior or that of the Reagan administration towards Iran during that time. And he’s eager to leave all sorts of dark innuendo about Gen. Abizaid (”suppressing evidence” of Iranian acts of war) but refuses to state what he means or why he thinks Abazaid would engage in such treacherous behavior.
This is how neoconservatives function. Ledeen’s intellectually dishonest tactic is found in virtually every one of Bill Kirstol’s columns and Fox News television sneers. For instance, Kristol — attacking Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s invitation to New Adolph Hitler President Ahmadinejad to speak — says today: “A perfect synecdoche for too much of American higher education: they are friendlier to Ahmadinejad than to the U.S. military.” So is Bollinger anti-American? A Traitor? As always, Kristol merely leaves the dirty innuendo against anyone who opposes more wars against Israel’s enemies, but always lacks the courage explicitly to make the argument.
(Nicole:) Now contrast Glenn’s excellent analysis with the news that Rudy Giuliani has brought on one of the PNAC elders, Norman Podhoretz, as a senior advisor on foreign policy for his campaign. Does that mean that if elected, Rudy will be making plans to bomb Iran (that assumes GWB won’t beat him to it)?
Needless to say, Coretta Scott King was not suspected of having committed any crimes. She was a completely innocent woman. And yet the federal government — with the knowledge and approval of two different presidential administrations at the highest levels — read her private mail, listened in on her telephone calls, and monitored and recorded her activities, all without warrants or oversight….
What the FBI did to Coretta Scott King, with the approval of two different presidential administrations, is reprehensible, and everyone outside of the small band of Bush authoritarians can understand why that is the case. Using such abuses to demonstrate why the Bush administration (and all other administrations) should be trusted with surveillance powers only accompanied by oversight is what the Democratic leadership would do if they were actually committed, as they claim, to reversing the disgraceful and dangerous law they just enacted….
Congressional Democrats actually seem to become weaker and more accommodating with every day that passes. Even when you think that they cannot get any weaker or more accommodating, they always manage to prove you wrong.
On a different note, is the curriculum for history classes in some American states restricted to learning about Hitler and the Nazis and 1938 and Hitler and Germany? It must be, because there are many right-wing fanatics whose entire understanding of the world is reduced in every instance to that sole historical event — as though the world began in 1937, ended in 1945, and we just re-live that moment in time over and over and over:
Love war? You are Churchill, a noble warrior. Oppose war? You’re Chamberlain, a vile appeaser. And everyone else is Hitler. That, more or less, composes the full scope of “thought” among this strain on the right.
These words gave me an epiphany: The key to understanding nonsensical right-wing rhetoric like the “Vietnam” speech can be found in an episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I was fortunate enough Thursday to interview Glenn Greenwald about his new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. In this podcast exclusive, we discuss the major theme of his book in the context of John McCain and the press’ reverence for him, as well as the successful campaign we waged to kill the AT&T bill and what it says about the emerging power of the blogosphere.
