Basically, if you thought Cenk jumped the shark with that hilarious “RAWR! FEEL THE WHINY WRATH OF ME, OBAMA!” rant at the Huffington Post, our boy is here to tell you: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Cenk Uygur, late of MSNBC, now of Current, is featured in a new Huffington Post opinion piece urging Democrats to vote against President Obama in the Iowa caucuses. To support his underlying aim, Uygur cherry-picks a handful of issues on which he disagrees with the president’s actions, and in the process either purposefully misleads or, alternatively, has conducted so little research as to unintentionally mislead. Either way: He misleads. Let’s look at what he’s arguing.
Uygur opens his HuffPo piece with a screed about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA); he takes issue with the final language contained in the NDAA sections pertaining to the detention of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. Uygur asserts that the NDAA allows for “the indefinite detention of US citizens by the military inside the US.” To bolster this frightening claim, Uygur links to this Glenn Greenwald post on Salon.com, in which Greenwald makes the same assertion: that the NDAA is the “indefinite detention bill.”
So, is it? How can we determine if the NDAA is the “indefinite detention bill” Uygur and Greenwald (to name just two) claim it is? How about if we look at the legislative language? The pertinent detention section of the NDAA is Sec. 1021/1022. Here’s the final language that came out of the House/Senate conference committee (the NDAA went to conference because the House-passed and Senate-passed NDAAs differed in key aspects, as we’ll discuss below.) I’m clipping at some length the key provisions at Sec. 1022, and have taken the liberty of bolding certain sub-sections:
Meet the new employee/boss relationship involving Keith Olbermann, same as the old employee/boss relationship involving Keith Olbermann.
Keith Olbermann, who came to Current TV this year to remake the channel and compete against his old home,
MSNBC, is sitting out the biggest political nights of the season.
Despite being the biggest star on the fledging channel, Mr. Olbermann is not scheduled to anchor Current’s coverage of the Iowa caucus or the New Hampshire primary in January. Instead, Current’s other prime time anchors, Cenk Uygur and Jennifer Granholm, will be joined by the channel’s chairman, the former vice president Al Gore, according to the channel’s TV schedule.
Mr. Olbermann also was noticeably absent from two special reports that Current produced after Republican debates in mid-December. Those, too, were anchored by Mr. Uygur.
These absences suggest that there may be new tension between Mr. Olbermann and the managers at Current, who are trying to create a progressive-oriented cable news channel.
