Tag Archives: Glenn Greenwald

It’s Not Kucinich’s Wackiness, It’s His Fecklessness

Kucinich june07Greenwald’s latest post is a love song for Dennis Kucinich.  Essentially, Greenwald argues that Kucinich has been a staunch advocate against executive power, drones, and secret wars, and that “establishment Democrats” ignore these principled stances in favor of mockery, derision and scorn  for Kucinich’s New Age/alien talk.

I suppose that’s one way to look at it.  But here’s another way:  Kucinich’s voting record stinks and he’s a terrible Democrat.

Personally, I don’t care about the alien/New Age talk (except to the extent that such talk made him unelectable by the public at large).  What I care about is his record on reproductive rights — it’s terrible.  Ultimately, Kucinich is a pro-life Catholic who flip-flopped to pro-choice in order to win elections, and I’m simply not cool with that.

From PBS Newshour:

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Rules for Radicals, Chapter Two: Of Means and Ends — Angry Black Book Chat

Warning: Hands Will Get Dirty. Proceed At Your Own Risk.

Welcome back, Angry Black Book Chatters! We’ve maintained a good conversation about Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, first with the Prologue, then with Chapter One: The Purpose.

Today we’ll tackle Chapter Two: Of Means and Ends, in which Alinsky begins to lay out concrete rules for the pragmatic radical.

A bit of housekeeping: we’ll be taking next weekend off and resuming the series with Chapter Three the following week, as yours truly will be reporting to the mother ship for a weekend of re-programming by our Angry Black Overlord in the City of Angels. This break should give those of you who have intended to participate, but fallen behind on your reading, an opportunity to catch up.

And now to the rules!  Continue reading

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Glenn Greenwald As Lucy, Football and All

Jay Adler has a must-read post over at Sad Red Earth entitled ”From the People Who Brought You Richard Nixon & George W. Bush.”  Here’s a snippet, but do click over and read the rest:

Who has a shorter memory than the perpetual loser? Over and over the perpetual loser performs the same self-defeating act. Again and again, the loser fails, and failing, finds cause for failure in the inadequacy of others. Charlie Brown runs, as he has run countless times before, for the football Lucy holds to the ground, and which she withdraws yet again, at the ultimate instant, just before Charlie’s flailing kick. Upending himself, he falls to the ground, and cries out in despair, “How long, O Lord.”

Lucy, analyzing Charlie’s unknowing allusion to scripture, offers the final verdict.

“All your life, Charlie Brown. All your life.”

And you thought Peanuts was all sweetness and Christmas specials. Continue reading

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Shorter Ron Paul: The South Will Rise Again

Are you kidding me with this guy?

It amuses me to no end when white folks laud the Declaration of Independence — with all of its lofty rhetoric about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — all the while stoically ignoring that all that happy-happy-joy-joy talk didn’t apply to the Africans whites dragged to this country and enslaved.

So when I see the tiny wizened messiah talking about the Civil War and lamenting all the liberty that was lost as a result of the war, I laugh bitterly.  When I hear him talking about goooooold! and ending the Fed, I begin banging my head against the closest wall.

Dude is so out of touch with the 21st century, I’m starting to wonder if he’s some sort of time traveler who crawled through the Rift and has managed somehow to amass Paul-lovers and the Paul-curious from each end of the political spectrum, and everything in between.  Everyone from Katrina vanden Heuvel and Glenn Greenwald to David Duke and Stormfront are singing this guy’s praises, in some fashion or another (but not necessarily endorsing him. *wink wink*)

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Tim Wise on the Lunacy of Greenwald and the Progressive Pauliban

Nailed it.

I have one question for the Salon.com blogger who repeatedly states that he does not endorse Ron Paul, and who coyly demurs that his vociferous statements of Ron Paul’s sheer awesome are not endorsement but simply a wistful desire to see certain issues discussed during the campaign: Why the fuck isn’t he endorsing Ron Paul?

He obviously thinks that Ron Paul is the bee’s knees and that Obama is some sort of Muslim baby-killing, drone-happy dictator. There’s a reason the Salon.com blogger refers to Obama as “Dear Leader” and to Obama supporters (85 percent of Democrats, mind you) as cultists (as well as depraved individuals who would defend anything, including Obama raping a nun.) So if he is spending thousands upon thousands of words touting the “really important shit” that Ron Paul brings to the 2012 election while also writing screed after screed (after screed after screed) about all the ways in which President Obama is the worst, and how Obama is a centrist Republican whose fault it is that the current Republican candidates are in a state of sheer clusterfuckery, it seems to me that the Salon.com blogger should saddle up and endorse Ron Paul.

It’s getting ridiculous — really.  His non-endorsement endorsement nonsense is positively Clintonian: “It depends on what the definition of ‘endorsement’ is.” Render unto me a break. The Salon.com blogger is fooling no one but his rabid supporters and the feckless media which invites him to speak for progressives, even though he is about as progressive as Gary Johnson, which is not at all.  Oh, and don’t you dare mention the Salon.com blogger’s Cato Institute affiliation.  He’ll go berserk and deny it (even though, apparently, his ties to Koch/Cato are not as tenuous as he would have you believe.)***

But people are starting to get it. The Greenwald sweater of polemical deceit is unraveling, and I like it. I like it because I find his sort of polemical discourse and rhetorical bomb-throwing to be a reckless distraction from the serious problems that confront us.

I especially like this, from Tim Wise — “Of Broken Clocks, Presidential Candidates, and the Confusion of Certain White Liberals.”  It’s a thing of beauty. You should read the whole thing, but I’m going to excerpt what I see as the most salient bit: Continue reading

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Sorry, Greenwald, but Ron Paul’s no diamond in the rough

Barack Obama is running unopposed for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. 

Admittedly, that may be the single most obvious observation made thus far in the 2012 presidential election cycle.

Sadly, it’s one that deserves some attention—particularly for politically plugged-in progressives who’ve willingly subjected themselves to the broken record of purely ideological, unabashedly partisan, and intellectually vacuous sound bites that comprise the score of torturous GOP debates held over last eight agonizing months.

The blindly faithful Obamabots who initially cursed the bleeding hearts for even suggestingthat another Democrat should challenge Obama for the presidency are now regretting that someone didn’t step in. At least it would have elevated the national dialogue above the monotonous (and backward) calls for further deregulation, even lower tax rates, and the end of “Obamacare” that all of the GOP candidates have used as the foundation of their presidential platforms.

In the absence of a Democratic primary, the party of sanity has been drowned out by the angry slurs of anti-government Republicans who’ve held a monopoly on the past year’s mainstream political news coverage with more than 20 debates held so far—and eight more scheduled before a GOP nominee is chosen and a Democrat is finally allowed to jump into the ring.

In the mean time, we can’t allow the intellectual deprivation of 24/7 GOP primary news to turn us into conservatives.

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"I'd like to introduce Glenn Greenwald to Reinhold Niebuhr" by @smartypants32

[A week ago, I read this post from friend of ABLC, @smartypants32 and thought it was too good not to be widely shared.  So read it, love it, share it. And then bookmark Smartypants's eponymous blog. You won't regret it.  -ABLxx]

I had a very strong reaction to reading Glenn Greenwald’s latest article titled Progressives and the Ron Paul Fallacies. But if you’d like a raging post about the evils of Greenwald, I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere. My plan is to try to respond reasonably – whether or not he would be inclined to do so in return. I’ll also fall short of tackling everything Greenwald said that I disagree with. Instead, I have a particular point to make and for today, I’ll stick with that.

It was when I got to the part in Greenwald’s article where he extolled a piece written about Ron Paul by Matt Stoller that I thought of Reinhold Niebuhr.

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"Cenk'd" by @sparksjls

[Here's a guest post from Jason Sparks aka @sparksjls.  I meant to post this before the Iowa Caucus but -- SQUIRREL!!  Oops.  The points are still salient, and so you should still read it. Cheers!  -ABLxx]

 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:

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Glenn Greenwald and the national conversation about sexual assault and rape

We’ve got a long way to go, baby

My friend Extreme Liberal posted a piece here awhile back titled “I was sexually assaulted as a child”. With Glenn Greenwald’s obscene comments about my good friend Angry Black Lady, I thought now might be a good time to tell my own story of being sexually molested as a young boy.

Unlike Extreme Liberal’s assault, I was, in fact, not aware that I had actually been assaulted until many years later. You may well ask, “If you didn’t know you were assaulted, how can you say you were?” You can trust me when I tell you that I have asked myself that same question.
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