When it comes to Glenn Greenwald, the last thing I want to do is to be petty and slimy. First, as I’ve said consistently, I think Greenwald is the best blogger in the business. His intellect is formidable enough that I am usually deterred from investing the time that is needed to adequately rebut what he’s saying. My political priorities are different than his, but I rarely disagree with his values. If I have a main criticism of Greenwald, it’s that he blogs like a prosecuting attorney. He isn’t concerned with the truth. He doesn’t want to convict an innocent man, but he’s not at all interested in making a fair or nuanced case. He will discard facts that don’t advance his argument and put the worst spin on facts that paint the defendant in a bad light. I think he’d be more convincing if he made a much greater effort to give credit where it is due, but he only does this in the most begrudging manner, if he does it at all.
He has recently written two large pieces (linked above) that deal with Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy and what it means for progressives. He has been at pains to insist that he isn’t endorsing Ron Paul for president or saying that he prefers Ron Paul to Barack Obama. He has taken offense when people have accused him of supporting Ron Paul and opposing Barack Obama. He has lashed out at people who assume that just because he supports Ron Paul on all the issues he cares most about, and he opposes the president on those same issues, that he might actually prefer Paul to Obama.
I understand his point that Ron Paul is the only candidate questioning the drug war, drone strikes, confrontation with Iran, an increasing level of surveillance and a decreasing level of privacy. But I have to call bullshit here on a key point. A recurring grievance of Greenwald’s is that progressives who opposed War on Terror policies when Bush was implementing them are acquiescing to them under the Obama administration. He accuses us of behaving in an unprincipled and tribal manner, where we only care about civil liberties and peace when we can gain a political advantage. I am sympathetic to this charge and I take it seriously as it applies to myself. It’s a moral shot across the bow of anyone who supports the president and his reelection, and it can’t be lightly dismissed. For me, that reminder and that moral constancy is why Greenwald remains a very valuable voice. But, here’s the problem.
If Greenwald supports the president over Ron Paul and over any of the other presidential contenders, then he can’t very well scold me for supporting him as well. My guess is that Greenwald will choose to vote for Gary Johnson on the Libertarian line. But, even if that is true, I’d apply a different test. If Greenwald had the power to choose between the top two vote getters and unilaterally decide which will be the next president, would he pick the Democrat or the Republican? My guess is that he would choose Obama.
There’s no need for Greenwald to apply the Categorical Imperative to his voting decisions, but the truth is that he’d probably make the same decision as the progressives he so relentlessly criticizes.
Yet, he plays this coy game where he won’t tell us who he supports. Why not just come out and say that, despite all his vitriolic criticisms, he’d prefer another term for the president than to see a President Romney or Gingrich or Santorum?
Why not flatly say that he prefers Obama to Paul? I think this might be why:
It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:
Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.
Are we to read that and then come to the conclusion that Greenwald is describing himself?
I don’t think so. I think any reasonable person would conclude that he is not describing himself. And, yet, we get this kind of petulant defensiveness:
Much of the reaction to the article I wrote last Saturday regarding progressives, the Obama presidency and Ron Paul (as well as reaction to this essay by Matt Stoller and even this tweet from Katrina vanden Heuvel) relied on exactly the sort of blatant distortions that I began that article by anticipating and renouncing: that I was endorsing Paul as the best presidential candidate, that I was urging progressives to sacrifice reproductive rights in order to vote for him over Obama, that I “pretend[ed] that the differences between Obama and Paul on economics [and other domestic issues] are marginal”; that Paul’s bad positions negate the argument I made; that Ron Paul is my “hero,” etc. etc. So self-evidently petty and slimy are those kinds of distortions that (other than to note their falsehoods for the record) they warrant no discussion…
But when you get right down to it, I don’t understand why these critics are wrong. Their criticisms seem entirely worthy of debate. They have at least a surface-level of obviousness. If Ron Paul is so much better on all these things, then Greenwald must think he’d be a better president. If he doesn’t think that, then maybe he doesn’t think these things are all that important. If he doesn’t think that, then why is he being so abusive to all the people who agree with him that Obama is the better choice?
Now, one reason why I don’t have any hesitation in supporting the president’s reelection is because I don’t accept Greenwald’s prosecutorial case against him. The defense’s case for the president must be the subject of another post, but I want to highlight one more thing. Greenwald wrote above that in order for me to support the president I must be “willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered.” Then he wrote this in his next piece:
In The Nation, Katha Pollitt writes about Paul and says: “I, too, would love to see the end of the ‘war on drugs’ and our other wars. I, too, am shocked by the curtailment of civil liberties in pursuit of the ‘war on terror,’ most recently the provision in the NDAA permitting the indefinite detention, without charge, of US citizens suspected of involvement in terrorism.” But she then claims: ”Salon’s Glenn Greenwald is so outraged that progressives haven’t abandoned the warmongering, drone-sending, indefinite-detention-supporting Obama for Paul that he accuses them of supporting the murder of Muslim children.” Seriously: if there’s any way at all within the confines of the English language to make even clearer that I’m arguing no such thing, please let me know.
Does anyone want to help Greenwald craft some English sentences that will make it clear what he means? Because it appears he can only be objecting to the bold part of Pollitt’s observation and not the part where he accuses us of supporting the murder of Muslim children. Even Mitt Romney doesn’t parse that much.
So, I just wanted to point out these flaws in Greenwald’s argument. There is a degree of disingenuousness that you expect from a prosecutor or even a defense attorney, but not from a blogger. And then there is the way he reduces the debate about drones to support or opposition of murder. There’s the way that everything is framed as a debate between Ron Paul and Barack Obama, without the context of Congress or the political landscape. That’s how Greenwald likes to argue, with moral force and no mercy. I’d probably hire him to defend me in court, but I wouldn’t rely on him to give you a balanced picture on anything.
