I Missed the Memo Telling the Left That We Now Support the Widespread Invasion of Privacy
Yglesias completely owned Greenwald here:
Yes, they have pulled off a very impressive invasion of a very large number of people's privacy all in pursuit of a really bad cause! https://t.co/WvVXTTvylR
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 27, 2016
In those 3 weeks, @WikiLeaks has published over 33,000 docs from Podesta's emails. Not a single one has been shown to be inauthentic.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 27, 2016
While the libertarian useful idiot for Vladimir Putin Glenn Greenwald is not a leftist by any reasonable definition, most of his fans certainly consider themselves to be on the left. And those who believe that such major revelations as John Podesta’s musing on risotto and that Bill Clinton committed the crime of the century by trying to help a friend who had cancer are a sign of the corrupt nature of $$Killery certainly conceive of themselves as leftists.
I don’t know, I guess that maybe I think the left shouldn’t be falling behind an organization run by a guy who won’t stand trial for his rape charges that engages in massive privacy invasions. I mean, that’s pretty disgusting behavior. But then after being officially run out of the left for not leaving a faculty dinner to immediately engage in an hours-long Twitter defense of the greatest martyr in known human history, Matt Bruenig, on the direct orders of Corey Robin and Connor Kilpatrick, what does this Hillary Hack who happens to believe that workers need to right to collective bargaining and women should have reproductive rights so maybe we shouldn’t help elect a fascist know about being a leftist? Maybe Naomi Klein will be run out of the left too for getting after Greenwald for covering all of this with such glee.
And hey, let’s start a pool to predict when Greenwald shows up in comments to call me a LIAR and other varieties of his classic all-caps insults!
It does seem a bit odd that Greenwald is an absolutist on the U.S. government not getting access to our private correspondence, but he thinks it’s terrific when the Russian government does, and releases it to the world. I’m not quite getting that.
I’m not sure where I first saw it, but the best summary of Greenwald is that he’s so against U.S. government failings (real and imagined) that anything anti-U.S. government is laudable.
It’s kind of a Cleek’s Law of U.S. foreign policy.
Greenwald is a former Republican who turned against the Republican Party over neocon foreign policy. I don’t think he really cares about the vast majority of domestic progressive goals (apart from LGBT rights), so it’s actually natural for him to be in favor of Republicans winning when Democrats don’t please him on foreign policy. What annoys me is people who do care about those goals jumping on his bandwagon.
Greenwald sporadically pretends to be liberal on domestic issues.
I am still unsure who this Greenwald guy is. Of the many internet sources I regularly view this is the only one that has ever mentioned him.
Greenwald is not some obscure figure. He is played by well-known actor Zachary Quinto in a mainstream Hollywood movie that is out in theaters right now.
It is almost as if we live on different continents.
You have heard of Edward Snowden, haven’t you?
If not, perhaps it’s not continents but planets.
I have indeed heard of Snowden. I spend a lot of time in former Soviet Central Asia and the television imported from Russia there has a lot of hagiography of Snowden. But, I can’t remember them mentioning Greenwald ever.
And yet you can get on U.S. websites where he has been prominently mentioned hundreds of times.
But will it play in
PeoriaBishkek?I think now it’s “Irbil”.
GG is Thielish without the money, but with writing skills… ?
how about Ben’s Corollary ?
I’ve been meaning to ask–are you that Cleek? How does it feel to get quoted on twitter by Bruce Bartlett? That’s glory for you!
I assume he’s still pretending that it’s not the Russian government, and that anyone who thinks it is is a McCarthyite stirring up a “new Red Scare”
Pretty much, yes.
Silly Manny, once a country is established as something, it never changes. Russia is clearly still the vanguard of the proletariat!In an unrelated note, I'll be taking a quick vacation to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a stop in Trebizond on my way through the Black Sea to Constantinople.“Yes, I’d like to send this letter to the Prussian Consulate in Siam by aero mail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro?”
I love this comment so much I would like to marry it. However, it’s the earliest 20th century and I am only allowed to marry a lady
Archibald closed the door, dusted his coat, and removed his bowler.
I assume you mean Byzantium, which I hear can be quite nice.
Well, it’s no country for old men.
Only if you sail to it.
Nobody’s business but the Turks’.
That would be Βυζαντιον, surely?
“Silly Manny, once a country is established as something, it never changes. Russia is clearly still a Czarist empire
the vanguard of the proletariat!”fixed that for you.
You mean the Mongol Empire not Russia I assume.
Nizhny Novgorod, surely.
Scythia
make sure you see Byzantium and the topless towers of Ilium while you’re in the area
He tweeted recently that if the emails were Paul Manafort’s, then the media would cover them all breathlessly. I tweeted back saying “of course, they would. We’d finally find out when an Russian agent was able to penetrate a US presidential campaign.”
It took him less than a 1/2 hour to suggest I get Joe McCarthy to help me with my crusade.
Leaving aside the weirdness of the reply, who punches down at me? Hell, I tweet links and comments to front pagers HERE without ever even getting a nod. What a thin-skinned little douchebag.
Which is not to say he’s always been wrong. His Bush stuff was good and his defense of Snowden is still something I respect
You are way above me on the list of influential people.
maybe you’re numb to how lonely dead people can feel?
You should have seen the last time he came over here. He punches down all the time, to the degree that I pointed out how absurdly he does that (like telling random law student me on Twitter, “What are YOU doing to have investigative journalism on Russian human rights violations?”) and then predicted he would show up to make a similar argument here, and he did just that like an hour later.
The generous way to read it is that Greenwald thinks it’s terrific to obtain private correspondence from people whose actions are newsworthy to the populace but not from ‘jes folks like us. The less charitable way is that it’s terrific to obtain private correspondence from people Greenwald doesn’t like.
If the US government hacked Greenwald’s email and released it to the public, how do we think he’d react? Greenwald is at least a public figure as most of the people in the Podesta emails.
Hell, even if Assange had done it he’d be losing his fucking mind.
Nobody is more indignant about being stolen from than a thief.
GG has certainly learned caution.
Hacking into GG probably requires agency-level ‘über skillz’.
(As far as I’ve read of Podesta), the Russians weren’t all that uber, which is partly why security pros found the Russians.
By that logic, the mainstream media should have published the stolen photos of celebrities (aka the Fappening), because hey, public interest, amirite?
Jackass.
This delightful individual would probably say yes.
that guy looks like Randy Quaid in one of his more lucid moments.
Yes, that was the argument he made to Chris Hayes on All In. Basically that as a person who wields some influence on government, Podesta has less of a right to privacy than you or me. The obvious problem Greenwald elides is that this standard is incredibly slippery, it could easily mean the personal emails of millions of government employees, consultants, and media figures ought to be up for scrutiny.
Given Greenwald’s past commitment to individual privacy from government snooping, your less charitable way to read him now is pretty compelling. He doesn’t like Clinton, he wants to criticize her, and the emails make it easier therefore privacy is not applicable in this case. QED.
Isn’t this true? Like, as an actual legal matter?
Podesta qualifies as a public figure, I think, and isn’t there a formally lower standard of privacy for such people?
I think you’re thinking of libel/defamation.
Could very well. I am not a law-talkin’ man.
Nor am I, which means I could very well be missing some legal nuance that does in fact mean Podesta’s emails are fair game for whoever can get them.
My understanding is that the “public figure” defense applies to protection of those who make criticisms of a public figure. It does not mean a public figure is not entitled to protection from having personal information stolen and published. All of this leaves aside the issue of whether Podesta even qualifies as a public figure. Greenwald’s argument is that his relative level of power qualifies him, I think he’s reaching.
http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/invasion-of-privacy.html
I think you are basically right, although this would be heavily jurisdiction-dependent.
I remember there have been repeated rulings in the geopolitical West declaring limited privacy/enhanced public interest in case of political figures. This was usually related to leaked photos or surreptitiously recorded speeches and such, I think.
Not sure Podesta – or wholesale email hacking – would necessarily qualify, though.
Podesta is not a public official, nor is he a candidate for office.
There is a major and very complex legal dispute over privacy rights for public figures, which is being settled in many different ways in different jurisdictions, but isn’t other than tangentially relevant to Podesta.
The dispute is whether someone who has made an aspect of their private life into part of their public profile has thereby exposed that to public scrutiny – ie has surrendered their privacy rights to some extent.
There is a general agreement in just about every jurisdiction that you can’t breach your own privacy. That is, you can reveal aspects of your own private life to the public. There’s also a legal consensus that there is a “cat out of the bag” situation – ie, once you’ve revealed something, it’s revealed, and you no longer have a privacy right to restrict who can publish it and who can’t. So, you can keep an affair quiet (an no-one can publish) or you can reveal it, but you can’t give one magazine an exclusive contract and sue everyone else that mentions it for breach of privacy. Some jurisdictions wouldn’t hold that an affair was private – so pick something else.
But what there isn’t a consensus on is the situation where you reveal some private information, you create a public image based on limited disclosures of private information, and that image is inaccurate. To stick to the affair example, do you have the right to create an image of a happy family life with your spouse, even though you’re having an affair?
Just being famous, that is being a “public figure” in the sense that a lot of people you don’t know have heard of you, has no impact on your privacy rights in any jurisdiction that I’m aware of (not in France, or England or California, for sure). But talking about something you do in private will, in some places, mean that investigators are allowed to check whether that is true and whether it’s a fair representation of that aspect of your private life.
There is also the public interest test – which is more what the Podesta wikileaks should be looked at in terms of.
I’ve heard him say that it’s equally problematic that the Russians hacked this as if the NSA had done it but it’s nonetheless newsworthy.
Morocco promising to give Bill Clinton a $1M of they would meet with him for 5 minutes. CGI Donors giving millions to both the Clinton Foundation and to Bill b Clinton personally. In exchange for what? Even Hill’s own aides thought it was shady and would lead to character perceptions.
ah now there is the fresh smell of someone who is totally convinced of the purity of their own motives
Interestingly many people here were less concerned about Gawker outing Peter Thiel than about Wikileaks publishing Podesta’s risotto recipes.
Gawker outed Peter Thiel by hacking his e-mails?
The Derp is strong in this ore.
Hacking emails isn’t the only way to invade someone’s privacy Chronos.
And where have I stated the countrary, mortal?
Your post suggests that Gawker didn’t invade Thiel’s privacy when in fact they did.
Considering that Thiel has revealed himself to be a blood-sucking, anti-liberal regressive who is willing to spend millions in “fuck you” money to destroy people who offended him…
I’m willing to say that Gawker was spot on.
Thiel has also flat-out stated his disapproval for democracy and supported anti-LGBT politicians. I’m fairly certain that a major anti-LGBT donor being a closeted gay man is newsworthy and can’t be prosecuted under invasion of privacy. Not that he was particularly closeted anyway; his sexuality was an open secret before the Gawker piece. They might as well have outed Rob Halford (who, to be fair, has no history of supporting anti-LGBT politicians; he’s just the first person I thought of whose sexuality was an open secret before being officially confirmed). This is probably why he couldn’t win an invasion of privacy suit on its own merits.
How is Podesta’s risotto tips, or Clinton asking her assistant to show her how to use an iPad, etc. in any way newsworthy?
What are Podeata’s tips? I loved it when I made, but I can’t the lumpen proletariat in my house to ask for it
That’s the point where this all falls apart. Greenwald may even be right about the motives of the sources not mattering (I don’t think it’s quite that simple — does it not matter if the Russian government is, in fact, providing the material?) but still this mass dump of emails hasn’t been shown to be newsworthy.
Also, too, consider that while most of the emails may be authentic, some of them may not be.
Wikileaks hasn’t shown itself to be a paragon of the West. They may try to wear a journalistic flag, but it suits them ill.
Some of them may not be. But none have been shown to be, and I do not believe any authors of any emails involved in the leak have disputed their authenticity.
That could mean:
1. They are genuine.
2. The people whose emails were leaked have better things to do than scan 30,000+ emails to determine whether they are genuine, because they’re in the middle of a fucking presidential campaign.
3. The people whose emails were “leaked” have determined that they are forgeries, but have concluded that it is not smart politics to bother contesting their legitimacy for any of a number of possible reasons (it’s too trivial to bother; they don’t want to keep the emails in the news; they don’t think they have enough proof to keep it from turning into a he-said, she-said affair; it’s not standard policy in the intelligence community to comment on the authenticity of alleged leaks; etc.).
4. Something else I haven’t thought of.
You are concluding #1 must be true despite no evidence suggesting that this is definitely the case, and dismissing the other possibilities out of hand. You’re not the only person making this mistake, but it is disheartening that so many people make it.
Glad to hear you say this. It’s been driving me crazy and making me feel like a crank.
I read that a Clinton campaign employee commented only that the mails may not be authenticate. That’s a fuzzy response. :-)
The Doug Band/Teneo/Clinton Foundation stuff seems newsworthy.
Can you explain it? I’m interested.
There’s a good TPM piece on it. The TL;DR is that Band is a sleazy sleaze who was seriously skirting some ethical lines between his private, for-profit consulting firm and the Clinton Foundation.
My understanding is that the general outlines of this have been known for over three years, but the hacks provide some new details.
Thanks!
I’m generally with TJ on the post above this one about the CF/WJC money trail. The long citation in his second comment though makes me want to barf. It’s more “journalism as a higher calling sacred profession.” If you don’t believe it, just ask any journalist who publishes someone else’s private information as a means for the journalist to climb higher on the newsy greasy pole. It’s just the ink-stained wretch’s version of “I’m not in it for the money.”
Impure motives is a consequence of a capitalist society. Pop’s cardiologist isn’t treating him for free.
When Greenwald leaked the NSA stuff they curated out the personal and non newsworthy. That’s undoubtedly better. But my interest in a free and transparent government exceeds my interest– in this case–in privacy rights. I doubt Mama Podesta’s jealously guarded risotto recipe is of such value that we should hide his emails. If it was some other secret–he was in the closet for instance– I’d feel differently. It’s called the Fourth Estate for a reason.
so, public officials have no expectation of privacy even for the most trivial of matters ?
that’ll attract the best talent. fer sher!
Yes, if the contents are important, then he doesn’t have a right to privacy due to the public’s right to know, and if the contents are trivial, he doesn’t have a right to privacy because nobody cares.
That’s quite a catch, that Catch-22.
“That’s quite a catch, that Catch-22.”
it’s the best there is.
Pop’s cardiologist doesn’t claim to be on the secular equivalent of a mission from Gaad. Careerism is fine, I engage in it myself so it must be, but the self-annointed holiness and we represent the people in the citation are right up there with Jam Bakker telling me that God has forgiven him for straying in the course of his noble efforts to save us sinners.
But my interest in a free and transparent government exceeds my interest– in this case–in privacy rights.
What government position does Podesta hold?
That’s a good question for Hill. He appears to have an unusually large amount of power in her world. He is Chairing her campaign so that’s close enough. Reince Priebus is not in the employ of the government but his emails would be of value too.
Do you not see how easily your standard can be perverted? As Naomi Klein says in her dialogue with Greenwald, by that standard the communications of media persons like her also have value. Is she fair game for hacking?
“He is Chairing her campaign so that’s close enough. Reince Priebus is not in the employ of the government but his emails would be of value too.”
and both would still be an illegal invasion of privacy, regardless of how public a person is. the republican and democratic parties are private entities, not government agencies. the people that work for them are not government employees, they are employees of non-government, non-profits. so no, the public doesn’t have any right whatsoever to see their emails, absent an official, legal investigation, where those emails might be evidence.
you keep saying you’re a lawyer, and I take your word for it, but sometimes you come out with stuff that causes me to wonder if you’re a graduate of the Papa Doc School of Legal Learning, in Port au Prince.
First off I’ve never ever passed myself off as a lawyer. In that exchange we had we compared bill rates not legal credentials.
Second no one questions that the material was illegally obtained. Since at least the Pentagon Papers however that’s been irrelevant to the decision to publish and, more broadly, if that information is newsworthy.
I supported publishing Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdens illegally obtained whistle blowing disclosures. I support this publishing as well.
The distinction between direct government employ and not is not meaningful:
In your world if the GOP outsources policy making to the Koch Brothers then the public has no transparency interest in knowing what the Kochs are up to because they’re not directly employed by the government.
OMFG, they were making plans as if they were expecting to wn and. Thinking about policy.
Stop the presses!
Question: What role should Citigroup executives have in staffing a Treasury Department which would regulate them, be in position to push legislation through Congress, and a DOJ that would be in position to prosecute them?
If you don’t see how this is a question of interest to voters then you’re dumb. I myself always thought that Geithner was too much of an apologist for the industry to be a good regulator of it. Or perhaps you think Obama’s Administration was adequately tough on Wall Street?
If you learned that the Koch Brothers were staffing a Jeb! Administration wouldn’t it be of interest, if not concern?
And you take that to mean Citigroup was deciding who would serve in Obama’s cabinet. And that Citigroup was the only source for such lists.
Good question: How many people outside of the finance industry were involved in staffing decisions? Hopefully more reporting will generate answers. This email isn’t a smoking gun of much but it’s certainly newsworthy and suggests a pathway for deeper inquiry. Some of us feel Wall Street has too much influence on the Dem Party, this suggests a reason for that perception.
And you take that to mean Citigroup was deciding who would serve in Obama’s cabinet.
Looks to me more like some guy who won the “guess the cabinet” pool.
and before that was an assistant in Bill Clinton’s administration and Chief Of Staff at the US Treasury, among other government jobs.
Don’t confuse TJ’s Clinton hate rant with pertinent details.
ThrottleJockey says:
no one questions that the material was illegally obtained
I supported publishing Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdens illegally obtained whistle blowing disclosures. I support this publishing as well.
I might have missed in this thread, mention of the concept of extra-legal whistleblowing ‘moral exemption’…. not unlike illegal public protest ‘moral exemption’?
I think Hillary Clinton’s gatekeepers are a credit to her. Having genuinely good people around her, with an eye to what looks meet and right, and blocking actions that don’t pass a smell test… That’s a solid example of moral leadership.
Podesta and Tandeen and Mookie come out looking pretty good in this. Chelsea too. You can see why Obama chose Podesta to be his Transition Chief. There are some people in Hill’s camp who enable her worst impulses (eg Cheryl Mills). She’d do her Administration a world of good if she cut those folks off.
Podesta, Tandeen, and Chelsea? Keep them around.
Allegedly Podesta is one of the few people who is comfortable saying “No” to Hillary. Worth keeping on for that reason alone.
Again, ThrottleJockey displays misogyny through name choice. Note how the four men cited are identified by their last names, and the two women that matter are identified by their first names.
Importantly, the next President of the United States is identified by a stupid nickname that she doesn’t use.
That’s because ThrottleJockey believes that treating women the same as men is bowing down to them and kissing the ring.
This is pretty stupid. Neera Tanden is a woman. And “Chelsea” is necessary to identify which Clinton we’re talking about.(Apparently Tanden doesn’t “matter,” though?)
Yeah, shorthand is tricky, because requires distinctive labeling.
I prefer last names for the primary persons – Clinton and Trump (or a derogatory name for the sake of disparagement. Even Trump’s first name as “The Donald” can work because it silly)
For the lesser persons, “Bill” in full-thread context refers to BC (Bill Clinton)
Chelsea.. in this thread, we’ve seen Chelsea Manning, but not as member of (Hillary) Clinton’s team.
Good catch. It’s called hypocrisy. Ditto Greenwald’s ability to ignore Russia’s treatment of LGBTs while pretending that Russia is a beacon of human rights because it is helping Snowdon hide out from justice.
When did Greenwald say that Russia was a beacon on human rights? Cites please.
Yeah, I really wish that people could criticize Greenwald without pulling shit like that out of thin air. It drives me crazy. There’s plenty to criticize about him but there are so many lies about him that go around as gospel and come out in every LGM thread about him.
Greenwald roots for the Yankees and his favorite Marx brother is Zeppo!
He loves ketchup vodka Bloody Mary’s and he’d trade 2 Tom Brady’s for 1 Adrian Peterson!
Zeppo!
alter ego of Zippo, secret national enquirer brother of Zippy!
Shorter Greenwald:
USA hacking and spying = bad.
Russia hacking and spying = good!
All I need to know about GG.
This election is certainly causing me to take a new look at the old saying that politics is like a circle, with the extremes meeting up so you can’t really tell them apart. But where we once had Nazis and Stalinists, we now have glibertarians and Berniebros. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
If you look at Michael Tracey’s stuff, we can see that it’s actually Berniebros and Trumpists, too.
Tracey was a Paulite first.
Why do you believe this? Like most old sayings, it’s wrong and stupid. Socialism and libertarianism are distinct philosophies, with no common ground.
You can look at polls, and the number of “Berniebros” (I’m making the heterodox choice of including all races and genders within this term) supporting Trump is insignificantly small. More than half are breaking for Clinton, the remaining, left-most candidate.
The number of Bernie voters supporting Trump is insignificantly small.
“Berniebro” refers to a particular loud species of internet troll.
This is not how BernieBro is commonly used. If it were, it would be insane to come up with a term (and then spill gallons of e-ink writing about) for what can be, at most 100 dudes on the internet who have exactly zero political or social clout.
The BernieBro was always a grotesque painted by the lazy punditry class who wanted to republish all their shitty articles about millennials and Game of Thrones after running it through “search and replace.”
Eh. “Bernie Bro” was never a term for Bernie supporters in general. It was originally a term used to refer to misogynistic Bernie supporters online.
This was the original sense of the term I remember. A number of Sanders supporters who didn’t really meet that definition rather foolishly, in my opinion, acted like it meant them.
The phrase was first used by an Atlantic writer to link maleness (bad) with concern for social and economic justice. Liberals, put rhetorically at a disadvantage by their support for an orthodox politician as against a vocal advocate for social and economic justice, ran with the moniker, and in so doing helped entrench the connection in the public mind: concern for social and economic justice is sexist and racist. Well done, liberals.
no offense, dude, but that’s an active community of trolls and morons, numbering well over 100, and annoying me.
If we’re gonna ignore groups of people based on their numbers then we need to exclude the LGM commentariat, white supremacists on Twitter, etc. Some people, no matter how small, deserve notice because they’re interesting or they require mocking
Already done.
Spoken like a white dude who was never attacked by hordes of BernieBros for being an
uppityoutspoken woman or PoC who disagreed with them.I’m not white…
I apologize for that.
BernieBros are, however, a thing.
This is not how BernieBro is commonly used.
The term has been commonly “used” by two groups. First, by the people who use it to describe an obnoxious but numerically small subset of obnoxious Sanders supporters. Secondly, it was “used” in a second order way by people looking for anything they could credibly claim to be slights and insults against all Sanders supporters. The second group’s use of the term to mean all or most Sanders supporters was cynical and dishonest, but I suppose you’re not entirely wrong that it qualifies as common.
That’s certainly how I was using it, possibly minus the “Internet” thing, and also how I’ve mostly seen it used here and elsewhere. (Bernie himself, notably, is not a “Berniebro,” to the great disappointment of those who are).
Because we don’t believe that people who are attracted to and follow these “distinct philosophies, with no common ground” are all that different in their tastes and motivations. That’s like saying Whole Foods is a store and has nothing in common with BMWs, which is a car. That’s true, but there’s a meaningful overlap in the customer base.
Here the commonality is that they are both radical in opposition to the instant government. The result is the willingness to engage in increasingly high levels of subversion and antisocial behavior to bring about their goals.
But there is not actually a meaninful overlap. If you mean the handful of “trolls” that haunts your facebook, then I’m certain I don’t know anything about them. If you’re talking about voters, there is little switching between far-left (Sanders) and far-right (Trump). These people do exist, but given that we have 320 million or so people in this country, existence is a low bar to clear.
But “their tastes and motivations” is vague enough to be tautologically true. Both Trump and Sanders supporters are: human, majority white, majority working-class, dissatisfied with their current lot and government. They share these characteristics not just with each other, but with the American electorate as a whole, and with any other subset that I know of (Libertarian, Green, Hillary supporters, ChafeeBros…).
As far as “subversion” and “antisocial behavior,” I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. Are we talking bodily fluids here?
How else would you describe the “Superdelegate Hit List”? The threats against AP reporters after HRC won the primary? The behavior seen at the Nevada state Democratic convention?
It isn’t so much that the extremes of the right and left meet ideologically; they obviously don’t. It is that those who are willing to embrace the extremes of one ideology are often willing to embrace the extremes of the other. There are those more enamored of the methods of extremism than of any ideology.
Nah, that was always bullshit. Nazism and Stalinism were both awful, but they were very different ideologies. Nazi Germany was notoriously not fine with the existence of the USSR, I mean they invaded them when they had a non-aggression pact, at huge expense of men and materiel.
I would argue that neither libertarians nor Berniebros represent the most “extemists” on the right and left. Libertarians are the only kind of conservative who agrees on some issues with liberals, and BernieBros seem to totally ignore that racism and sexism etc. are problems, and anti-racism and anti-sexism are very important to the modern left.
Yeah, if we’re going to talk about “extremes meeting on a circle” then we need to talk about people willing to use mass violence for their cause. Pretty significant group on the right, vanishingly small group on the left. And has nothing to do with Berniebros or whatever.
No one is saying your support for Sanders makes you just like a Trump supporter, but citing the textbook on the differences between the ideologies is an incomplete feint at refuting the point.
One could just as easily refer to both as revolutionary totalitarian movements that have differing views about a few secondary issues as you could point to other differences in ideology and conflict between them. Divine Right monarchies shared the same governmental theory and fought each other all the time.
But does supporting Sanders make you as extreme — i.e., as far from the “center” — as supporting Trump?
I just don’t understand where any sense of equivalency enters the equation. And I also feel very surreal getting a response from someone named Jose Arcadio Buendia.
The saying has to with the street level of experience of the people. You can assure me that the things the Gestapo said to their victims was different than what the NKVD said, but the tactics were the same. Meanwhile, to folks standing up against a wall or sent to a gulag/concentration camp, ideology made no difference
While my line was at least partly facetious and I wouldn’t dispute that Nazism and Stalinism had major differences, this
doesn’t seem to necessarily be one of them. The point of people who equate Stalinism and Nazism has always been about their behavior – as timb says, whether your murder comes from the Gestapo or the NKVD – but not necessarily about whether they get along. People can be alike and still loathe each other.
(Mind you, this is an additional point against my analogy, since I was talking about the phenomenon of people on the far left lining up with libertarians rather than necessarily behaving like them).
In the ’30s it wasn’t that hard to find people who switched from one to the other. It’s not that the philosophies are interchangeable; it’s that they attract people who are similarly, at best, amoral.
Nazi Germany was notoriously not fine with the existence of the USSR,
Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact
They weren’t just having cocktails.
“They weren’t just having cocktails.”
no, schnapps and vodka, straight. that pact was signed to ensure Russia wouldn’t interfere with Hitler’s plans for the east, and Germany wouldn’t interfere with Russia’s plans for the east. and it worked out splendidly for both sides, until Russia got its ass kicked by Finland in the Winter War. this the result of Stalin having wiped out most of the Russian Military’s most experienced officers.
tiny Finland, which should have been beaten in short order by the Russian Army, inflicted massive losses instead, surrendering only when it became apparent that Stalin was willing to kill as many Russians as it took.
this was what caused Hitler to invade Russia when he did, realizing the Russian military wasn’t nearly the fighting force he (and everyone else) believed it to be. initially, he was right, the Winter War was no fluke, Stalin had singlehandedly managed to almost entirely wipe out the experienced, competent officers. absent those officers, the Russian Army was overrun in fairly short order. if Hitler had let his experienced, competent Generals do their jobs, eastern Europe might well be a different landscape today. fortunately for everyone, he didn’t.
Actually I think it was more the realization that Britain and France weren’t going to be able intervene in any significant way before the country was overrun. The Finns only surrendered after the Mannerheim Line broke, leaving little to stand in the Red Army’s way.
Fortunately for everyone except the millions killed, anyway.
Given Hitler’s virulent anti-Slavic racism, I don’t think it’s safe to assume that Stalin killed more people than Hitler would have, given the power. To be clear, this is not intended as a defence of Stalin in any sense other than the “maybe he doesn’t look so bad compared to Hitler” sense, and it’s worth noting that Stalin actually did kill more people than Hitler did. However, the fact that Hitler didn’t manage to kill more people than Stalin did doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t gladly have done so, given the opportunity. It’s not entirely implausible that, given the opportunity, Hitler would have killed every last inhabitant of the former Soviet Union (he certainly had no problem subjecting Slavs to the same treatment he gave to Jews, LGBT people, the disabled, Romanis, leftists, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and plenty of others). Given that, I do think a case could be made that Stalin may actually somehow still manage to qualify as a lesser evil than Hitler – the people Stalin killed may have still ended up dead in a counterfactual universe in which Hitler successfully won the war in the eastern front, along with tens of millions more.
(I’m not sure if you were referring to Stalin’s purges or the war in the Eastern Front, and if you meant the latter, then this entire comment is irrelevant… though it is worth noting that soldiers on both side of that conflict committed heinous war crimes.)
Yeah, even without any additional troops, Tukhachevsky could have warned Stalin that putting the Red Army in a thin line along the border was just asking the Germans to play Panzer Cuisinart.
Gee, is that why the Germans agreed to incriminate Tukhachevsky?
Ich sehe was du da gemacht hast.
Cпacибo (Thank you)
Listened to most of the podcast.
So: He makes excuses for an accused rapist with a long history of abusing women, calling him a ‘complicated man’.
He blames the victim of a cyber attack by a foreign government for having their data stolen (he says we need to teach people to build “gated communities” around data).
He acts like it’s an interesting debate whether releasing personal information in these data dumps is ethical or not, without ever denouncing Wikileaks. It’s just like, well, these are my ethics, but if Wikileaks has different ethics, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
He condescendingly explains to Naomi Klein (because she’s a woman, and dumb at technology, I guess) that the hackers can’t just take the non-private emails. What a fucking piece of work. At least he’s more pleasant in podcast form.
Trump isn’t “complicated” at all. he was, as they say, born on 3rd base, and keeps thinking he’s hitting grand slams. he’s arrogant, entitled and gives no fuck for anyone but himself. what’s so “complicated” about that?
I didn’t read/listen to the podcast, but did he call Trump or Assange “complicated”? It’s not clear from context which one Casey was referring to. Not that I see either of them as particularly complicated; they both strike me as egoistic narcissists, so it doesn’t particularly surprise me that one is supporting the other.
Trumpkins seem closest to pre-glibertarian Birchers and anarcho something fringe of “bernouts”. Anarcho fringe were more prominent in Occupy, but didn’t fit in with the Sanders people.
Trumpster common antipathy is toward “banksters” and “globalism”.
In contrast, conventional Libertarians are very “open borders”. Many Libertarians offend the RW “sovereign” extremists, who mesh well with Trumpist xenophobia.
Also, conventional (old school?) Libertarians “Constitutional fundamentalists” (enumerated blah blah) but personally aren’t gun-worshiping “militia” wackjobs.
And, theocrat RWNJ (mostly love Cruz) dislike Trump, though some will vote Trump for SCOTUS nominees.
This is some fine fine trolling, Erik. Hope you catch a big one!
(You might have found an opportunity to mention Freddie, though. He might feel left out)
LGM is not meeting its Freddie quota.
Freddie’s not so fun anymore. He has a day job now, and can’t post and tweet as much.
That’s why you need to bait him by saying his name three times in front of a mirror.
Freddie deBoer. Freddie deBoer. Freddie deBoer.
Hopefully that works.
Don’t you also have to turn the lights out first? Or possibly turn the lights out and then light a candle.
OMG, don’t summon Freddieja
Obviously I turned the lights out. I’m not a moron.
I’m just asking.
I care about getting this right as much as you do.
Wow, and you type pretty good in the dark, too.
did you velcro your cape around yourself and hang upside down from the exposed beam ceiling?
would black shoe polish in combed back hair help?
DOE NOT CALL UP ANY THAT YOU CANNOT PUT DOWNE
Pish tush. We’ve put Freddie down plenty of times.
What else can you expect from the Objectively Despicable?
“We’ve put Freddie down plenty of times.”
the problem is, like that guy in all the horror movies, he refuses to stay down. which, if he had something interesting to contribute, would be ok. he doesn’t, and it isn’t.
Not a single one has been shown to be inauthentic.
Has a single one been shown to be significant?
Seriously, one of the reasons that journalists selectively publish leaked (let alone stolen) documents is not just to protect privacy, but so that things of significance aren’t washed away in a flood of trivia (like risotto recipes and the shocking revelation that people in organizations sometimes greatly dislike nominal allies).
Yes.
ETA: thankfully, the wingnuts in my social media circles have been so despondent that they haven’t much bothered with posting all the TROUBLING QUESTIONS raised by the Wikileaks emails.
Most haven’t but some are newsworthy.
you know, considering you say all sorts of weird and obtuse stuff for effect each and every time you comment here this churchmouse crusade for 100% honesty from other people is just really really funny
I am shocked! Never before have I seen or heard or written a glib comment!This obviously isn’t remotely newsworthy. I mean, not even close.
Maybe…maybe…if someone looked at the all and put together an insider picture, that would be interesting. Even then, it doesn’t seem newsworthy. It’s just people chatting.
Oh BP et tu of all people?
For weeks I’ve said her behavior raised character concerns and here is one of her most senior and loyal aides saying…her behavior raised character concerns with voters!!!
That’s what I call vindication. You might disagree that you’re concerned about her character but it’s clearly newsworthy that her senior staff see the same issues voters do.
So they discussed how to get out of an unforced error, and that was newsworthy?
You know what they call senior staff who don’t see the same issues the voters do?
It’s a toss up, really. You could go with “sycophants” or “unemployed.”
Yes Chronos when Hill’s own staffers say her behavior impugns her character it’s newsworthy. Shocking I know…
I'm a Twelfth-Level Intelligence. I don't make mistakes."But they didn’t say that.
I’m sitting here trying to read this email according to your point of view, and it’s just not working. Pray tell, can you explain exactly how this demonstrates anything other than a conversation about damage control?
That’s what I call vindication.
Well, yes, you would.
For weeks I’ve said her behavior raised character concerns
Oh, is that what you were saying? I thought you were saying she’s pathologically dishonest and irredeemably corrupt. My mistake.
I know better than to stick my nose into this, but I’ll just point out an obvious fact: Anyone who can look at an opinion poll would know that many voters are concerned about Clinton’s character. That her advisors acknowledge this fact does not seem particularly noteworthy. In fact, the reverse would be closer to the truth. That is, if her advisors never seemed concerned about the polls showing that voters don’t trust Clinton (partly because of the e-mail stuff), that would be a far more interesting story.
1) The aides observed what everyone observed…that voters reacted to her public handling of the situation poorly. And? Who disputed this?
I’ve disagrees that it did, in fact, raise either character or substative issues. But that’s reality not people’s perceptions.
2) You equivocate on “raising character issues” between the perception and the reality. No one denied the latter but you argued the former. The email do not show that the aides were concerned about the former but only the latter. Thus, not only are you not vindicated, but your are rebutted. Again.
3) The aides observed what everyone observed that her handling allowed voters to think less of her character. And so? This is not newsworthy.
Really? Her behavior raised character issues but was not something that should raise character issues?
And when Tanden said Cheryl Mills “wanted to get away with it” that, too, raised no newsworthy issue of character?
To hear some of you anything less than an indictment for murder isn’t newsworthy.
The behaviour which increased voter mistrust of her was not behaviour that merited an increase of mistrust. Yes. What part don’t you understand?
In context, that speculation seemed innocuous. It’s not part of or awareness of a conspiracy of any kind. But this, at least, has a prima facie interest. But, afaict, upon *cursory* investigation it turned out to be nothing at all.
Only if you aren’t hearing.
Agree completely. At the end of the day, this will be the most inside look at a campaign (real inside, not the crappy Halperin drivel where he trades making his sources look good to get scoops). But as to newsworthy stuff? This has been a big wet fart.
And with so much early voting done and no big election “events” remaining, any chance to really affect the election with these pathetic leaks is over.
What the hell is supposed to be “newsworthy” about that? I can’t imagine anyone who works for a major politician for any length of time doesn’t occasionally privately muse with co-workers or other trusted individuals about their boss’s percieved shortcomings, and their frustration with them. Is every single one of those instances newsworthy?
Move along nothing to see here folks…
Are you kidding me? Have you looked at a paper or blog lately? Kim Kardashian’s butt it’s newsworthy! Obama’s fallout with his half brother is newsworthy. This is easily of more interest than those.
Gosh, no word on her sekret plan to turn against BLM after her inauguration?
A tad circular, no? Newspaper publishes story on poop; ergo, all poop is newsworthy?
You working this hard you should be earning overtime! The dude whose job was to staff the cabinet looks like he won an office pool??? Newspapers aren’t good judges of what’s newsworthy???
We should ask you and only you what’s newsworthy! That would work much better!!
So because the news media has failed by promoting dumb stories, they should continue to fail by publishing this dumb story because you hate Hillary? Your logic is impeccable.
As rea said, this just means you have no standards for newsworthy (by which we usually mean “sufficiently in the public interest to override various negative aspects such as violation of privacy”.
This sort of standard forbids more than the actively illegal. That many journalists violate that standard does eliminate the standard.
No it means I don’t have a definition held hostage by partisan myopia. Unless it’s strictly personal (closeted gay man, secret illness, etc) so long as it informs perceptions of public governance it meets the very low bar we have in this country of being newsworthy.
You might disagree that this informs your perception of public governance but the simple indisputable fact is that it informs many other people’s perceptions. Some for strictly partisan purposes no doubt. But that’s ok too and it’s a legitimate expression of first amendment rights. Nothing in the definition “newsworthy” means “only those items of interest to BP and friends.”
What’s strictly personal about a closeted billionaire who doesn’t believe in democracy?
I don’t have a definition held hostage by partisan myopia
LOL
It’s as if you didn’t realise that you just wrote:
I believe I can safely say that neither Ms Kardashian’s butt nor Obama’s “fallout” with his half brother are newsworthy without being hostage to a partisan myopia.
But now, at least, you articulate a standard:
Interestingly, both your “strictly personal” examples actually have scenarios of public interest.
“Informs perceptions” is a weird phrase, but by that standards nothing in these email meet it.
This is eminently disputable. What you so excellently demonstrates is that it *misinforms*. I don’t see I need to support *mis* information esp. when it’s so ridiculous.
You have a first amendment right to violate people’s privacy? That’s silly.
In any case we’re talking about ethics not law. You can have a first amendment right to something unethical.
Since that’s not the definition I offer, this is irrelevant.
But “public interest” doesn’t mean “public curiosity” and never has. Your attempt to conflate them is a very basic error.
well hell, that does it! HRC and her staff are very clearly acting like ambitious politicians, and we can’t have that, no siree!
nope, sorry, can’t even come up with decent sarcasm, it’s just a big nothingburger.
bothered with posting all the
TROUBLING QUESTIONSThere are too many mails. Altcucks need to be fed by breitbart and hoft “pros”.
There are ways to process the text, but I suspect only a few are doing this. Assuming breitbart etc. have posted the naughtiest mails, then I won’t bother doing any processing myself.
No smoke without fire!
I loved that sentence from Greenwald.
“Wikileaks didn’t fabricate anything! Hooray!” Don’t hit your head on that low bar, Glenn.
To be fair a lot of people have been out there insinuating that some of the Wikileaks emails are fake. But Greenwald is right, so far none of them have been shown to be.
This remains a danger with mass dumps of emails — that faked ones could be slipped in there, especially as Wikileaks seems to get more and more reckless and players with big agendas (i.e. the Russian government) get involved, but it still hasn’t happened as far as we know.
How would we know? Serious question.
I’m not an expert in verifying the authenticity of documents, so I wouldn’t purport to explain it. But it seems to me that it would have to start with the authors to whom these emails are attributed asserting that they are fakes. That has not happened in this case.
Let me help you out here. I think the Clinton campaign emails published so far are for the most part authentic. The best evidence for that though is not lack of fraud charges from Podesta et al, but the fact that they’re so banal.
That could change though if tomorrow or next week Wikileaks drops a big bomb that •is• forged. In that case, the credibility that you’re helping them build through these burden-of-proof-on-the-smear-target arguments will have paid off.
Look, I know that the whole point of this thread is to hate on Greenwald, and that’s great and all, but he is right — so far there haven’t been any cases of forged documents being laundered through Wikileaks. This could happen but it hasn’t happened yet. In the absence of evidence that these emails are forged we can’t just assume they’re forged because we don’t like Wikileaks. I don’t know why this is so hard to understand.
And this:
That’s a nice little sleight-of-hand there but the whole point is if the emails are not forged than it is not a smear. These Wikileaks email leaks are a massive violation of privacy and I do not think that they are newsworthy, nor do I support indiscriminately dumping private information like this on the Internet with such minimal public need for it, but they are not a “smear.” Until you can, you know, show that we have reason to believe that they are fake. Which you have not. You acknowledge, in fact, that the preponderance of evidence is that they are genuine.
That we know of. As has been pointed out several times elsewhere, most of the people included in the dumps have better things to do than search them for discrepancies, considering they’re in the middle of a presidential campaign. Even if they didn’t have better uses of their time, it also probably isn’t smart politics to litigate whether the emails are legit given what huge nothingburgers they’ve been thus far.
You’re saying we should assume they’re legit because no evidence has emerged otherwise. TroubleMaker13 isn’t saying they definitely are forged, but rather that people shouldn’t simply assume they are legit without further proof. To compare this argument to strands of atheism, it’s not an argument that God does not exist (hard atheism); it’s an argument that there is no basis to conclude God exists (agnostic atheism).
You’re attaching far more value to the fact that no one has claimed the emails are forgeries than is merited. All that means is that no one has claimed they are forgeries; it doesn’t mean they are or are not legit. There isn’t yet enough evidence to conclude that they’re legit, and thus, a healthy degree of scepticism is merited.
Right, and it’s up to the party on the receiving end to prove it’s a forgery, because until they do, it’s not a smear. That’s you proving my point.
Anyway, you make me curious– has anyone, a sender or recipient, actually affirmatively confirmed any of these emails? On the record, either “Yes, that’s real” or at least clearly implying it? I really don’t know of any.
I don’t think it’s correct to conclude that because no one has come out saying that the emails are fake, they are genuine. Most of the people concerned are currently involved with a national campaign for president. They probably have more productive uses of their time right now than searching through a dump of 30,000+ emails and seeing if any of the ones attributed to them are fakes. That’s assuming they even still have backups of their old emails, which some of them may not.
It’s very common to see commenters at left-leaning sites like TheSlot.Jezebel dealing with the Wikileaks documents by saying, “We don’t know if they are real,” or “Why should we trust anything released by the Russian government,” etc. The fact that nobody seems to have documented any instances of fabrications in the releases to do would thus seem to be highly relevant.
Gawker Media should be the last concern worried about invasions of privacy and emails of unknown provenance given their putrid history.
“At first, they came for the closeted, blood-sucking billionaires, and I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t a closeted, blood-sucking billionaire…….”
Wait a minute, isn’t Thiel the closeted, blood-sucking billionaire, or did I miss the joke?
Yep.
To a fucking moron, yes. How exactly would the victim of a smear campaign “document” fabrications in a purportedly stolen string of emails? Serious question.
Eh, the argument from negative evidence is particularly weak in this case. You have no idea how hard people have tried to find fabrications, or how willing they would be to come forward if they did find one. Most of the people who might be in a position to do so (by having copies of the originals) are (1) used to handling classified information. where I understand SOP is to neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of alleged leaks, and (2) are in the middle of a presidential campaign, where they might have higher priorities at the moment than digging through infodumps looking for potential fabrications. If Wikileaks had come up with something fabricated that was really damaging to her campaign, you might have seen a response. As it is, I don’t expect one whether there’s anything fake in there or not.
Exactly.
if they had come up with something like that, it would be a huge headline. and then a bottom of page 20 note that the email turned out to be fabricated.
And what is an “original” email? What form does that take that renders verifiable originality? If I present to you an “original” print-out of an email (or some other human-readable rendition), to contrast a “fraudulent” copy, how would you know which is which? Again, serious question.
This was also Tim Kaine’s only response on the Sunday show I randomly watched last week. It’s fine to make the point about provenance, but I wish he’d also simply called shenanigans on the people pushing everyday email snark as news. Maybe other campaign people are?
Someone should post a factory-style sign. “____ Days Since WikiLeaks Made Shit Up.”
Hehehehe.
My wife has a coffee mug I bought at the Goodwill for her which touts the safety record of a single department in a local packaging materials firm over June to August in a certain year.
Probably donated right around Labor Day.
There are some elements of the Podesta emails that are, I think, newsworthy and arguably in the public interest to report on, e.g. excerpts from Clinton’s private speeches.
The vast majority, as far as I can tell, are inconsequential. Most of the reporting I have seen about the topics of particular emails are not about subjects I would consider newsworthy except perhaps at TMZ.
Nah, he prefers to delegate that out these days. He’ll make some baiting comment daring his followers to go after you here and on Twitter without explicitly saying so.
Speaking of Kilpatrick, he actually had a piece in Jacobin today that confirms your perception of him. It’s still good to see it, because I was wondering what exactly he does at Jacobin – he seems to just be on Twitter all day whining about liberals.
That third-to-last paragraph, mercy. “Why didn’t ya get rid of Those People, huh? Huh?”
I held my nose and gave them the page hit (I am currently working with an old Macintosh mouse without a right-click function, so I couldn’t grab the link for archive.is).
I love how Kilpatrick pretends to be so concerned about LGBT people in that paragraph. That’s got to be the only reason he wants black voters (including the LGBT ones, I guess), who constitute a huge percentage of the Democrats’ actual base, “purged” from the party. Right?
I was with Kilpatrick about up to here:
I assume the rest is not worth reading?
Looking further – not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I think he has some decent points.
not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I think he has some decent points.
Really? Maybe I should do a post on this. But leaving aside additional howlers — like a discussion of Truman that attributes imaginary “significant and expansive…federal legislation on civil rights” to his administration while ignoring Taft-Hartley — we have the core argument:
It’s just that easy! Bernie Sanders’s class appeals are a magic wand that will both dissolve racism and make democratic socialists electable in West Virginia and Indiana! This is pretty much the opposite of serious analysis.
SHIT WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT SOONER
My expectations for Kilpatrick are very low. The Truman civil rights thing was a real howler. I assume he was thinking of desegregation of the military, which obviously wasn’t legislation.
I would assume that too. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, except that nothing about that analysis made the slightest bit of sense.
Ha, same here. I read through the first 5 paras and thought “Gee, I dunno Brett, seems pretty coherent and reasonable so far,” got to the 6th and thought “Ok, interesting hypothesis, tell me more, please,” then hit that sentence at the beginning of the 7th and it was pretty much off the rails after that. I waded through another three paragraphs or so after that, but the turds were getting pretty deep and I had to bail out.
The refusal of some people to believe that any part of The White Working Class could possibly be motivated by any factor other than pure class consciousness leads to some really puerile analysis. Yeah, white folk are voting for Trump cause Obama didn’t give them single payer. Sure. Pass me one of those cigarettes.
I think Kilpatrick, like most of the Jacobin crowd, is eager to ignore the role of racism and is way too materialist in its interpretation of voter motives. And there’s some straight up factual errors. And a lot of straw manning.
But I don’t think his argument is entirely without merit. In particular, I think he’s right that the collapse of unions is really important, and has a lot to do with the white working class moving towards the Republicans. But he really needs to actually grapple with race, rather than dismissing it.
Manny, if you had a newsletter I would subscribe to it.
I got a newsletter. Wunt sum?
There’s too many newsletters these days. Yglesias started doing it again, and then others followed suit. Those jack-offs better not be pulling my email address into an e-mailing list they’re selling to advertisers and fundraising groups.
I thought we were long-time enemies.
Only when it comes to the Labour Party!
Unless you’d like to have some kind of WWE style feud? We could arrange that. Maybe Bijan could hit one of us over the head with a chair!
Only if it’s a department chair.
The basic hypothesis, that the Republicans are doing better at delivering results for their voters than the Democrats, is sound. The problem is, as you say, not grappling with the fact that a big part of what they’re delivering is reassurance that they’re working to maintain a racial hierarchy that keeps whites on top.
Yes, very much this. To the extent that some people’s bottom line is white supremacy, the Dems can’t help them. Convincing them to have a new bottom line is really pretty hard and may not be the best or most efficient way to find votes.
Building strong labor unions in all 50 states should be a core Democratic goal and is both the best thing Dems probably can do for working class people in general and the best way for them to get the votes of white people who are at least white supremacy-curious.
I agree. It’s unfortunate that Kilpatrick doesn’t do so because there’s a real opportunity to grapple with race in a more substantive fashion than most of what passes for racial analysis, at least from mainstream outlets.
I’m sorry, Kilpatrick is a grown man working at a political magazine with no small level of influence. I think it’s a distraction to identify and correct what he’s not grappling with. You get much closer to the truth when you question why he’s not, and question the political environment that makes it possible for him not to do so while still being an accepted member of the further-left, that other left wing and liberal voices feel comfortable responding to.
If he was at the NRO, we’d know what that article is, why can’t we know what it is when he’s at Jacobin? This is all deliberate, and what he doesn’t know is entirely a consequence of what he doesn’t want to know. More importantly, it’s a consequence of what he can get away with because the left is exceedingly homogenous, and not being able to take a basic fixture of nonwhite life seriously isn’t going to ping him with the crowd he belongs to. Also, note how he referenced his twitter exchange by calling social democrat Jamelle Bouie who supports universal basic income a liberal. They’re not telling us what the left means, they’re telling us that positions are not what decides who belongs in it. And, as I said below, that’s fine, but folks really need to start calling this what it is.
Exactly.
Fair enough. His whole exchange with Bouie was awful.
It also doesn’t understand how racism, just as anti-racism, reflects and defends a material interest with material consequences in service of material ends. They claim to be Marxists but they refuse to incorporate Du Bois’ expansion of Marxist analytical tools, and as such, they don’t take the protection of racial caste/race hierarchy as a serious, consistently reasserted material interest that reflects actual priorities that basic Marxist framing can only deflect from without explaining. This negligence is, as with most negligence here, intentional, and it’s evidence of how white leftism would rather abdicate the challenge that racism brings to its analysis, at our expense, than responsively address it. They keep telling us who their leftism is for, and why. People should listen.
The whole Jacobin crowd is certainly deeply enamored with the idea of winning back the white working class, and incredibly dismissive when non-white people push back against this.
To be honest, I’m still sceptical of the idea that the “white working class” has abandoned the Democrats. As far as I’m aware, the poorest white people still tend to vote reliably for Democrats. There were a lot of thinkpieces about how they had abandoned the Democratic Party for Drumpf, and then actual demographic research debunked them by pointing out that Drumpf voters’ median income was about the same as the traditional Republican base’s. Poor counties tend to vote more Republican, but the poorest residents of those counties still tend to vote Democratic.
In short, the whole premise is faulty. The white working class hasn’t abandoned the Democratic Party. It’s the white middle class that has. Self-interest remains a powerful motivator, and poor white people tend to be smarter than they’re often being given credit for. They often still recognise that the Democrats have helped them, and even if some of them do nonetheless have racist impulses, they often aren’t strong enough to override economic concerns.
That’s not to dismiss the overall impact of racism on this country, of course. It’s just to point out that people are focusing on the wrong perpetrators. (Additionally, the number of thinkpieces on the “white working class” as opposed to the working class broadly is itself problematic, as is the number of thinkpieces on Trump voters while ignoring Clinton’s base, which is often quite enthusiastic.)
I’ve been thinking along similar lines for a while now. A good number of the thinkpieces about Trump’s supporters in particular seem to do more of confirming preconceived notions about their subjects and less of any serious analysis of race and class as it pertains to those subjects. I’ve found that to be rather frustrating.
Yes – or to be more precise, when we’re making general statements about about who has abandoned whom, we need to, IMHO, keep in mind a number of caveats when we do so.
I mean, if you want to read a tendentious account of the last 40 years in which the Democratic party is the only mover in national politics, and state politics just fails to exist, it’s worth reading.
It’s not good! But he has a couple of reasonable points and my expectations were very, very low.
I agree with you on the reasonable points, and there’s a kernel of something that could be part of a better analysis, if not by Kilpatrick, then at least by someone else.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I think it was only a couple of months ago he showed up to brag about how famous and successful and huge-dicked a journalist he is.
That was last month, in the thread that hit two TBoggs.
What happens if we hit Three TBoggs? Does everyone get a free basset hound puppy?
No, everyone gets a basket of cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops and glow sticks.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but people should interrogate whether the white left is intended to be a pluralistic construct. They should weigh its political utility and its status as a moral political force by its demonstrable unwillingness to prove that it is. Articles that bad and that blind are not a mistake. Its historical smudging and nitpicking isn’t an accident, its consistent focus on white voters to the rejection of all other concerns isn’t an oversight, its utter disinterest in understanding (much less correctly describing) how and why racism operates is not unintended. They are signaling its compatibility with a white nationalist politic every day, and I think it should be problematized more forcefully as a consequence.
These aren’t people that are merely wrong in the same way every time, these are people who have an ideological commitment to disengaging from the coalitional interchange and reciprocity that’s necessary to meaningfully incorporate anti-racist priorities. Their response isn’t to get our votes and support by changing that, but to get our votes and support by undermining the idea that we have priorities that warrant heeding at all. And that’s fine, but it’s also deliberate, and it’s painstakingly reinforced with any number of manipulated historical asides and argumentative tics that are as dangerous and sloppy as they are propagandic. The only thing Kilpatrick is telling us is all that Jacobin’s project has been telling us: non-white voices don’t matter, so when they’re raised in objection to a racism they refuse to take seriously, the left, because it’s righter, has no obligation to listen. Someone benefits from this, but it was never intended to be us.
You’re just upset because Connor is finally drawing attention to the major civil rights legislation, signed by Harry Truman, which led to a decades-long racially unified working-class coalition firmly in control of the United States Congress and the White House. Those who ignore history are doomed to deny that Bernie Sanders could have magically made white-working-class racism disappear by advocating a $15 minimum wage and failing to pass anything!
I’ve had dustups with Drex in the past, but he’s absolutely killing this point of late. To steal a brilliant bit of social commentary: Jacobin doesn’t care about black people.
Co-signed. I didn’t always agree with Drex when he first came here (I was a lurker at the time and hadn’t started commenting yet) but I’d be hard-pressed to think of something he’s written recently that didn’t strike me as absolutely spot-on. I’m not sure if this means his arguments have gotten more on-target and persuasive in and of themselves or if it means I’ve simply been persuaded more by reading more of his comments.
Yes, they’re the most accurate, infallible leaks ever, and oh what’s this?
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/774023424498892800
.goy. Nice. Booga-booga Jewish people!
Now, perhaps an OCR error. Probably an OCR error. (Though I bet one allowed to slip through because: booga-booga Jewish people.) But when you’re hyping the lily-white ethics of the enterprise, and something like this has already been noted, you may look like a jackass. Maybe sort of.
It’s an email. How would there be OCR going on? (Even ignoring the “.goy,” the wikileaks tweet is fucking idiotic)
I don’t even understand what the insinuation is there. Is “earpiece” slang for some kind of lesbian sex act I’m not aware of?
Clinton is a moron who needs an earpiece to sound coherent and intelligent. Our proof is a photo of her at the UN!It’s like a whole room full of idiots who can’t do nothing without those earpieces.
It looks like the emails were released in some kind of image format like .jpg instead of searchable text.
Looking at it – I believe that these came from the state department who released them as PDFs. These certainly aren’t the Podesta e-mails that were hacked because that wouldn’t have been in there.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out that paper copies were produced and scanned to PDF for inscrutable reasons related to workflow rules and database processing for archiving paper memos that haven’t been/would cost money to appropriately adapt to e-mail.
The originals in WIkileaks’ database are apparently non-text PDFs, so they are OCR’ed to produce searchable text.
The original PDF in this case clearly has .gov, not .goy.
How on earth does the appearance of the word “goy” equal “Booga-booga Jewish people,” when the only parties to the correspondence are Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton?
Try to keep up, dumbass. Someone altered the text of the stolen document, changing “gov” to “goy”.
No one altered anything here, it was the result of an OCR mistake.
You mean someone ran the PDF through an OCR tool, which altered “gov” to “goy”, and then published that altered rendition?
Ok, like I said, someone altered the text of the document.
Where people are taking issue with, I believe, is the insinuation that it was necessarily done on purpose. It’s entirely possible (and indeed, quite plausible, given their past record) that Wikileaks is simply sloppy enough that they didn’t even notice the OCR fuckup.
For the record: I’m Jewish, and I find this pretty flimsy. Particularly since Alex Jones is spouting off much more anti-Semitic stuff today. Let’s focus on things that are provably malicious rather than things that could plausibly be oversights.
Fair enough. I just find a lot of people giving Assange/Wikileaks the benefit of the doubt on a lot of fronts, when he/it has done little to earn it and more than a few things to discredit it, troubling to say the least.
On the whole, I agree that he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt and very well might actually be anti-Semitic; I just don’t think it’s focusing too much on something that could plausibly be brushed aside as an innocent mistake. There’s too much other damning evidence to bother spending time on something this ambiguous.
I left a word out: “I just don’t think it’s worth focusing too much…” My meaning was probably clear, but in case it wasn’t, that’s what I meant.
Let’s see all of Glenn’s emails. It’s in the public interest to know whether he’s been corresponding with any Russian government figures, and if he knows of any great recipes.
Well that’s different, see?
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and all that.
Do you think he might have a good goose recipe?
Let’s take a gander.
And his texts, snaps, instant messages, phone call recordings, medical records, bank records, and web history.
His risotto recipe takes longer to read than it does to make.
Are the two minutes of hate over, or has it been expanded to continue until the actual election?
Yeah, bunch of Correct the Record shills over here, obviously.
I don’t know, you should ask Assange and Greenwald that. Luckily for them, their Goldstein appears to be set to stick around for at least another 4 years.
Sigh. People really need to read Orwell before they’re allowed to site them. Getting angry at horrible people for things they actually have done and said is not at all what the two-minute hate was.
Your “witty retorts” make Phil Perspective’s look like Dorothy Parker’s.
I’m sure Greenwald and Assange would have no objections to third parties publishing their private emails. After all, they are public figures, and any evidence that they are driven as much by personal vendettas and petty self interest as they are by core moral principles would be in the public interest too, yes?
Yes. Definitely yes to all that.
I rather suspect Greenwald is exactly as obnoxiously self-righteous in private correspondence as he is in public, unfortunately.
I can guarantee this from personal experience.
Holy shit, did he email you some condescending criticism full of that special Glenn brand of self-righteousness?
Yes. It was at the beginning of our feud in like 2011 or early 2012. It was precisely as you think it would be.
Please tell me he made fun of your pants
Publish them. Put them on the front page here. Glenn’s deeply in favor of transparency, so he surely won’t mind.
Did he reinforce how important he was?
I look forward to the advertising poster claiming:
Makes me think of this from the Simpsons.
I'm just glad that Greenwald and a bunch of DC reporters, being private citizens and having realized what's good for the goose is good for the gander, have announced they will voluntarily release for the prurient perusal of those bored people with no self-respect and nothing better to do all of their personal emails, and for that matter all the emails of various of their loved ones.Assange’s unwillingness to face the music in his rape trial is all I ever needed to know about that creep. If he’s afraid of the notoriously generous and overly-sympathetic-to-defendants Scandinavian criminal justice system, he’s obviously guilty as sin. On the other hand, his two rooms in the Ecuadoran embassy are certainly less comfortable than any Swedish prison and he’s almost certainly to do a lot more time locked up there.
The
nicething about those charges is that the Alt-Right just slots them right into their narrative. Because Sweden is a Commie hellhole, and false rape charges are how the Womyn keep them down, so Assange’s cruel oppression is just one more sign how deep the rabbit hole goes, wake up sheeple, etc.I thought the real issue was that Sweden has an extradition treaty with the US.
You know who’s got even closer ties with the US, including a strong extradition treaty? The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Before screwing the nice guy who put up his bail and disappearing into the Ecuadorean Embassy to be the world’s worst house guest, Assange was at the disposal of Her Brittanic Majesty’s Government for, what, a year? More? And yet, strangely, there was no American extradition process started against him. It’s not like Sweden is some giant metaphorical trapdoor leading straight to Leavenworth.
the world’s worst house guest
Well, I suppose that John Belushi never released DNC emails. Can’t find the SNL skit on Youtube.
Here’s the video
The Thing that wouldn’t leave
From memory, even if the US requested Sweden to extradite him, the procedure (via some kind of EU arrest warrant) would have required the approval of the UK too. So he would be doubly protected…
…unless we leave the EU. Oh well.
I really think there ought to be a sitcom about Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy.
Apparently the BBC made one, though they removed some of the Assange-specific elements.
That is the ostensible issue for Assange. Of course, he has not been accused of any crimes in the United States, much less had any US extradition proceedings begun against him.
Assange seems to believe (correctly or incorrectly) that as soon as he hits Sweden he will be sent to the USA on still secret charges to share a space with Manning. So does Ecuador.
It isn’t a totally unreasonable belief.
He doesn’t seem to believe that to me. He’s *said* that, but as Manny pointed out he had no trouble at all hanging around the UK for a very long time without any peep about concern about extradition to the US.
Has he said secret charges? That’s even more bonkers.
Well, that version certain is bonkers! What was the US waiting for if the had secret charges?
Also – Sweden is not a US ally, and has absolutely no reason to turn Assange over based on secret irregular charges. There’s a process for extradition, and the US would have to initiate it to extradite Assange from Sweden. If Assange went to Stockholm and was cleared of the rape charges, there’s absolutely no reason to think he’d be in any more danger of immediate extradition than he was in London, pre-Ecuadorean embassy.
It seems more unreasonable to think that Sweden is much more likely to hand him over than the UK. I mean, what’s The Special Relationship for anyway if the US couldn’t get the Brits to extradite one pesky little hacker?
I would like to put money against Greenwald showing up here. That way I either win by getting money or win by getting to watch him have a meltdown.
Less flippantly: this isn’t really relevant to Greenwald, more to the DC reporting set, but there’s now a bunch of folks who have filed stories, under their bylines, about what they found while going through the personal emails Podesta sent or received. A few of those people (Yglesias, for example) have filed stories intended to make the point that this enterprise is misbegotten and nothing has been found, but there are a bunch of mainstream reporters who’ve filed overwrought stories based on misreading or over-interpreting what’s in this private correspondence, or have eagerly reported various episodes of cattiness and gossip (the Washington Post‘s Karen Tumulty, for example).
These reporters are going to have to live alongside and seek interviews with the people whose privacy they invaded, and their friends, who know that this was done to and for no obvious overriding public interest. How does that work? In any sane world, haven’t these reporters poisoned the well for themselves?
Sparkling Glibturd thinks the press’ schmoozing comes off the worst here, albeit it being done to get ”useful’ journalistic info.
That is an excellent point. We’ve always been told that one reason the talk shows go so easy on so many of their guests is because the thought of not having, whomever, Mitch McConnell or Grandpa Walnuts back is so horrific, so they’re forced to treat them with kid gloves and ignore the dissembling.
Yeah. I’m in the industry; the Wikileaks subject matter isn’t my beat, but I would have a real problem writing about their contents. I think there’s a balance: if there was something real bad in the emails, that probably outweighs how they were obtained, but “Colin Powell thinks Hillary is an asshole but competent” isn’t even dog bites man, it’s hey, dogs exist.
glenn was (and is) always negative about wikileaks’ approach, has a nuanced if “ultimately, yes” view about whether some of this stuff is newsworthy (as do the many news outlets who have chosen to run selected stories based on the leaks – not that this proves glenn is correct, just that he isn’t alone), and his tweet was (presumably) his response to early efforts, echoed by many working in journalism (broadly defined, especially), to argue that the wikileaks releases weren’t just wrong or inappropriate, but fabricated.
but he’s a big boy and doesn’t need me to defend him
At the same time, he has reveled in covering the leaks in all their details.
I’d say his sense of what is genuinely newsworthy is a bit broader than mine, but I don’t think it’s off the charts, and arguing that they’re newsworthy once they’re out there (which they are, no matter what the intercept does with them), is not the same thing as justifying how they were obtained or even claiming they should have been obtained.
my take is they’re out there so good journalism can help provide context to distinguish between nothingburgers (most of it) and what is actually interesting, though of course we won’t always agree on just what are nothingburgers
Sorry, but that’s downright Greenwaldian, as in shifting the goalposts to assert a truism and deflect criticism. GG has functionally identified himself with Wikileaks, and tap-dances away from any criticism of them.
“GG has functionally identified himself with Wikileaks” I’ve never seen this, though I am not a full greenwaldologist. I don’t know what goalposts I shifted honestly.
The issue has not been the accuracy of leaks for weeks now, it’s been the appropriateness of them. GG’s tweets were all about accuracy, your comment is about appropriateness.
Greenwald’s tweet was about accuracy, but Loomis’s post in response to it wasn’t limited to that.
True, but your responses (in themselves fine) have all been about appropriateness, and not about the other points Loomis made, which were essentially related to motive. Enough, I’m not even deeply disagreeing with you, I’m just pointing out the arguing past each other, which is sadly common when it comes to Glenn “never wrong” Greenwald. If he would occasionally admit to infelicity in language, I would be much more accepting of his assertions.
You aren’t hanging out on the right websites then, because you can find plenty of people claiming that if the documents aren’t outright fabrications they should, at minimum, be presumed to be fabricated.
C’mon, I can find websites saying all kinds of shit, including nonsense from campaigns trying to deflect attention. Doesn’t mean that anyone seriously believes it. (Well, DJT may believe what he spouts.)
Atrios is very generous to Wikileaks, considering his own involvement . . . :)
Interesting because the following quote comes from the piece that Erik linked in the original post:
Anyone paying moderate attention knows that Greenwald has, in fact, criticized Wikileaks’s tactics in this dump and in other recent mass data dumps.
Did I say tap-dance? Why, yes, yes I did.
One thing worth noting is that the MSM stuff I’ve seen on the leaks doesn’t seem to actually involve any reporting. They report what some of the leaked emails say, and then do no more than the most basic “ask for quotes” follow-up with the people involved. So there’s always tons of stuff that “remains unknown.” They shouldn’t publish if they can verify the context. Did Morocco donate money to the Clinton Foundation? Nobody appears to have any idea.
perhaps also report on the source of the hacking? Or is that beyond the pale?
Yes I think the source of the hacking and their motives would be a story. Maybe when someone figures it out it will be?
Well, that was nothing if not well-rehearsed.
No idea what that means.
Sounds like some people are getting ready to accuse you of being in on it too! Whatever “it” is. I’d say that it was Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald along with the RAND Corporation and the reverse vampires, conspiring to eliminate the meal of dinner.
The range of hand-waving-to-outright-vilification of those who’ve looked into and found evidence and motivations for the hack is untoward, annoying, hypocritical, instructive….pick your word.
The “well gosh golly, if someone actually *found* something, I guess that’d be just peachy too” response is nothing more than glib boilerplate. C’mon. You know full well Greenwald howling over Red Scare II doesn’t fit what his critics have found.
What, hoocoodanode isn’t enough of an answer for you?
I mean, it could be China. It could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.
Jesus Fucking Christ, you don’t think the very fact that there are no verified sources is a MAJOR part of this story?
The emails were hacked by Russia. The national intelligence community thinks so, and private security firms agree. They even know how they did it. Or is it only newsworthy if we figure out the hackers’ names?
Including the fact that it’s impossible to authenticate these “emails” on their face and that they come from opaque and therefore fundamentally untrustworthy sources.
We’ve seen practically none of this “good journalism”. Least of all from Glenn Greenwald.
Thanks, Atrios. I largely agree with your view of these things as expressed here.
Atrios is like the bizzaro world version of Bill Kristol. He is basically always right about everything. It is eery.
Nice!
Well, that’s astonishingly well said.
Right, for instance “nobody has figured out who is behind the hacks” is definitely a true thing. Atrios and Donald Trump are on the same page there.
Sorry Atrios, your take is too nuanced. People around here would much rather argue with the flattened caricature of Greenwald that they have constructed rather than actually look at what he says.
hmm
Sorry. Good catch! Let me amend that to say some people.
I think the articulate, erudite, and uncommonly intelligent lawyers and academics who frequent this place deserve more understanding from you: you ask them to read the material he has written on these topics? Unreasonable! Or review summaries of his many interviews? Crazy! Can you expect these superbly educated readers, intellectually and emotionally grounded as they are in reality, to not slide ugly accusations out of the the pus-y, inflamed lower regions of their GI tracts and fling them about willy-nilly?
What galls me is how easy it is to find out what he thinks, how easily refuted so many of these statements are. For example, position on wikileaks:
:
On the threshold at which public persons sacrifice some right to privacy (note, it’s not about fame, it’s about POWER. Further note, this is a well-established journalistic principle )- see point 3:
Just two areas (of many) where the commenters feel free to impute views of their choosing. They’re all utter fantasy.
The first link was: link
The second link was: link
Not being quite so intelligent as the people I’m criticizing, I messed up the links. The criticism isn’t any less valid, though.
I’m skeptical of his “nuance” when the only email story he’s put his name to is titled “EXCLUSIVE: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship”, promises to “shed light on friendly and highly useful relationships,” and identifies one (1) reporter that the campaign considers “friendly.”
While it wouldn’t surprise me if there are reporters who have a “cozy” relationship to the campaign, they’d be vastly better served looking for it in the actual reporting than lazily insinuating using a hacked email.
Edit: to clarify, if your complaint is “Clinton campaign tries to put its thumb on the scale,” maybe don’t put your thumb on the scale.
On one point, I’m in agreement with Glenn – as a reporter, you don’t care where your information came from, your job is to report. So, if there is anything newsworthy here, any good reporter has to use it. Full stop.
Where I part with him, and why he’s a hack is this: There hasn’t been anything newsworthy here. And the source of the hacks is most certainly newsworthy. In fact, given how lame these emails have been from a “scandal” perspective, the story IS the hacks. The story is who and why: Who is hacking Democratic party institutions and for what reason.
As a reporter, you are failing at your job if you don’t read these emails when they come out. I really believe that. But it’s a bigger failure to turn nothing into trumped up “scandals”, which The Intercept has been attempting to do. The less said about Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani the better. Jilani especially has revealed himself to be an immature stooge who reports for the “lulz”.
The bigger journalistic malpractice is not to question the who and why of the hacks, especially because you are then becoming a player in the story. If a foreign government is indeed doing this hacking, with an eye on influencing the election, and you treat that as a non-story (and even go so far as to mock anyone who claims it is, or to treat people who think it’s a story as being vile assholes, something Glenn seems to be doing a lot…), then…YOU ARE HELPING THEM! Ignoring that part of the story makes you a part of the propaganda. And that’s where the Intercept has humiliated itself, and Glenn continues to double down on it.
(I also agree on the narrow point that too much energy is being spent on saying “we don’t know if these are even real”. Given the benign nature of the emails, I’d admit it and move on, everyone knows they are real. And there is literally nothing important in them. I mean, it will make for a great campaign book, but actual news? I’m not seeing it).
Hillary keeps on saying this and everyone just dismisses it, but it’s true.
In one of SNL’s debate sketches, they had the moderator respond to “Hillary” making this argument by saying “you’re never going to answer any questions about your emails, are you?” I went “gaaah!” loud enough that my roommate asked what the hell had happened. It is mind-boggling and enraging to me how these completely unrelated Wikileaks emails have been bundled together with the long since resolved private email server issue as “Hillary’s emails”.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that slight of hand. This seems to be lumped with the private server, when it’s got less than nothing to do with that.
I still find it fascinating that Glenn and others ignore the Putin story. I mean, around the conventions, Putin was on a Russian TV show and he brought up Russia being blamed, and he brushed that off to talk about…how the DNC was unfair to Bernie Sanders.
Like….really? Does Putin actually care about that? It was such a bizarre statement from the head of Russia’s government. It’s when I lost any doubts Russia was behind it. “no, we aren’t involved, but btw, isn’t it terrible how Debbie Wasserman-Shultz treated Bernie Sanders?” Really Putin?
Well, at least DWS didn’t give Bernie any polonium.
Yep, that’s one of the things that irritates me most about this. Not to mention that she’s already answered more questions about her emails than most politicians have to answer in a lifetime. I mean, I understand that SNL needs to make fun of both sides so they won’t be accused of being overly partisan (though they get accused of that anyway), but that attack was simply a distortion. (Their characterisation of Clinton as highly rehearsed, on the other hand, seems spot on, though the real Clinton has somehow managed to make this into a strength.)
That said, I can’t complain too much overall about the SNL skits, because while they certainly have taken unfair shots at Clinton, they have been absolutely merciless to Trump, so they don’t really come across as playing favourites in the same way that a lot of so-called “journalists” have.
If they move away from the “We don’t know if these are even real” tack, than they have to respond to specific questions about specific emails. And some of them are at least embarrassing or awkward to deal with. The current line prevents that.
That is true, and I understand the campaigns strategy. I disagree with it (but i’m not a campaign expert, so who cares what I think), as I think a lot of these questions are easy enough to answer. Hillary did it herself in the debate giving context to her “public/private positions”.
But you are right, the current line is the better method to circle back to the campaigns talking points, which is really what they should be doing (especially since nothing very newsworthy has come from these emails).
Spending the last few weeks of the campaign trying to explain out of context emails would be electoral malpractice.
#nailedit
And of course, Greenwald continues to get mad about people saying the Russians are behind the hack.
Strongly disagree. Normalizing Wikileaks as a legitimate source of information without authenticating or independently verifying it is journalistic malpractice and dangerous. Whatever you think about individual records in Wikileaks, if it’s not already being polluted with disinformation, it soon will be.
“Hey guys, check out all this neat stuff about Larry O’Brien, George McGovern, and the DNC’s secret dealings with Howard Hughes! While I wouldn’t have broken into the Watergate myself, and I don’t work for CREEP, the info here is accurate…” – Glenn Greenwald, 1972
The conversation between Klein and Greenwald was a very good one, and I think it is worth reading the whole transcript. While I certainly agreed more with Klein than with Greenwald, I’m not really sure what is gained by framing your discussion of it it in the most rhetorically heated way possible and dragging in your other beefs of the moment.
Someone who read only your post would probably be rather surprised by Greenwald’s words at the conclusion of the interview:
Welcome to LGM!
No, that’s totally what I was expecting before listening to the podcast – I didn’t expect him to take some sort of stand for or against personal privacy. (Why would he denounce or endorse wikileaks’ actions, when it’s better to keep splitting the difference? I’m sure Greenwald was a good lawyer.)
That leaves him free to continue to profit from others’ actions without accepting any moral culpability.
And libertarians always want to turn mentions of concrete injustices into abstract discussions of ethics. “If we cut AFDC, children in this country will starve”. “What’s interesting is that Ayn Rand says that taxation is just like slaverly because ___”. It’s tiresome hand-waving, meant to signify you are a deep and ethical thinker, while avoiding discussing the concrete evils created by your supposedly ethical position.
My point was that those are hardly the words of someone bent on “drumming Klein out of the left” or insisting that everyone agree with him (not that Greenwald doesn’t ever do that – just not here). I largely agree with what kped wrote elsewhere in the thread.
For all I wish Greenwald were other than he is, I still think we’re better off with him – and the Intercept – than without it.
Zeynep Tufekci has been another very good critic on the topic of privacy.
Well, I guess I don’t know anything about “the Left,” but I hardly see how exposing the e-mails of top Democratic Party operatives discussing Democratic Party business qualifies as “widespread invasion of privacy.”
If these leaks are coming from the Russian government, I sure wish they would start leaking some of the good stuff from Corporate America.
Really? If the same thing was done by, say, Hillary supporters to Bernie Sanders back in February you would not say the same thing. And neither would a lot of other people.
Bernie seems to agree with you!
I think it’s a point that the rank and file has a legit interest in how the officers are doing business, but that is no part of the way this stuff is being presented.
Call me an anarchist, but I think it is perfectly okay journalistically to publish stolen e-mails.
We’d all be delighted in Assange was publishing Karl Rove’s messages to his Republican cronies.
Given what Rove has said in public, I’d only consider it appropriate if he were confessing to illegal acts. That’s not what’s going on here.
I’m an anarchist. I also think even government employees are entitled to a certain amount of privacy, and most of the people in the email dumps aren’t even government employees. If the leaks revealed anything illegal, that would be one thing. However, this is nothing more than voyeurism, and is absolutely not newsworthy.
Yeah, as much as there’s been nothing at all in the emails that’s actually scandalous, I don’t cry for John Podesta’s privacy. He’s a political operative and they seem to mostly be political operative business. If they stole his dick pics and posted those, I’d feel bad for him.
Where the leaks are really coming from is an actually important question, as others have said. The canonical example for anonymous sources is Deep Throat, but for me anyway it did actually broaden the story to know it was an FBI bigwig who dimed Nixon to the Post.
Yeah, Deep Throat and the Pentagon Papers.
Remember that that the Pentagon Papers were stolen government property, and the NYT went ahead and published them anyway.
An FBI official, rather than a White House official, being Deep Throat is actually a tremendously important distinction, and I kind of think Woodward and Bernstein were wildly irresponsible to imply the latter.
To expand on this, their Post reporting using Felt’s stuff as background is just good journalism. The hoops they jumped through to hide Felt’s identity in All the President’s Men, less so.
Deep Throat provided information that Woodward and Bernstein were then able to follow up on and independently verify. That’s how real journalism works.
Exactly! Too much of the reporting here is “this is an email and what it says”. No reporting is done. No fact checking. Just more “questions raised” talk, even if it’s trivially easy to answer those same questions (FBI/State Department quid-pro-quo).
I’ve no problem with the emails being used and reported on. But having said that, the responsible thing to do, and here’s where Glenn and his team have failed spectacularly, is to use them as reporting tools, not as gossip items. Read the email, think it’s interesting, investigate, report. I’m not a journalist, but that sounds like journalism 101.
Yeah, but here’s a document, this is the document, I’m going to apply what it all means from this instead of reporting with other sources is literally Greenwald’s MO from moment one, even on the Snowden stuff. It was WaPo and others that actually did followup journalism on what they actually meant, the reality usually being less sinister than Greenwald’s heavily implied interpretations of Orwellian malfaesance.
The more bad journalism i read (Greenwald falls into this), the more I appreciate the good stuff. It’s so easy to do the first step that Greenwald and co do. It’s much harder to actually do the real work and dive in and see what there is. Farenthold could have simply wrote a couple of lines about the Trump Foundation and been done with it. He actually called each and every charity and did the legwork. That stuff is real journalism.
Naturally, the Jacobin Kidz trash Farenthold on the tweets all the time.
I don’t follow them…and your post makes me glad I don’t!
What’s their criticism of him?
My favourite of the genre is the “12 email that HRC doesn’t what you to read” stuff. Which invariably go like:
1) “Shockinf email uses a word that if you put it beside another word and then add a bunch of other words and then misread that you have a whiff of something. But if you read the email you’ve got nothing.
2) Same as one, but moreso
I never get to 3
I think releasing the name of a completely innocent third party who once attempted to commit suicide it pretty scandalous, especially given the way such a revelation might affect her personal life and mental health. (And, given that the number of outlets publishing Wikileaks info is likely to affect the search rankings for any names contained in them, it may also have an affect on her professional life when colleagues and employers Google her name.)
Hey, the conflating of rice pilaf with “risotto” is a pretty serious matter (I am told)!
Not to mention the Doctor Who bit bspencer noted yesterday that could be A Major Issue, unless she was talking about Matt Smith.
And that Shrill$hillKillFillMillBananaBanaFoFana-ary has a “transition team” so that she is prepared to use the time between about 11:00pm EST on 08-Nov-2016 and 12:00pm 20-Jan-2017 efficiently is just a sign that The Whole Thing is Rigged, while The Orange Jumpsuit having (a) a larger team (b) run by Governor Make-My_Bridge-Go-to-Nowhere is just good management.
Not only is Assange loathsome because of the rape accusations, he has no regard for the harm his handling of documents does to information. He’s compromised sensitive financial information, identity security, and put dissidents and joirnalists in direct physical danger. Greenwald, by all appearances, thinks this is just peachy.
In fairness, he doesn’t. But that doesn’t seem to keep him from cheerleading Assange and lending his own credibility (such as it is) to Wikileaks.
Well if you say “golly it’s terrible that Assange gave information on dissidents to Belarus, but can’t we talk about the mean things Neera Tanden said about Larry Lessig privately,” sensible people have to conclude that you don’t really care if Assange is getting people killed.
Not defending Assange or many of the “journalists” publishing trash about private sniping remarks. But this is at least newsworthy: https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton
Really? “And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast.” This is remotely new information? Of course key staffing was in place early. Was there someone who thought that competent candidates waited until November 9 to start this process?
Nothing in those emails told us anything about the Obama administration’s approach, ideas, or influences that we didn’t already know. And if more liberal members of the Democratic Party thought that they could afford to wait to start identifying and promoting sympathetic appointees, then they were incredibly naive. I would be shocked if someone like Warren wasn’t already suggesting candidates and pressuring the transition team.
Do they think that a candidate can’t make any decisions until The Will of The People has spoken? And then at that moment the President-elect is given magical pixie dust, the absence of which heretofore made everything illegitimate??
And with the increasing use of early voting it would be more accurate to say ‘before the votes have been counted’.
It seems like the opposite case would be newsworthy. That is, if it turned out a lot of major appointments were chosen after the election, that would be a man-bites-dog kind of story and of genuine interest. As it is, the revelation is “presidential candidate prepares for successful transition into presidency”.
Yeah. You’re gonna get elected in early November and then figure out how to staff a new administration in only three months? I would be shocked if serious thinking on appointments had *not* happened by October.
What a ridiculous statement. How would one show that a digital document, purported to be a stolen email, is inauthentic? Or for that matter, authentic? It’s impossible to prove (or disprove) the authenticity of these records, and any attempt to do so would likely just fan the flames. This is thoroughly dishonest.
To the extent that it’s lent any credibility, Wikileaks is functionally equivalent to a money-laundry for disinformation. Whatever the original intent and whatever “transparency advocates” want it to be, it’s effectively a smear machine, nothing more.
Have any of the authors of the emails that were leaked disputed their authenticity? Seems like that would be a start.
Maybe. As far as I know, no one has made any statement one way or the other about authenticity. In prominent cases, conspicuously so. Maybe that means they are authentic, or maybe it just means that the authors have made the calculated estimation that a he-said/she-said tug of war will just inflame the issue and draw more negative attention, since they know there’s no way to definitively prove or disprove it.
Right. The idea that the Clinton campaign, two weeks before the election, should spend time trying to refute/explain these is crazy.
It’s certainly not always “impossible.” For example, if one of the e-mails references something that is clearly inconsistent with otherwise public information, that would be a strong indication that it’s been fabricated.
How about if one of the emails references something that is clearly consistent with otherwise public information, and that credibility is leveraged to sell the unverifiable fraud presented in some other “email” in the tranche?
We can play this game all day. Still makes you a fool to trust an opaque and thoroughly unaccountable source for info.
ONLYif the human being who actually ‘hacked’ the information personally reveals it. Becoming a ‘clearinghouse’ for anonymous criminal activity is not any way ‘ethical’.
If Wikileaks had uncovered some huge scandal or crime by Hillary Clinton or one of her closest advisers than I could understand the rational behind publishing these emails. Some things are more important than the privacy of powerful people who wish to serve in public office.
That said, so far every single thing being released is nothing but petty bullshit and, fairly normal, campaign tactics and strategy. No smoking gun to justify these releases has yet been found.
Earlier in the year I read a number of “looking back at the Trump Presidency” fantasy pieces, and the thing they sometimes imagined taking out Hillary Clinton was Wikileaks revealing that her private email server had been hacked and had exposed the identities of US secret agents. Thus tying the two major “Clinton email scandals” together with a tight bow.
But, of course, the real world is not governed by narrative coherence in that way.
Yeah it would (truly) suck for secret agents’ identities to be accidentally exposed; wonder if it’s ever been done deliberately, oh yeah – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair
IOKIYAR
Every few days, the NY Times prints some b.s. story based on the Wikileaks emails; each containing pretty much zero real news but plenty of juicy, catty, “behind-the-curtain” details (i.e., “all the news that fits”). Today’s piece (on the Clinton Foundation) has info on a pseudonym Chelsea uses in emails and checking into hotels; some bitchy comments about her made by another guy, etc. It really, REALLY pisses me off that they consider this to be “newsworthy” enough to justify publication, especially when they know they’re coming from stolen emails.
Btw – the gist of the piece is that Podesta and others wanted the foundation to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest arising from big donors, some of whom gave gifts to Bill, etc. (it’s mostly about Bill and his activities). It includes a sentence saying, “The emails […] have not contained evidence to support Republican contentions that Mrs. Clinton performed any favors for foundation donors.” As far as I’m concerned, that sentence should have been the entire article.
TL;DR: Erik Loomis hates Glenn Greenwald episode XXXVIII: “I Hate What Glenn Said on Twitter”.
He’s not a big-L Libertarian, if that’s what you’re claiming; and last I heard being a civil libertarian wasn’t incompatible with being a “leftist”. He’s not a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin. And if you don’t think he’s a “leftist by any reasonable definition” I have to wonder just what your “reasonable definition” of “leftist” is.
You sure do hate him, though.
Twitter again!
How much more proof do I have to point to before you all agree with me that Twitter is the most pernicious, evil invention in human history? Wars will be started and billions killed at some point because of this infernal app! Just say no to Twitter!
I agree with you on one that one thing at the very least: twitter sucks.
Facebook also sucks. Which is why I’ve never touched either of them.
Lawn, off of, you kids.
The same charge could be laid on nearly any communication medium. Curse the telegraph for starting WWI!
There is literally no evidence whatever that Greenwald cares at all about any liberal domestic policy issue other than gay rights stuff. He occasionally takes lefty positions if he can use them to attack the Obama administration, but that’s all.
I don’t know if he’s a libertarian or not, but he’s by no reasonable measure a leftist or a liberal.
I’ve said this before, but “left” evolved as a description of an economic position, and despite some people’s attempts to redefine it, it remains primarily an economic descriptor. Greenwald may express positions on many other issues that leftists agree with, but this does not make him a leftist. Gary Johnson also expresses positions on many issues that leftists agree with, but he certainly is not a leftist. There is an authoritarian right and a libertarian right (although it’s much smaller than its adherents wish people to believe it is, and labelling it as such involves a fundamental redefinition of the word “libertarian” from its initial use as a synonym for anarchist communism); there is also an authoritarian left (although, since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has also been small) and a libertarian left. (A case can also be made that there is a spectrum of interventionism and isolationism that is largely independent of the left/right and authoritarian/libertarian spectra, but that discussion is outside the scope of this reply; in any case, if such a distinction should be made, then Greenwald is largely on the isolationist side.)
Greenwald has taken occasional liberal stances on the economy (for example, he has expressed occasional concern about corporate power, and he made criticisms of Citizens United that comes off as quite tepid, particularly considering that even 80% of Republican voters think the decision should be reversed). However, when it comes to actual left-wing issues, such as labour rights and union activism, Greenwald does not have a credible history of engagement. He may qualify as a tepid liberal, though frankly, I haven’t seen much evidence that he’s ever spent enough time thinking about the economy to qualify as one; I would classify his overall positions as broadly small-l libertarian without much concern for economic issues. He is certainly not any sort of leftist.
Greenwald largely seems to have become convinced he is a liberal because he underwent his political awakening during the Bush administration and defined all political stances in response to Bush’s stances and his own. Since Bush was a conservative, he must be a liberal. That seems to be the extent of his thinking about these kinds of matters.
Greenwald seems to be a victim of the same problem Richard Dawkins suffers: he is very, very good when writing about his area of expertise, and terrible when he wanders off it. Unfortunately, like Dawkins, he has become convinced he’s an expert on everything, so he writes a lot more about topics on which he’s completely ignorant.
This seems about right, except that I’m less convinced than you that Greenwald is ever “very, very good.”
His book How Would a Patriot Act? was good and (IIRC) a bit ahead of its time in sounding the alarm about surveillance, but like most constitutional arguments too fetishistic about the values of the Framers.
Again, I have to question what you consider a “reasonable measure.” Because by the most generic definition available, Greenwald most definitely is a “leftist”:
Now, maybe he doesn’t agree with your personal definition of a leftist or support your pet cause (or do so fervently enough). But he is in no way authoritarian and his steadfast defense of civil rights is indisputably “leftist”, so let’s drop the “no true leftist” baloney shall we? One can be critical of the Obama administration and also be a “leftist.” And because one is critical of the Obama Administration on a handful of issues it doesn’t mean one would prefer McCain, Romney, or Trump to occupy the Oval Office.
I honestly expect better from actual flying monkeys.
Sh*t’s weak, yo.
Tell the Intercept they aren’t paying you enough.
Yeah, but Twitter is still less destructive than the Babel Fish.
From what I’ve heard, Wikileaks has some Trump emails, but isn’t releasing them because (in Assange’s opinion) they aren’t damaging.
Now, the argument “the Trump campaign/RNC internal emails are a pile of incoherent gibberish” has a fair amount of plausibility. Even so, they are blatantly taking sides in a national election. That can’t be doing anything good for their rep.
Since when does WikiLeaks make judgment calls about what to release? They used to make their materials available to actual journalists and coordinate releases that way; sometime in the last few years they said “fuck it” and just started dumping piles of raw, unexpurgated documents. Have they started claiming that they only release “damaging” or newsworthy material now?
IIRC, they defended outing undercover operatives by citing transparency, didn’t they? They’re pretty much admitting that they’re hypocritical partisan operatives at this point.
Perhaps Assange doesn’t believe that misogyny is damaging.
I’m not sure I want to think about what Trump could be saying in private that’s worse than what he’s saying in public, except if it includes details proving illegal activities for which he could be prosecuted.
“From what I’ve heard, Wikileaks has some Trump emails, but isn’t releasing them because (in Assange’s opinion) they aren’t damaging.”
Damaging to Clinton, I hope he means.
I’ve never quite understood how so many self-declared liberals got to be fans of a man who is perhaps, at best, an anarcho-syndicalist who thinks the very idea of government is inherently corrupting and evil, and at worst a glibertarian who thinks that the Constitution actually is a suicide pact…but only for the United States.
I’m not sure if you’re referring to Assange or Greenwald, but neither of them strikes me as being anywhere near close to being an anarchist of any sort. Assange may be some sort of “ancap”, which is not the same thing (anarchy means without rulers; ancaps simply want to replace one set of rulers with another).
I thought there have been a fair number of interesting things from the emails,assuming they are genuine. First, Clinton admitted a no fly zone would kill many Syrian civilians. That seems kind of important given that the DC crowd seems eager for another Mideast war. Second, someone wrote an email saying that the Saudi government supports ISis and al Qaeda. Third, we get to see how speeches are watered down on the subject of Palestinian rights.
http://972mag.com/clinton-speech-was-scrubbed-of-palestinian-rights-emails-show/122823/
I think there have been others, but those are what I remember off the top of my head.
It’s weird reading the claims that the emails are a nothingburger. You people need to get out more. Now if you want to claim they are fake, fine, but then the Russkies are incompetent– they should have put in some really salacious things that Americans would care about, not silly things about war and killing civilians and human rights hypocrisy.
Here is a link–
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hillary-clinton-wikileaks-email-isis-saudi-arabia-qatar-us-allies-funding-barack-obama-knew-all-a7362071.html
I can’t get over all the people who say the wikileaks emails are a nothingburger. In any sane society an email which says the US government knows that the Saudi government supports ISIS while not admitting it publicly would be front page news and reporters would be questioning all the DC types and the Clinton campaign, asking for a confirmation or denial, but that’s a sane society. This is the US during a political campaign.
And here is a link about the Syrian no fly zone
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/10/in-secret-goldman-sachs-speech-hillary-clinton-admitted-no-fly-zone-would-kill-a-lot-of-syrians/
The situation in Syria has changed since 2013. The risks and rewards from establishing a no-fly zone have changed, too. What I see in those excerpts is someone who is thoughtful about the human effects of the use of military power.
I don’t know what the right answer is in Syria. I do know that Russian airstrikes have killed at least a thousand civilians already. This is not Iraq. The war is already started. Blood is already flowing. We elect presidents in part to make difficult decisions like this.
It was utterly predictable that outside forces arming rebels would lead to more killing, it was likely that Islamists would jump in. It was certain that Iran and Russia and Hezbollah would help their ally Assad. And now Russia is there and a no fly zone means risking war with Russia.
Our idiot elites learned nothing from Iraq except that putting hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Middle East becomes politically unpopular. That’s it. Other than that, they still think they can overthrow governments or supply weapons to dubious allies for reasons that can’t have anything to do with humanitarian goals, because nobody could be that stupid.
So far as I can tell, we mostly elect Presidents to either start stupid wars or pull out of the stupid wars some earlier President started.
I just don’t find this kind of foreign policy nihilism convincing anymore. It certainly doesn’t provide any help in figuring out what we should do now. Saying “we shouldn’t have done [X] in the first place” is cheap. I wish we hadn’t illegally invaded Iraq. We did. We’re still dealing with the aftermath. That blood is on us.
I’m also not sure it’s constructive to dismiss the unwillingness to engage in further Iraq-like conflicts as a minor foreign policy advancement. The region is horrifically destabilised, certainly, but I don’t see any evidence that anything done under the Obama administration has been anywhere near as destructive in either the short or the long term as the Iraq invasion. That’s not a high bar to clear, but it’s not nothing either. Handwaving it away as though Obama and Bush are EXACTLY THE SAME! on foreign policy, which as far as I can tell is what Donald is attempting to do here, is disingenuous at best.
This also somewhat gets into what I was talking about in the Chomsky discussion from Loomis’ later post: the need to be pragmatic about the fact that frequently there are no perfect solutions, and in other cases it is politically infeasible to implement the best solutions. Chomsky, one of the most famous radicals in the world, is extremely clear-eyed about this fact and advocates pragmatism in response to it: certainly, one should attempt to change the factors that make the best solutions infeasible, but this is frequently difficult and often ends in failure. The attempt should still be made, though. Throwing your hands up and saying “Eh, whatyagonnado” doesn’t help anyone.
I don’t really consider the no-fly zone a major deal, because I’m not convinced Clinton actually intends to set one up. It’s the carrot and the stick, or as Clinton herself put it, a public and private position. She uses the threat to bring other players in line. It’s pretty standard negotiating tactics. If she actually enforces one in office, that would be a big deal.
The Palestinian rights thing would be an issue in a normal political system, but seeing as the Republican Party is even worse on that particular issue, I’m not surprised it’s not getting much traction. If there were a candidate who could reliably challenge the bipartisan consensus without serving as a spoiler, it might be a significant issue. However, we have first-past-the-post voting, so a number of things that should be political issues aren’t. This is a major reason the Cuban embargo lasted for sixty years. As a person who’s paid attention to the issue for over a decade, I also don’t see the Palestinian rights speech revelation as particularly surprising. It may surprise laypeople, but for me it’s a “dog bites man” story.
The Saudi government thing would be damning, but I don’t see how it’s a big deal for Clinton’s campaign, since the key email regarding Daesh is dated 2014, after Clinton had already left the State Department. I can see an argument for why it should still be a big deal, but I can’t see why it’s a big deal for the Clinton campaign. She wasn’t influencing policy at that point. And frankly, even if it does raise some questions about Obama’s policy, I’m not inclined to speculate that the motives behind keeping it private must be nefarious, either – it’s entirely possible there were diplomatic or national security-related reasons for the secrecy.
I thought it was pretty much an open secret that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were supporting ISIS. Certainly it’s no secret that the Saudis have been state sponsors of terror for decades.
IMO even if we knew today exactly what Hillary would do today it quite likely wouldn’t be what she would do when she becomes President because by then the situation will probably have changed, no doubt for the worse.
Stuff from several years ago needs to be viewed in the context of know conditions at that time, not the ones today.
Finally, the “would kill a lot of civilians” needs to be weighed against how many civilians would be killed if the no-fly zone wasn’t instituted. I don’t understand why we think in the total absence of this ever happening anywhere that wars can be fought without killing civilians. Pretending bad things won’t happen isn’t useful.
If killing civilians was the major concern, then no sane person would have advocated arming “moderate” Syrian rebels. There is absolutely nothing about our record that suggest we are good at supporting wars in the Mideast in this fine tuned way that leads to a democratic result–assuming that was the main objective. I suspect the thinking was that if the conflict didn’t result in rainbows and puppies, at least we would be keeping the Syrians and Hezbollah and Iran busy. It wouldn’t be the first time we tried to give an enemy their “Vietnam”.
Whether or not something is a big deal for the Clinton campaign shouldn’t be the measure of whether a story is important. I am voting for Clinton, so I don’t read stories like this in order t find out if I should vote for someone else, but to find out what our DC types are saying behind the scenes about the issues that I try to follow.
As for whether it is common knowledge about the Saudis supporting ISIS, the way the game is played, when a politician or official is caught telling the truth in private, he or she is supposed to be pressured to tell it in public. That’s how these open secrets stop being treated like facts nobody in very serious circles is supposed to mention.
The same goes for the Palestinians. Given that there are players pressuring the Democrats in one direction, it seems helpful to have stories like this exposing the process by which it takes place.
I agree that a lot of this wikileaks stuff is not that important, but some of it is.
When people are saying it’s a “nothingburger” they’re saying that it doesn’t have the impact that Assange wants it to have against Clinton’s campaign. Some of it might still be interesting, although there’s nothing that I’ve seen so far that we didn’t already know. Hell, the article you cite notes that Joe Biden had already said a lot of this stuff in public.
“Entirely possible” is pretty weak. Of course there were. The Saudis are a key US ally in the region who also covertly sponsor anti-American terrorists. Of course the US doesn’t want to publicly accuse the Saudi government of sponsoring ISIS.
This post is embarrassing–petulant and ungrounded and sophomoric in its sarcasm.
I can see an argument that argument that Greenwald has engaged in a lot of overdone hemming and hawing here, as though there were really a lot of thorny questions (“Should WikiLeaks have posted donors’ SS numbers and credit card information? Only Snowden knows!”). But that’s not what Erik has offered.