Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "The Dishonest u0026 Maddening Debate Over Treason w/ Glenn Greenwald" video.

  1. I always see these types of ads on left-of-center channels, PragerU being the most consistent offender. I think they imagine they'll poach some gullible people from the Other Side.
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  2. If your house is on fire, it's kind of dumb to worry about the leaky faucet. The thing that gets me is when pundits and politicians lament Russian meddling as the end of American democracy...because, what democracy? When top political scientists and former presidents say we're living in an oligarchy—then that's not a democracy. Democracy died in this country long before Russian trolls came in to meddle, and it was killed by the corporate and political elite.
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  3. It reminded me of watching the debate Greenwald had with Michael Hayden. Greenwald brought facts, quotations, studies, sources while Hayden regurgitated talking points with absolutely no data. Unsurprisingly, the audience thought Greenwald won the debate.
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  4. zwergie256 Yeah, for sure, Glenn's written some things that are a little off (a piece he wrote about gun rights in Brazil hasn't aged well). But I don't think he's a neoliberal or that your link proves he is. If anything, he's doing the same thing he usually does: express a standard and follow it, in this case, does international opinion necessarily make Bush a "bad president," and he's right that, no, usually not. Being a bad president made Bush a bad president, the Iraq war made Bush a bad president, among a myriad other backwards policies. Glenn's just trying to uphold a standard of critique, which is valuable given how the MSM is hyperfocussed on optics, appearance, and opinion rather than facts and truth.* I think Glenn is actually kind of a moderate, which is what so many people try to claim to be in order to throw up a smokescreen for their real values. He believes in constitutional law, civil rights, regulation. He seems like the sort of person who opposes socialism (the collective ownership of production) AND neoliberal capitalism. Personally, as a leftist, I find Glenn's older comments about fanatic socialist this and that to be petulant and grating. I can look past it to the better aspects of his actual reporting and not just commentary in a blog. I can't tell someone what to do with their money, but I think it's a little rash to pull a donation over one story that one reporter wrote. The Intercept has variety—that's a good thing. Most of that variety is a counterpoint to the MSM—that's good too. I think it's better that journalists have leeway when it comes to their stories, rather than having the narrative set by an editorial team. That's how we got the MSM in the first place. It's easy to control, buy off, and undercut a team of a few editors; much harder to do that to each and every journalist. Caitlin Johnstone, however, I can say with confidence, is a know-nothing hack with an Internet connection. *I remember an NPR story about anxiety surrounding Obama's visit to Japan. People were worried he might apologize for the nuclear bombs (he didn't). So NPR got an "expert" on to talk about whether or not Americans believe the bombs were necessary to end the war. Of course, there was no discussion of whether the bombs actually were necessary—only the belief or opinion that they were; no mention of the July cables, the Bombing Survey, nothing. That's a very dangerous practice in journalism and you see it everywhere.
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  5. James Risen has done some amazing and important reporting. No one can take that from him. However, reading his book State of Power, it became clear fairly quickly that he does operate with that "Washington bubble," pro-elite mindset that you see everywhere in the corporate media.  Here is how he describes Bush in State of Power. He says that Bush's foreign policy was "a radical departure from the centrist traditions of US foreign policy," which presumably includes supporting dictators, supporting coups, Iran-Contra, Bay of Pigs, installing medium-range missiles in Turkey, funding Diem and calling off elections in Vietnam and then turning it into a parking lot. Risen further describes this tradition as embodying "cautious pragmatism."  He goes on to say that "President Bush deserves credit for making the spread of democracy a centerpiece of his agenda," which was his "ambitious dream." I'm sorry, but anyone who sincerely thinks that Bush cared about the spread of democracy is severely blinkered when it comes to assessing the agenda of power in America. One can imagine similar panegyrics being made to Trump's MAGA, with similar effect on the gag reflex. Who cares what Bush's intentions or dreams were if his method was to devastate a region with impunity? He says of Condoleezza Rice, "Rice had a strong bullshit detector." This of the woman who sold America on the line, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Rice must have been on DEFCON1 for that.
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