Tragic Indeed
There's a wonderfully big buzz about Glenn Greenwald's new book "A Tragic Legacy" (officially releasing Tuesday, as I hear it, though Amazon claims my order has already been shipped).
Firedoglake had the honor of hosting Glenn today in their Book Salon. The exchanges between author and audience, even to the limited extent I surfed them, were terrific. I strongly encourage you to ramble through the comments!
Digby (yes, that Digby) took charge of introducing GG at the site. This is the Blogger who was very properly awarded last week for her great work in doing actual Journalism in an era when Big Business and the Monopolistic Media have fought hard to eliminate the "Izzy" style of independent un-bribed reporting and decided news will be what they tell us, e.g through the columns of folks like Ms. Miller (former NYT) and the ongoing sycophantism of shills (and so-far un-indicted potential felons) like Russert and Matthews. Those who have any intention of actually wanting to grapple with information (versus spin) must at least consider exploring elsewhere.
Digby's award, as you may be aware, took place at the Take Back America conference last week. It engendered a quite remarkable speech. I hope you had a chance to appreciate it. In the interest of brevity I have only the start of Digby's intro to the Greenwald thread at FDL here, admittedly only a teaser:
After 9/11, I remember being quite surprised that the US government would so freely use the phrase “good and evil” when our attackers had been extreme religious fanatics. Laden as those words are with religious association, it seemed to me to be fanning the flames when a smarter approach would have been to distance ourselves from such rhetoric and try to redirect the focus to more rational ground. I did a post quite early on in which I compared speeches by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in which their frequent references to God and good and evil and satan were nearly indistinguishable. Both speeches could have come right out of the 13th century. (It was one of the creepiest posts I ever did, and I recall that at the time we were in the grip of such paranoia, I wondered if I would gather the attention of the authorities for writing such a thing.)
From very early on Bush used archaic religious verbal constructions like “the evil ones” and “evil-doers.” Perhaps the most startling example is what he reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mamhoud Abbas in 2003: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.” Yikes.
It turns out that anachronistic verbiage was much more than boneheaded rhetoric. As Glenn Greenwald convincingly lays out in devastating detail in his new book “A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency”, this war between “good ‘n evil” became the all-purpose justification for the lawless usurpation of the bedrock values of our constitution. From the extended excerpt in Salon Magazine:
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Firedoglake had the honor of hosting Glenn today in their Book Salon. The exchanges between author and audience, even to the limited extent I surfed them, were terrific. I strongly encourage you to ramble through the comments!
Digby (yes, that Digby) took charge of introducing GG at the site. This is the Blogger who was very properly awarded last week for her great work in doing actual Journalism in an era when Big Business and the Monopolistic Media have fought hard to eliminate the "Izzy" style of independent un-bribed reporting and decided news will be what they tell us, e.g through the columns of folks like Ms. Miller (former NYT) and the ongoing sycophantism of shills (and so-far un-indicted potential felons) like Russert and Matthews. Those who have any intention of actually wanting to grapple with information (versus spin) must at least consider exploring elsewhere.
Digby's award, as you may be aware, took place at the Take Back America conference last week. It engendered a quite remarkable speech. I hope you had a chance to appreciate it. In the interest of brevity I have only the start of Digby's intro to the Greenwald thread at FDL here, admittedly only a teaser:
After 9/11, I remember being quite surprised that the US government would so freely use the phrase “good and evil” when our attackers had been extreme religious fanatics. Laden as those words are with religious association, it seemed to me to be fanning the flames when a smarter approach would have been to distance ourselves from such rhetoric and try to redirect the focus to more rational ground. I did a post quite early on in which I compared speeches by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in which their frequent references to God and good and evil and satan were nearly indistinguishable. Both speeches could have come right out of the 13th century. (It was one of the creepiest posts I ever did, and I recall that at the time we were in the grip of such paranoia, I wondered if I would gather the attention of the authorities for writing such a thing.)
From very early on Bush used archaic religious verbal constructions like “the evil ones” and “evil-doers.” Perhaps the most startling example is what he reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mamhoud Abbas in 2003: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.” Yikes.
It turns out that anachronistic verbiage was much more than boneheaded rhetoric. As Glenn Greenwald convincingly lays out in devastating detail in his new book “A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency”, this war between “good ‘n evil” became the all-purpose justification for the lawless usurpation of the bedrock values of our constitution. From the extended excerpt in Salon Magazine:
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posted by Sir Gumbo at 9:57 PM
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