Greenwald: in the Trenches on Our Behalf

Glenn Greenwald, posting these days at Salon (but you know where to find him, right?), has been doing a lot of heavy lifting lately in shining a light on two major impediments to our hope of a return to anything resembling the form of representative government our founders fought for. I.e., a return to a system where the vice (oh so appropriate in this case) - president does not feel he can with impunity answer "so?" when for-once actually confronted with the fact that this administration is in full defiance of the American people's very strong majority opinion.

GG has the badge of honor for me for his unflinching on-going spade-calling over the absolute void of journalism in the mainstream (i.e., fully corporate-co-opted) media these days. Most recently he has been appropriately focused on the amazingly torpid non-journalists spending their time sucking up to McCain. I anticipate upcoming post on a recent Greenwald on that score.

He has also shown remarkable courage in calling out the scabrous, venal tactics of the right wing and their propaganda machine, ever-ready to make a huge fuss and get their brain-dead legion to gin up thousands of angry emails over the most pathetic non-issues. Doubtless he has a spam hit-rate orders of magnitude more numerous (and more nasty by far, I'm sure, though it's the same septic level) than the multitude who somehow imagine I have one organ or another that needs enlargement.

This particular Greenwald post, entitled "Tactics of the right-wing noise machine," is actually a follow-up to a previous GG post (see early link in article). In short, he has spotlighted the sleazy practice, truly the essence of what little there is of a bush administration program, whereby outrageous lies and distortions are linked to, publicized, and repeated ad nauseum (9/11-Iraq!, terrorists want to strike the homeland!), with some faint veneer of detachment allowing for denial of responsibility.

This is a good part of how for a spell these gibbering idiots who can't find a decent bureaucrat to run an agency, for the love of Brownie-the-horsie-boy, had seven people (okay, rounding up) convinced they were much more to be trusted to keep us safe than any Democrat. Of course, the fully-bought-out nonfunctional "media" for a while had themselves convinced we had ten actual citizens (rounding down), hence the soporific Ravel's "Bolero" spoon-feeding of "a majority of US citizens believe the bush administration is far more trustworthy on terrorism than the Democrats."

Of course their real difficulty in finding a bureaucrat who can perform is that there are these secret loyalty-oaths required before you can be nominated. And you know as well as I do that these oaths have nothing to do with serving the American people, doing the job well, or being accountable. As they say, "the reverse is true." I suspect those include things like: "I will never ask a question of the president," "I will never offer an opinion of my own," and "I will never testify under oath to any investigating body." (Should there be any such left.)

To whit, the Never-Accountable Administration.

I give you their admirable gadfly, Mr. Greenwald, in toto:

On Sunday, I wrote about a repulsive racist screed published on the conservative blog, Instapunk -- a blog heavily promoted by right-wing law professor Glenn Reynolds, among others. In response, Reynolds and various other right-wing pundits have spent the last several days in an angry, defensive frenzy, trying to distract from the principal points by attacking the absurd and obvious straw man that one should not be held responsible for a post they did not link to or promote.

As I made explicitly clear, I never suggested anything of the sort. Rather, my post illustrated how the right-wing noise machine functions -- by promoting and courting the most extremist and hateful elements for political gain while trying to keep a safe distance so as to evade responsibility:

The original purpose in pointing out that Instapunk is a favorite blog of Glenn Reynolds was not to suggest that Reynolds is directly responsible for the particular racist screed I quoted, but rather, to demonstrate that I did not select some obscure unread blog nor go searching deep in the comment sections in order to find something inflammatory -- the typical method used to generate almost every liberal blog "controversy" -- but instead had found this written by a principal contributor on one of the most heavily-promoted right-wing blogs.

Nonetheless, the updates [here and here] demonstrate that Reynolds has promoted and himself expressed similar sentiments regarding the Obama/Wright matter, albeit in less explicit form. That's how the right-wing always works. The more respectable venues promote more tepid versions of the filth being spewed by the darker corners of the noise machine, so as to keep a safe distance while simultaneously ensuring that it ends up widely circulated (see e.g., Obama's madrassa education, Bill Clinton's string of rape victims and drug running operations, John McCain's black illegitimate baby, and John Kerry's Swift Boat adventures).

Republicans have done this routinely and successfully for years, actively courting "American-hating" extremists such as Pat Robertson, and even electing to the Senate radicals such as James Inhofe (who suggested the U.S. was to blame for the 9/11 attacks by angering God with insufficient support for Israel). That's precisely why John McCain is able actively to embrace the likes of John Hagee and Rod Parsely with virtually no consequences. I can't be held responsible for all of the views of someone I praise and embrace, declares McCain.

In any event, University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos has an Op-Ed in today's Rocky Mountain News which examines the Instapundit/Instapunk matter and highlights exactly the points that actually were being made. While Democrats are constantly forced by manufactured controversies generated by the right-wing noise machine and their media allies to "repudiate" and "renounce" a never ending carousel of "extremists" ranging from the moderate to the irrelevant (Michael Moore, MoveOn, Louis Farrakhan, Ward Churchill, etc. etc.), the GOP establishment for years has tied itself at the hip to hate-mongering extremists along the lines of John Hagee, Rod Parsley, Pat Roberston, Ann Coulter, and all sorts of various Instapunks, with no repercussions or accountability whatsoever.