On the subject of dealing in good faith with people who never have and never would, I think that Conor Friedsdorf deserves some credit for this post at Sullivan’s. The point was to answer some writer who got butthurt about Friedsdorf dismissing Andrew McCarthy as a nut (sample book title: How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda). IMO his answer is all the more effective for the length that he goes to try to accommodate the other person’s perspective and give McCarthy the benefit of the doubt. It could just be me, but I prefer that kind of argument to ten thousand snarky ‘shorter’s.
No doubt that two of the next three things he writes will piss me off and the third will involve cats. Still, it is nice to have someone very politely try to retrieve the standard of intelligent and honest(ish) writing on the right from embarrassments like Cap’n Ed and Megan McArdle.
Violet
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I’m happy to give the benefit of the doubt, but would prefer to wait until I see a trend.
matoko_chan
i think i should drop a Black Sun safe on you too.
Fridersdorf = EDK = Douchebag = McMegan
they are all the same, bourgie conservative strokin’ the e-peen. fap-fap-fap markets!
w/e they say up front they still believe there are “good” ideas in conservatism.
and that is a lie, empirically.
they still perpetuate the eumeme that “we are all the same” and the Myth of divided government.
the Myth of Divided Government is that bad, stupid, and empirically wrong ideas deserve equal time and equal representation, just because the other side holds them.
Im an empiricist.
there are no good conservative ideas.
Conservatism has FAILED.
Friersdorf and EDK and Douchebag are pushing the same recycled conservative shit as McArdle and McCarthy and Cap’n Stupid.
they are just more subtle, and they sure fooled you.
Rick Taylor
__
I don’t see that it has to be either or. I tend towards longer arguments that give people the benefit of the doubt, a pithy response can sometimes cut through bullshit more effectively. I find Atrios often jarring, but also sometimes eye opening. There’s room for both kinds of arguments and for people who take different approaches.
Laertes
Yeah, I wa impressed with that piece too. I think he’s going to find that Berlinski isn’t capable of responding int that same spirit.
Yutsano
Cats piss you off? Mine is adorable. Annoying at times, but still amazingly cute.
NickM
I’m pretty sick of young Conor, but I do have to admit he lays a pretty good smackdown on McCarthy and Berlinski for defending him.
BGinCHI
Andrew McCarthy was also terrible in “St Elmo’s Fire.”
eldorado
you really don’t have to read further than the title.
Sarcastro
It takes two to tango.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@Violet: He’s written some other good stuff while Sully’s out, which makes his forays into inanity (“A Writer at Balloon Juice…”) all the more frustrating.
And yes, it’s a pretty good post on a hot and complex topic. Very damned few people in the US have even heard of the Muslim Brotherhood before recent events. Pushing back on people who want to use them as the “new fearful boogeyman”* is a public service, and should be applauded.
– * I can’t be a Conservative of that stripe. I’m just not that afraid of what’s waiting in the dark. Or, for that matter, in my closet.
John Cole
If you read her book Menace in Europe, you will understand why Claire Berlinski finds Andy McCarthy so persuasive.
Scott
Friedsdorf writes an excellent smackdown there that’s pretty much impossible to argue with.
His reward will be that he’ll be denounced as an Enemy of America on some show on Fox.
The Moar You Know
@matoko_chan: I’ve got to agree with you on this. “Standing athwart history, yelling ‘STOP'” is not helpful. It doesn’t do anything but slow down the progress of the human condition.
Gotta go with you on this, too. Just because Friedsdorf the Idiot decided to be articulate and well-spoken this time instead of a foaming at the mouth rage machine, as is his usual modus operandi, is hardly a reason to give him kudos when his core beliefs continue to remain fundamentally wrong.
cleek
yeah right. like McCarthy, or anyone who thinks he’s right, is going to be persuaded by any kind of reasoning – whether 10,000 shorters or 10,000 link-filled words. by the arguments they make, these people have already proven that they’re uninterested in logic, evidence or reasoning – they know what they know dammit, and things which don’t confirm what they know are lies by evil people, which only further confirm what they already know.
kth
Conor is actually being sort of wily here (though perhaps some of it is inadverternt). He is pleading with this Ms. Berlinski that there is a line separating her from nutjobs like Andy McCarthy. But Berlinski (who is no doubt quite a piece of work) is insisting, no, I don’t see any such line.
OK, lady, there’s no difference between you and Andy McCarthy. Good to know.
(edit) if you click through and through, you’ll see that two of the sages that Claire Berlinski, Ed., is following are John Yoo and Mark Steyn.
sb
I was going to type something simlar to what Cleek said but instead, I’ll just do this:
What Cleek said.
They’re wrong? They lied? They don’t care.
CK MacLeod
All of which are or have been conservative ideas, at one time or another, or in one way or another.
You’re right though that “empirical” American conservatism… well, any political movement in which Andy McCarthy (or Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin) is a “leading voice” is impossible to take seriously except as a problem. As the old saying goes, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than empirical American conservatism.”
Tom Hilton
I often find Friedersdorf relatively reasonable; he’s someone I don’t agree with a lot of the time, but his thought processes are not wholly alien to me (as, say, Michelle Bachmann’s are).
I would sure as hell rather get into a discussion with Friedersdorf (about almost anything) than with either Hamsher or Greenwald. Friedersdorf would be generally fairly honest, while Hamsher and Greenwald are habitually dishonest.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@BGinCHI: Wasn’t he terrible in everything?
Tim F.
@kth: I used to try that gambit all the time when conservatives would show up around here. It never worked.
In fact, DougJ’s schtick was entirely predicated on the idea that people like Berlinski cannot and will not write off people on their side of the calvinball net as counterproductive nutbags. When he started it I thought the idea seemed silly but no, Doug was fucking psychic. He nearly brought the comment sections of Protein Wisdom and Red State to their knees.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@The Moar You Know: There is value in having brakes. But not the kind that lock up and keep you in 1950.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@cleek: It’s really not about the writers convincing each other, in and of itself. If it was, I’m sure an email exchange would be far more useful and less stressful to all involved.
It’s really about the readership. It’s about the people reading the discussion, and convincing them. It matters that the target might change their minds, but it matters more than a reasonable and intelligent counter to ugly Islamophobia is being projected into the conversation.
Turbulence
@Tim F.:
Whoah. Can you tell us more about DougJ’s schtick. What exactly did he do the commenting hordes at RedState or Protein Wisdom?
Tom Hilton
@cleek:
The point isn’t persuading McCarthy or anyone like him. The point is persuading people who might read McCarthy but are not completely insane.
That said, the shorter model can be useful to the extent that it creates a useful meme–a soundbite that sums up the lunacy in a way that speaks to people who aren’t necessarily on your side. Most of the time it isn’t that; most of the time, the shorter model is venting. Which has its place, but isn’t exactly functional.
One more thing: there are twice as many conservatives as liberals in this godforsaken country. If we start from the assumption that we won’t persuade anyone who doesn’t agree with us, then we start from the assumption that everything we do is completely futile.
matoko_chan
@Turbulence: when was he at PW?
when i was a guest blogger?
lawl.
jibeaux
@Barb (formerly Gex):
You’ve got something against “Mannequin?”
matoko_chan
@Tom Hilton: it is futile. because conservatism is selection for stupid.
conservatives exhibit factblocking and backfire effect– being proven wrong only increases the salience of the fact.
that is why there are more conservatives– there are more stupid people… 75% of the population is below one std of the mean of IQ.
McArdle and Friedersdorf and EDK wouldnt last 10 secs on the other side as intelligentsia– they would be shredded.
But they can succeed as conservatives.
Conservatism– where even the smart people are retards.
so egaliterian.
lawl.
Elvis Elvisberg
@Tom Hilton:
I don’t read Hamsher, but I do read Greenwald, and have never found him to be dishonest. In fact, he updates his posts with corrections meticulously. He’s perhaps a bit more strident than I am, and a bit too snarky for my tastes on Twitter sometimes, but that’s a far cry from dishonest. What specifically are you thinking of?
@jibeaux: Mannequin was filmed at Woolworth’s.
Ash Can
Good post. Now watch, Friedersdorf is going to worry that kudos from Balloon Juice are going to blow his reputation, and his next column will be a monument to stupidity.
@matoko-chan: It’s a school day. You should be paying attention to your teacher, not playing around on the Internet. Put the i-phone away.
Linda Featheringill
@Turbulence:
Hey, Turbulence! How’s the family?
ed drone
@Barb (formerly Gex):
Those 1950 brakes were “New Departure Coaster Brakes,” and all US-made bikes had them. I don’t know if the few “English bikes” had ’em, ’cause no one in my neighborhood in Des Moines could afford an English bike, with its fancy three (3 — count them!) gears.
My $10 no-name US bike had the New Departure brakes, and I was satisfied with them. You should be, too.
Ed
jibeaux
@Elvis Elvisberg:
I’m getting a Ween song there.
Thanks, now I’ll be doing Beavis and Butthead impressions all day! WEEN! WEEN!
BGinCHI
@jibeaux: He was great in that until he moved.
Tim F.
@Turbulence: DougJ practically invented comment spoofing. He would register with some rightwing handle and slowly test how far out he could go and have the real conservatives defend him from other people arguing with him or laughing at him. He used to hang out at PW and RS and nudge comment threads further into crazytown by criticizing other commenters from the right. Similarly, he might or might not have been involved in the hilarious Blogs4Brownback spoof blog.
PW and RS went completely apeshit when they figured out his schtick. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Turbulence
@Linda Featheringill: They’re all good so far. One of my older relatives is over 90 and had to spend some time in the hospital for pneumonia, but when he was discharged, his son drove him home without incident.
Thanks for asking!
Turbulence
@Tim F.: It would be awesome to see some of those threads…maybe its time for DougJ to do a spoofing retrospective post?
Woodrowfan
Isn’t McCarthy also a Birther??That kind of stupid can’t be fixed…
jibeaux
@Tim F.:
Did they actually figure it out? The target audience of How Obama Embraces Sharia’s Agenda did? Now I have to know how.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Turbulence:What do you mean, “retrospective”? There is a complete absence of evidence that he’s ever stopped spoofing – including here, also, too.
Come to think of it, I’ve never seen him and matoko at the same time …
eemom
@Tom Hilton:
tee hee. A swipe at Hamsher/Greenwald, and a chance to piss off Cole and start another flame war, is never OT.
Yer a man after my own heart.
matoko_chan
@Tim F.: what nics did he use?
just curious.
my nic at PW was nishizono shinji, after the MPD Psycho manga and the epic Iissi Miiyake miniseries.
i considered nishi to be the embodiment of pure unadulterated evil at the time.
John Cole
DougJ also wrecked the Just One Minute comments section.
Mark S.
Even though there’s quite a bit of competition, Andy McCarthy is easily the most loathsome creature who writes for National Review. McCarthy’s hatred of Muslims rivals Pam Gellar, he is completely dishonest, and he molests children (at least, that’s what I believe, and I have as much proof as Andy does of Obama’s alliance with al-Qaeada). If McCarthy died tomorrow, the world would be a much better place.
(Gimme a Moore award)
matoko_chan
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: scrap that. DougJ is a bioluddite.
quelle horroure! jamais de ma vie!
Catsy
@Tim F.: Link nao.
Culture of Truth
It may very well be necessary for those remaining rational few on the right to expend 10,000 words repudiating a work like How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda but for those on the left to do so is a timesink playing into the hands of extemists who throw up distractions to their incompetence.
Ed Marshall
@Elvis Elvisberg:
When Glenn Greenwald starts doing civil rights and puts his lawyer hat on, he gets really, really, slippery. I understand what he is doing, he is making a case. What good lawyers do isn’t to lie, it’s to arrange the truth in a neat package and hide and inconvenient pieces of the truth from view.
As an example, when he was taking a flamethrower to Obama’s DOJ over defending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, he *knows* that ethically DOJ has to defend Federal Law. He’s not stupid. There is an argument there that if the government knows the law is just not going to pass constitutional muster that it could just throw in the towel, but that argument is a bit harder to make.
Instead, you got a bunch of horseshit about how Obama was doing this because he hates gay people, and he’s a coward, and yadayadayada. What bugs me about Glenn is that he *knows* better, I understand when he wants to make a case he does what he does. His readers don’t seem to understand what he is doing, and it’s Glenn Greenwald, The Only Honest Man Telling Truth to Power.
Loneoak
I would love to see DougJ’s path of destruction. Anyone have links?
matoko_chan
@Culture of Truth:
false. there are no rationals on the right. only grifters, spinners, and intellectual whores sukking bankstah cock like Conor and EDK.
Paul in KY
@matoko_chan: A reasoned critique of modern conservatism :-)
J. Michael Neal
@Ed Marshall: Greenwald also flat out lies. I’ve posted this before, but just as one example, here is how he reported an email conversation with Ryan Singel.
There are other examples, but I don’t feel like spending more than a couple of minutes redocumenting something that’s been obvious to anyone who pays attention.
Paul in KY
@matoko_chan: Another fine comment on the modern conservative zeitgeist. Keep em coming!
KG
@Culture of Truth: it is absolutely necessary for the rational on each side to police the extremes on their respective sides. but it makes little sense for the rational on each side to engage the extreme on the other side.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@Culture of Truth: Oh, I wish.
But anti-Islamic sentiments aren’t subject to America’s political divides. Just look at how people like Dean decided to kick the Park 51 project around, rather than defend their right to build — much less understand that it’s not a mosque.
It’s like saying that African-Americans never need to have to explain our POV to fellow liberals. Only in our dreams is such a thing true — and we’re far more well-known, well-documented, and entrenched in the American Left that American Muslims (and we’re actually talking about another country whore expatriates are only a percentage of the Muslims in this country, but you get my point, I hope.)
I wish my side didn’t need such a long discussion, but the point is that we oftentimes do.
Elvis Elvisberg
@Ed Marshall: Yeah, I get what you’re saying about his tone. IIRC, his argument about defending those laws was that the Obama administration went further than the Bush administration had, that it claimed Teh Geyh was even worse than Bush had. You might be right about his arguments on that point. And yeah, I know how rare & difficult it is to decline to contest opinions– Walter Dellinger, I think, wrote an OLC memo on that back in the Clinton administration.
Redshift
OT: While this environmental issue is serious, I had to chuckle at the headline:
Wolverine population threatened by climate change
Wolverines!
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@The Moar You Know: This right here, repeated loudly and forcefully.
catclub
@The Moar You Know: ” there are no good conservative ideas.”
“Gotta go with you on this, too.”
I can think of one: ‘Before we change things, let’s figure out if the solution is necessary and an improvement.’
Seems to me to be the essence of the (good kind of )
conservative ideas.
I can’t remember ever actually seeing it applied in the wild.
It usually is twisted to: ‘Things the way they are, are the best ever, and cannot ever change.’ (See the US healthcare debate.)
BTD
@Elvis Elvisberg:
Amazing how Hamsher and Greenwald can be worked into any discussion.
Loneoak
@catclub:
I think that’s a perfect example of how conservatism is largely bereft of any good ideas. That is not a conservative idea, it is just a good idea.
Point to any liberal that disagrees with it. Point out any policy differences that flow from that idea. Then I might agree its a conservative idea.
Political ideologies are about how the world is and ought to be put together, not about cliched nostrums.
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@NickM: I agree. It’s an impressive and thoughtful takedown. And the second thing I’ve liked since he’s been on understudy duty this time. She will not respond with as much grace, or sanity. That’s my prediction.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@catclub: Change always makes winners an losers. Conservativism always gets twisted this way because it is adopted by the current winners. Therefore any examined change looks bad from the conservative viewpoint.
Ed Marshall
@Elvis Elvisberg:
Maybe, he got to it in an update. I know that in real time, when the news went out that DOJ was going to defend the policy, I checked Glenn’s blog and was struck by the fact that he never, even mentioned the obligation. I’m just a poli-sci student who wants to go to law school, and I knew why DOJ was doing what they were doing. Glenn passed the bar.
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@Paul in KY: You’re not helping here. And I’m close enough to KY to kick your ass. :)
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Loneoak: This. Somehow, the framing has been changed to assume that no one else cares about the effects of their policies. Only conservatives do.
Smedley
This is one Conor post that hasn’t had me praying ever more fervently for Sully’s return to health. In fact, it’s the first that I’ve been able to read all the way through without coughing up a hairball.
Paul in KY
@Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q): Ok, OK, I’ll stop the Matoko fawning.
You know I feel the same way about em.
Tim F.
@Loneoak: @Catsy: Links might be hard to come by. You have to keep in mind that DougJ was extremely cagey about his spoofing for a reason. His primary psychological weapon was the paranoia that any slightly off-the-wall commenter could really be him, laughing at you. Giving away all his handles would give away IP addresses, emails, etc. So there won’t be an authoritative history anywhere written by the man himself.
Meanwhile the target sites practically restructured their comments from the ground up after they found out about him. I believe that the threads that Doug obviously screwed with were scrubbed out of shame and only he knows which ones didn’t get scrubbed.
back in 2005 you could still figure it out, more or less, by searching for rightwingers who were just a bit loonier than the rest, but these days rightwing commentary has run too far off the rails to even bother spoofing.
catclub
@Barb (formerly Gex): Exactly what I thought about (unsuccessfully) expressing.
Allan
If Conor were any kind of debater, he would have opened by pointing out that Berlinski is discredited by her opening gambit of derailing the argument with the “Don’t you have more important issues to think about” meme:
thus nothing that follows is worthy of discussion. He should have invited her to come back when she grows the fuck up.
piratedan
@Barb (formerly Gex): I thought he was passable in Heaven Help Us and Class, otherwise I had the opinion that he couldn’t have acted his way out of an open phone booth
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@Paul in KY: I don’t disagree on the mendacious ignorance of the current crop of “conservatives” but some things should not be encouraged.
kindness
Connor is a putz. He’s kind of similar to Andrew in that he says reasonable things some times, Sadly, Connor usually follows those things up with a defense of the idiots in Republicanworld. No…..I’m looking forward to Andy getting better, he is at least a little more honest (but not always).
Barb (formerly Gex)
@kindness: At some point, you have to grow concerned about all the nice young reasonable men who continue to mostly support monstrous policies. If it was only Dick Cheney and the Koch Brothers selling conservatism, we’d be doing better.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@piratedan: I’m just saying, looking at both of the Andrew McCarthys in their entirety, I’m not sure I need either of their works.
Culture of Truth
@Woodrow
But anti-Islamic sentiments aren’t subject to America’s political divides.
Perhaps, but the right is constantly trying to get liberals waste time denying they hate America, or some such nonsense, not to mention denials give such ideas credence. It’s a trap, and Obama iz TEH Jihadist1! crap is not worthy of 10,000 words or even 10.
cleek
@catclub:
IMO, conservatism, like liberalism, has little representation. the people who get elected lean one way or the other, but first principles are only used for rhetoric, not for lawmaking. and lawmaking is mostly just dealmaking.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Once upon a time you could actually debate with “conservatives,” but then the Confederates took their movement over with their predictable meanness and stupidity.
My opinion should probably be taken with a large grain of salt; because I truly, deeply hate those confederate fuckers with the heat of any dozen supernovas.
BGinCHI
@Barb (formerly Gex): Andrew McCarthy vs. Andy McCarthy Texas Cage Match is the only way to settle this.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@BGinCHI: Probably the one and only time I will enjoy their work.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@cleek: Once upon a time, I would have agreed with this. Since the confederates took over the Republican party, tho… deal-making is nearly impossible; and the confederates are just determined to enact the most hateful, mean-spirited, and just plain STUPID bills they possibly can.
Polar Bear Squares
This is a very good post. Thanks for linking to it.
But isn’t this what modern conservatism is about? A lack of good faith? I havene’t really heard any persuasive anti-choice arguments. That’s because the reason they’re making these arguments is because they want to ban abortion and they want Roe v. Wade overturned. All the arguments seem geared to this end. Even ridiculous arguments like the Health Care Law is going to subsidize abortion or doctors who perform abortions are babykillers. Same with gay marriage. If they hafto say the gay agenda wants to destroy marriage as we know it, they will say it.
This goes back to bad faith. Can you trust a movement hellbent on end results as opposed to an actual discussion of the question at hand? I don’t really get the vibe wingnuts want a discussion. To them, that discussion has been settled. They want conversion. And they want conversion at all costs. If they hafto make an implausible argument to do so (government takeover of health care, gay people are more likely to be pedophiles, Obama wants to impose Sharia Law) they’ll do it and stick by it. That’s the epitome of bad faith if you ask me.
You could add Palin, Gingrich, Beck, Hannity. Even so called moderates like Pawlenty and Collins. They all do this. I’m astounded by how many bad faith arguments have filtered out into our mainstream dialogue. Yet, I’m at a loss on how to combat it.
Benjamin Cisco
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
FTFY.
Mark S.
@Allan:
I like how Conor didn’t bother to link Claire (How do you focus a camera?) Berlinski, Ed.
Svensker
I give Conor credit for taking the time to debunk McCarthy’s crap. For myself, something that makes as much sense as “honk whistle scarf makes pootie red” is just too ridiculous to even try to bother with.
How these people get a national audience is truly astonishing.
El Cid
You are all missing the biggest story: the Egyptian protests are because of the Muslim Brotherhood, who learned their tactics from Code Pink and Bill Ayers.
eemom
@El Cid:
from the utterly moronic to the impressively well-reasoned, check out this piece
http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/02/game_over_the_chance_for_democracy_in_egypt_is_lost
It’s depressing but persuasive.
catclub
@Mark S.: Ricochet – where you pay $3.47/month to post on a blog with the likes of John Yoo and Mark Steyn.
I think PT Barnum had something to say about that.
Bill Murray
The real question is what does young Conor do the next time McCarthy writes a stupid piece along the same lines. Ten thousand word, reasoned takedowns are good, but if you try to do it every time a conservative pundit writes the same stupid thing, you will never finish. Which is why after a point, the shorter is the only way to go. Plus, ridicule generally works better than reason in getting the undecideds into your ideas.
les
I don’t know, aren’t we just burying the bar here? Friedersdorf is at best a well spoken idiot; but an idiot surely, with idiotic things to say. What’s the premise of his praise garnering post? That Berlinski, who is defending Andy McCarthy, is such a star conservative pundit, such a font of foreign affairs sanity, that Conor must exert himself to stay in her good graces! When your premise is that fucked, who cares how well spoken the piece is? Jesus, conservatism is so lost in this country that when a conservative doesn’t puke on his own shoes trying to speak, we pat his head and give him a treat.
El Cid
I wouldn’t want to over-emphasize Mubarak’s brilliance, given a lot of it follows standard authoritarian counter-democratic strategy (often from US advisers and PR firms in the Latin American variety).
But not for one minute did I think that the US was interested in any sort of serious regime change in such a way as to change Egypt’s ability to do what we hire them to do. And such a threat could arise if the US weren’t one of if not the leading factor in determining what a likely outcome of all this would be.
It’s pretty typical for the US to do various statements of condemnations of trouble from all sides and expressing serious concerns that our ally in this or that nation has been failing to act swiftly enough against this or that various charge.
While clarifying the close role played by leader X and country A for the last umptdozen years.
And then when some new guy or government is shuffled in, sometimes with obvious US influence (you can’t get much more pathetically obvious than the Haitian ‘government’), sometimes with pretty clear but more subtle US influence, we express high hopes for the chance of working together to solve the sorts of problems which the prior leadership wasn’t able to do.
That new leadership may very well be better for the population, but a huge foreign power like the US will prioritize the foreign policy establishment’s interests (often the opposite of your or my interests) and some serious and unpredictable democracy can threaten those.
Mark S.
@catclub:
I’ve never heard of it. It doesn’t even get links from memeorandum, which is how I keep up with the latest from Confederate Yankee, Sister Toldjah, and Dan Riehl.
Tom Hilton
@Elvis Elvisberg: I think @Ed Marshall touches on the fundamental problem (the incompatibility between the roles of lawyer and journalist, and the fact that he acts as the former while presenting himself as the latter), although Ed puts it more generously than I would. The point there being that dishonesty is somewhat situational: behavior that is merely aggressive advocacy for a lawyer is, in a journalistic context, deceptive and unethical. Shoq has done a series of recent pieces (starting with this one) about Greenwald’s conflicting roles in the context of the Bradley Manning thing.
That said, I sure as hell wouldn’t want Greenwald representing me, because his diversions and evasions are too transparent to be effective–and are the kind of thing judges really, really hate. (In a class cert hearing last year, the other side put up a slide with a cherrypicked quote from a case that has been discussed extensively in a half dozen briefs. The judge looks at it and asks, “but what does the next sentence say?”–knowing full well that the very next sentence undermined the whole argument. Greenwald is operating on the level of those attorneys, and if he actually practiced I think he would keep getting nailed for it.)
@J. Michael Neal brings up an excellent example of Greenwald’s outright dishonesty (having read the Greenwald piece at issue there, I laughed out loud at his outraged denial that he was smearing the journalist). I think his reaction to Jamelle Bouie’s review of Markos’ book is worth checking out for the way it grossly misrepresents everything Jamelle actually said. Neither of these examples is isolated: Greenwald smears people, and he misrepresents opposing arguments, and he does both with such regularity that he may not even be aware he’s doing it.
eemom
@El Cid:
then I guess you disagree with the FP piece author to the extent he suggests the Obama WH has been a hapless dupe in this process.
Tom Hilton
@matoko_chan: And the problem with this is your underlying assumption that all people are either dedicated liberals or dedicated conservatives. Which is obviously untrue.
Again: if you assume that liberals cannot persuade people who are not themselves liberals, then you assume that nothing liberal can ever be achieved. Ever.
Cyrus
I’d also enjoy some DougJ “greatest hits” links. If Tim says they’ve mostly been scrubbed or reformatted, that’s fair enough, but it would be fun if DougJ would be willing to make any survivors available to us. You can find some yourself here; just google Balloon Juice for “spoof” and similar things and experiment a bit.
El Cid
@eemom: Yes and no.
First, it doesn’t seem to me that Springborn is portraying the US as hapless dupes.
Choosing to throw its weight behind the military government running Egypt — and which has done so for generations — is a policy choice, one which prioritized the group able to control the government without Mubarak, and which avoided the possibility of any participation in Egyptian governance which would have threatened US policy basics. I.e., independent and especially Islamicist and populist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
If the ‘humble pie’ is that the US continues to fund a troublesome regime which carries out its interests, then we’re fucking obese with ‘humble pie’.
When has the US chosen to risk its strategic regional interests by pushing an actual large and key regime toward real democracy?
For that matter, what sign is there that Israel (i.e., Israeli militarist policymakers) would have preferred the sort of modern, stable democratic society that Springborn had hoped for?
When is it new that the authoritarian regimes in charge of US client states in the Middle East have used anti-American population to manipulate the population?
When is it new that the US and Israel have chosen the repression and avoidance of a secular nationalist opposition such that the result is an opposition based in the other populist sector, radical Islam?
Hell, Israel funded Hamas, which didn’t take much time or much money to launch such a group to displace the secular Palestinian nationalist movement.
I think there’s a conflation of “US interests” meaning ‘what might be in the actual best interests of the US as you and I might consider it’ and ‘what the US foreign policy establishment defines them’.
Don’t get me wrong — the US (i.e., the Administration) would prefer that its authoritarian allies be replaced by respectable, modernist elected regimes; but only when the path there was clear, simple, controlled, and would yield and outcome largely identical to US foreign policy establishment interests.
Was anyone able to outline what the new democratic regime would look like? Who would head it? What strength would it have to hold and maintain power? How would it exclude or minimize the influence of forces the US opposed? How would it be known in advance that the new government would not only commit to but be objectively fixed to supporting current US priorities (in sum, at least)?
Such things are never truly known, but here’s a situation which directly affects the huge US priority with regard to Israel and more significantly, and the reason for US backing of Israeli militarist policies, the oil resources of the region including the also weak Saudi government.
Egypt’s military budget is about $3.7 billion. Of that, about $1.5 billion of that is provided by the US directly. That’s a lot of influence. That’s out of an entire government budget of under $60 billion.
The military isn’t just the army — it’s an economic institution with penetration into the economy: its own military industries, construction, and every other big Egyptian economic sector (agriculture and so forth).
Did or does the US have some allied interests from with the Egyptian military which could have eased Mubarak out to be replaced by some acceptable transitional government, maybe leading to new elections and a new slate of acceptable candidates?
Egypt isn’t Iraq — the US isn’t just going to ignore it if Egypt follows the Islamic fundamentalist path the US pushed Iraq into.
I’m not suggesting I had or have any specialized insight into the situation. And I don’t know what will happen still. Maybe the administration will see some further huge changes in the situation over the next months or year or whatever.
Maybe the next elections won’t be jokes. Maybe the military chooses to back some real reform for whatever reasons, maybe just more stability and less chance that their power and economic interests be threatened or reduced by instability. Maybe Mubarak will finally say ‘fuck it’ and leave for his next in charge to run things.
But I haven’t seen a strongly reliable outline that the US foreign policy establishment (i.e., the administration, state department, highest level foreign policy and military legislative committees, US military leadership, and the think tanks and policy adviser groups circulating between these institutions) had a set of fundamental policy demands, rather than whether or not Mubarak himself is in charge or if so how and such.
Again, I think the US FPE would very much at this stage prefer Mubarak to be gone (no one much cared before now, though) and repressive measures to be relieved, but I think that it’s more about what would come next and how it could be managed to be the transition desired by US foreign policy.
Stillwater
@Tom Hilton:
Gotta open fire against ya on this one Tom.
I often find Friedersdorf relatively reasonable; he’s someone I don’t agree with a lot of the time, but his thought processes are not wholly alien to me (as, say, Michelle Bachmann’s are).
You find his tone relatively reasonable, and as you’ve said on this very blog, civility is more important to you than content. Conor is fucking premier hack in profession (conservative punditry) where hackery is badge of honor. So, while you might enjoy a pleasant discussion with Conor about why women ought to be forced by the state to carry to term, he is and will always remain (until he shows otherwise) an intellectually dishonest water carrier for a dead ideology.
I would sure as hell rather get into a discussion with Friedersdorf (about almost anything) than with either Hamsher or Greenwald. Friedersdorf would be generally fairly honest, while Hamsher and Greenwald are habitually dishonest.
This makes no sense, except as an example of what constitutes – for you – civil discourse. That’s some pretty lean pickings there my friend.
Stillwater
@El Cid: But not for one minute did I think that the US was interested in any sort of serious regime change in such a way as to change Egypt’s ability to do what we hire them to do.
And, of course, you are right to think that. There’s a reason we pay them 1.3 billion Deniros a year. Why would anyone think that democratic values would trump the security role Egypt is paid to perform when they clearly haven’t in the past?
matoko_chan
@Tim F.: praps ill just ax Jeffie G.
in truth, when i was a conservitard and blogged at PW, i doubt i could have differentiated DougJ from the major hard core loons.
Hes indistinguishable from most of the cudlips here.
a bioluddite.
:)
matoko_chan
@El Cid: well, Mubaraks thugs are cracking journalist skulls today in advance of the big demos that coming tomorrow– after friday dihkr.
What is going on?
my guess is Mubarak is trying to draw the Brothers into taking a bigger role so he can play the islamofascism card. Murrican soljahs ropelining into Cairo is a big fat wet dream for him now.
i wonder how many of the MB are in the army.
hmmm.
Blotto von Bismarck
@ Cyrus: You can start here. There’s lots of good spoofing here, especially his War on Christmas material.
@34:
If he contributed, he wasn’t one of the regulars. Sisyphus and Psycheout didn’t have the finesse of DougJ.
Stillwater
@matoko_chan: Murrican soljahs ropelining into Cairo is a big fat wet dream for him now.
I agree. But with the military pretty clearly staying neutral, knowing how their bread is buttered, it doesn’t look good for Mubarak. His days are hours. That means free elections of civil government (with US support of course), and a return to the state-client relationship for military (with the same US support).
Stillwater
@Blotto von Bismarck:
Why can’t we get this kind of snark here at BJ? When did he trade snarkoliciousness for seriosity?
matoko_chan
@Stillwater: retard alert.
Ummm…mistah packer…the iranians SUCEEDED in their revolution against the American puppet-tyrant Shah.
tch tch, how soon these old people forget.
matoko_chan
@Stillwater: In 1979 the army turned against the Shah.
i wonder what will happen tomorrow.
praps Mubarak will find out baiting the Brothers is a bad idea.
A Writer At Balloon-Juice
@John Cole:
That was my best moment as a troll. That had to be craziest comment section I have ever seen.
Stillwater
@matoko_chan: Well, to give him a little credit, he didn’t have too many other options. The military was neutral (which he should have interpreted as check-mate), the US and internationals called for serious reforms, he played the ‘let anarchy reign til the masses realize how good they got it’ card to no avail, now he’s tempting fate by engaging the Brotherhood. But really, he had no other options. I just hope the military stays neutral and he runs through the citizens willing to be bought off right quick.
And that fuckstick at the Dish is a fuckstick.
Stillwater
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice: Enough of this insider-only adulation. Link please.
sneezy
@catclub:
“I can think of [a good conservative idea]: ‘Before we change things, let’s figure out if the solution is necessary and an improvement.’”
By some definition of “conservative,” I suppose that’s true. But whatever that definition is, it has not been operational in American politics for a good long time. And as Loneoak points out, there really isn’t any sense in which it’s uniquely or even characteristically “conservative,” by almost any definition.
A Writer At Balloon-Juice
@Stillwater:
Here.
It ends with Maguire editing my comments, class act that he is.
Bill Arnold
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice:
You weren’t “Cecil Turner” were you? He was fun to argue with.
El Cid
@matoko_chan: I think that the thugs were called into attacking anti-government demonstrators for the same reasons they always are: to attack demonstrators and attempt to drive them away or weaken them; to frighten others from joining the crowds; to create a sense for at least some intended audiences that spontaneous social forces support the government against the dangerous radicals…
To play the Islamic radical threat card, I’d do different things. A classic approach is to fake incidents and communications suggesting that one part of the opposition attacked another part. So you could very much make it seem that either some part of a secular opposition group attacked or burned or violated a mosque or Muslim Brotherhood-admired religious figure. That might prompt responses and counter-responses, whether directly or via media-based portrayals. Or of course both.
If the point about American soldiers in Cairo referenced some trope of discussion, okay; personally I can’t imagine any scenario under which the US would send forces into Cairo. Maybe I’m just not being creative or not, or am tired for a moment.
matoko_chan
@El Cid: i think the clampdown is to try to avert the mosque based protests tomorrow, and to remove the cameras and journalists from operation….i think hes trying to hide how big the demos will be, an’ also to draw out the Brothers. the Brothers have been very chill so far.
if the army turns on him, (Hillary did send a message to the generals), he might fall tomorrow.
nah. the MB is solid. i dont see that helping Mubarak at all. if Mubarak is percieved as directly attacking al-Islam, hes toast. he knows that.
Khamenei could pull that shit an get away with it, cause both sides were islamic.
Mubarak is secular, and tainted with shaitan (the US) as well.
matoko_chan
dateline Egypt:
the army is protecting the protestors for the Day of Departure.
Wat i say? the Brothers are very, very wise. again, i predict elBaradei as the president. He will be the Fouad Siniora to the MB’s Hizb’. The islamic party will control the legislative body and the people will have justice.
El Cid
@matoko_chan: It doesn’t matter as much whether or not the MB is solid. Authoritarian leaders don’t restrict themselves to strategies which work. A classic attempt is to try to divide the opposition against itself. Tyrants do in fact do foolish things. But dividing the opposition against itself is not a stupid goal.
Actually, one of the patterns of authoritarians dealing with large, very serious, and not centrally organized rebellion is to attempt to make deals with the largest opposition groups. It can be more threatening for them to grasp that what they face aren’t centrally organized by one group, and they often hope to be able to co-opt such a large group.
Tom Hilton
@Stillwater:
This is a Greenwaldian misrepresentation of two separate comments I’ve made.
First: what I said about Friedersdorf was that I find his thought processes understandable–i.e., I can see how he reaches his conclusions even when I disagree with those conclusions. That may not be a familiar concept to you; in any case, it has little or nothing to do with ‘tone’.
Second: in the comment to which you refer, I said (paraphrasing, but paraphrasing faithfully) how you treat people is more important than having the ‘right’ opinions. (In a subsequent comment to that thread, I qualified this to exclude people who are able to enforce or broadcast their opinion to a degree that can cause practical harm (or good) to other people; I’m talking about complete nobodies like you and me here.) Just so you know, opinion != content. Your opinions are vastly less important and less reliable than you think they are; in fact, unless you are one of the select few who can make their opinion manifest, the practical impact of your opinion (for good or ill) approaches zero.
On the other hand, how you treat those around you–whether you treat them with kindness, consideration, and courtesy, or with general disregard for their humanity–does have practical impact. If you make someone cry, or make someone laugh, that’s impact–a vastly greater impact than your mere opinion has on anyone. The fact that the impact from your treatment of others diminishes with (figurative) distance does not eliminate the possibility that your treatment of a complete stranger could have some positive or negative consequences.
The belief that holding the ‘right’ opinions is more important than how you treat people is a kind of rephrasing of the notion that the ends justify the means. Of course, ends are inherently speculative while means are concrete, and the belief that a given end justifies given means that are not otherwise acceptable is nearly always based in wishful thinking. Similarly, the belief that one’s opinions are important is based in eliding the difference between the opinion itself and the practical implementation of the opinion.
matoko_chan
@El Cid: the problem is, Noble Campeador, that your long battle against the Moors has corrupted your view point. al-Islam is a consensus religion, not an authoritarian one.
And you are also quite insane if you think Mubarak would seek to “co-opt” the Brothers. They are mortal enemies ideologically with a long and tragic history of antipathy… and blood debt.
matoko_chan
@El Cid: also, too.
very clever I think. once there are free and fair elections, the MB will rule. and the west will be powerless to stop them.
:)
Stillwater
@Tom Hilton: I don’t disagree with anything you said in this post, except the prioritization of civility over the politics being espoused. Conor advocates policies that are extremely harmful, but you seem to give him a pass because his words may impact someone (on a first order level) positively (or negatively, as the case may be), That he is – in some sense of the word – civil, even tho his views, if implemented are extremely uncivil.
Of course it does. So, granting that Greenwald uses hyperbolic language and occasionally misrepresents facts (not endemically, like you said upthread) in a larger critique, he does so to highlight instances where in his view people are being treated without kindness and consideration, and in which their civil rights are being violated. Is this just a different side of same coin? Is it categorically different?
Also, your incivility regarding GG seems to undercut your broader point about civility as a necessary condition for political discourse, and the impacts our words have on people.
I just don’t get it.
Stillwater
@Stillwater: Adding to the above: Conor is either a liar or deluded wrt to the relevant facts and evidence, let alone valid argument forms, that he uses to advocate for his favored, very anti-social, policies. How you overlook all that because his arguments are understandable to you is beyond me.
Tom Hilton
@Stillwater: You’re arguing that the ends justify the means. You’re phrasing it differently, perhaps because you don’t want to admit to yourself that that’s what you’re arguing, but it comes down to the same thing.
Your reaction to Friedersdorf and Greenwald is very telling: you perceive bad faith in anyone who disagrees with your policy preferences, and good faith in anyone who agrees with them, no matter how scrupulous the former or how unscrupulous the latter. That standard is silly at best, and at worst monstrous–that is, it can lead to monstrous consequences. That’s the standard according to which some people called for primarying Bernie Sanders, perhaps the single silliest moment in a season notable for the amount and volume of its silliness.
But as I’ve said, that’s not my standard. I don’t give Greenwald’s habitual dishonesty a pass (or try to trivialize it as “hyperbolic language and occasionally misrepresent[ing] facts”) simply because he happens to share some of my policy preferences. YMMV.
Stillwater
@Tom Hilton: I don’t even know what you’re saying here. I’m not arguing that the ends justify the means – if someone is lying, or ignorant, or intentionally misleading, then they ought to get called out on that. Conor is a habitual liar about policies that have no basis in fact or reason. He is disingenguous as a matter of course. GG is honest and factual most of the time, hyperbolic frequently, and intentionally overlooks his own errors on occasion. If honesty is the criterion (and not ideological preferences) then GG is light years ahead of Conor. It just so happens that based on my understanding of the relevant background evidence in conjunction with evidence and argument presented by GG or COnor, I side with GG frequently and Conor rarely. Those conclusions are based not on a preconception of who’s side these guys are on, but on the arguments they present.
Christ man, it’s not about sides, but about good policy (the content of the positions advanced). You used to know the difference.
Stillwater
BTW, when I say Conor is a ‘habitual liar’ I’m actually giving him credit that he probably doesn’t deserve. It’s more likely that he’s simply an ignorant ideologue who refuses to acknowledge any facts that conflict with his world view. In that case, it’s best to just say he’s ignorant – but it’s still not enough to say he’s arguing in good faith. Part of the responsibility of opinion makers who aren’t propagandists is to understand the relevant facts in play.
Tom Hilton
@Stillwater:
It is entirely possible to argue for one’s policy preferences without excusing the bad behavior of anyone who agrees with them (or imputing bad faith to anyone who doesn’t).
Stillwater
@Tom Hilton: But you’ve gone way beyond simply criticizing GG’s bad behavior. If that were the case, you’d accept the remainder of his arguments that weren’t corrupted. What you’ve done is employ the liberal one percent doctrine: any liberal who deviates more than one percent from the tactics and views I support is 100% rejected.