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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Blog Chewtoy Long Read: “Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller?”

Blog Chewtoy Long Read: “Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller?”

by Anne Laurie|  January 22, 201810:15 pm| 141 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Readership Capture, Russiagate, Assholes, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

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I care if the President of the United States has a corrupt relationship with the Russian government. https://t.co/ajT8ys9xgN pic.twitter.com/A8v89BcZe1

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 21, 2018

What committed activist could resist the lure of a long-form profile in a glossy NYC-based magazine, nestled between full-page ads for Rolex watches and Broadway hits? Unfortunately, despite Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s best beat-sweetening efforts, Greenwald’s logorrheic arrogance and simmering resentment of all the mundanes who fail to appreciate his brilliance make him sound less like Andrew Sullivan and more like Ted Cruz:

It’s 10:45 p.m. Rio de Janeiro time. Glenn Greenwald and I are finishing dinner at a deserted bistro in Ipanema. The restaurant, which serves its sweating beer bottles in metal buckets and goes heavy on the protein, is almost aggressively unremarkable (English menus on the table, a bossa-nova version of “Hey Jude” on the stereo). Greenwald avoids both meat and alcohol but seems to enjoy dining here. “I really believe that if I still lived in New York, the vast majority of my friends would be New York and Washington media people and I would kind of be implicitly co-opted.” He eats a panko-crusted shrimp. “It just gives me this huge buffer. You’ve seen how I live, right? When I leave my computer, that world disappears.”

Greenwald, now 50, has seemed to live in his own bubble in Rio for years, since well before he published Edward Snowden’s leaks and broke the domestic-spying story in 2013 — landing himself a Pulitzer Prize, a book deal, and, in time, the backing of a billionaire (that’s Pierre Omidyar) to start a muckraking, shit-stirring media empire (that’s First Look Media, home to the Intercept, though its ambitions have been downgraded over time). But he seems even more on his own since the election, just as the agitated left has regained the momentum it lost in the Obama years.

The reason is Russia. For the better part of two years, Greenwald has resisted the nagging bipartisan suspicion that Trumpworld is in one way or another compromised by a meddling foreign power. If there’s a conspiracy, he suspects, it’s one against the president; where others see collusion, he sees “McCarthyism.” Greenwald is predisposed to righteous posturing and contrarian eye-poking — and reflexively more skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community than of those it tells us to see as “enemies.”…

Thanks to this never-ending hot take, Greenwald has been excommunicated from the liberal salons that celebrated him in the Snowden era; anybody who questions the Russia consensus, he says, “becomes a blasphemer. Becomes a heretic. I think that’s what they see me as.” Greenwald is no longer invited on MSNBC, and he’s portrayed in the Twitter fever swamp as a leading villain of the self-styled Resistance. “I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow,” he says. “And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.” His view of the liberal online media is equally charitable. “Think about one interesting, creative, like, intellectually novel thing that [Vox’s] Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein have said in like ten years,” he says. “In general, they’re just churning out Democratic Party agitprop every single day of the most superficial type.” (Reached for comment, none of these people would respond to Greenwald.)

All this has led to one of the less-anticipated developments of the Donald Trump presidency: Glenn Greenwald, Fox News darling. For his sins, Greenwald has been embraced by opportunistic #MAGA partisans seeking to discredit the Trump-Russia story. When alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich sat for a 60 Minutes interview last year, he praised only one journalist: Greenwald. “My opinion of Glenn ten or 15 years ago was entirely negative,” says Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who now heralds him as one of the “clearest thinkers” in media.

This, by the way, is the reason we’re eating dinner so late on a Tuesday: Greenwald has to be at a TV studio in a few minutes to be interviewed by Carlson. We leave the restaurant and head across the street to the garage where he parked his Mitsubishi Outlander. Unexpectedly, the gate to the entrance has been shut and the attendant is missing. Mild panic sets in. Greenwald begins rattling the gate. Even if we catch a cab to the studio, his TV clothes are in the car, and he is currently wearing shorts and an old polo shirt. “How,” he frets, “can I go on Fox News dressed like this?”…

Greenwald’s home is located on a dead-end cobblestone street, under a thick canopy of trees, a few miles inland from Ipanema Beach. The grounds are large enough to comfortably accommodate Greenwald; his husband, David Miranda; their two recently adopted children; household staff; 24 formerly stray dogs; and some dog poop, which, when I visit the day before his appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, I step in.

Greenwald greets me in his cathedral-like living room dressed in his usual shorts and polo. When I joke that he lives in a gated community — a guard in a booth controls access to the street — he seems wounded and explains that he could afford the place only because the recent Brazilian recession had devastated Rio’s housing market. He plays coy when I ask him who owned the house previously. “I think it was some hedge-fund pig,” he says…

Greenwald grew up near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was closeted in high school and cultivated a rebel iconoclasm to cope. “One of the strategies you can develop is, I’m never going to be weak,” he says. “I’m always gonna be smarter and stronger and more aggressive.” Comparing himself to the titular character in the mockumentary American Vandal, he says he once prompted a schoolwide investigation by spray-painting the walls with “extremely offensive profanities about individual students and teachers.” “He was always warring with the administration, warring with teachers,” says his friend and former classmate Norman Fleisher. Instead of schoolwork, he devoted himself to the competitive-debate circuit and, in his senior year, to a failed bid for the Lauderdale Lakes City Council. He squeaked into George Washington University, where he majored in philosophy — Nietzsche — and again poured all his energy into debate…

[I wonder if he and Ted Cruz ever crossed paths on the competitive-debate circuit?]

… In 2014, Omidyar, the founder of eBay, poured $250 million into a news organization called First Look Media and handed Greenwald the keys. One of Greenwald’s collaborators on the Snowden story, the documentarian Laura Poitras, made a movie about the experience, Citizenfour, in which Greenwald was something of a second star. In 2015, it won the Oscar for Best Documentary, which Greenwald says he could not enjoy because host Neil Patrick Harris joked that “Snowden couldn’t be here for some treason.” At an after-party that night, a BuzzFeed reporter asked him about it. “I’m like, ‘I’m really trying hard not to say anything about it,’ ” Greenwald recalls. “And they’re like, ‘No, but you must have an opinion on it,’ and I was like, ‘Neil Patrick Harris is a fucking moron, and that joke was completely idiotic and offensive.’ ” (For the record, Snowden thought it was funny.)…

The week I visit Greenwald in Rio, the news out of the D.C.-Moscow gyre is the indictment of three Trump-campaign aides: Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, and Manafort. Sitting at Greenwald’s dining-room table, as a little dog named Kane molests a bigger dog named Enzo, I make the mistake of suggesting this is a “huge” development. Greenwald is ready for me before I finish my sentence.

“Have they been huge?” he pounces, answering his own question. “I mean, I guess they’ve been huge in the sense that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager was indicted on multiple felony charges, right? That’s inherently huge, but it’s not particularly huge for the Russia story, because all the charges leveled against Manafort were unrelated to questions of collusion with the Russians.” Fair enough, but Papadopoulos’s arrest was in fact related to the question of collusion. Greenwald waves this away. “They had all these kind of losers who weren’t even in the Trump campaign,” he says. “You know, these charlatans who were constantly puffing up their résumés, who come from the shittiest schools and have no significant experience.” He continues: “What happened this week, for me, is exactly what I’ve been expecting all along.”…

Greenwald’s half-a-million-dollar Intercept salary reflects his role as the founder and figurehead of the organization. But since the Snowden revelations, Greenwald hasn’t done much original reporting, and he has lately repositioned himself as a bomb-throwing media critic. This is in some ways a natural role for him, one that harks back to his early blogging days. “His general default position is that we shouldn’t believe anything the elite Establishment politicians are saying without fact-checking them,” says Jeremy Scahill, his Intercept co-founder. “We certainly shouldn’t believe the anonymous proclamations of CIA, NSA, FBI officials.”…

To listen to intelligence veterans, there is also a defensive aspect to Greenwald’s collusion skepticism. “You really cannot dismiss as part of his motivation the way in which this new story is undermining the very things that he made his reputation on,” says cybersecurity expert Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel. “Which is: embracing WikiLeaks and Snowden and a hostility to the idea that there are national-security threats the U.S. has to respond to.”…

Which makes his lack of interest in a report the Intercept itself produced all the more curious. In June, it published an explosive story that Russia had attempted to infiltrate voter-registration systems days before the election by sending phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials. The information came from a leaked NSA report; shortly before the Intercept published its story, a Georgia NSA employee named Reality Winner was arrested on espionage charges. Almost immediately, the Intercept was accused of exposing Winner with its own sloppy methods. But the scoop itself represented one of the first credible claims that, more than trying to influence American voters, Russia may have been directly targeting election technology. Greenwald distanced himself from the bungled leak at the time and now says he doesn’t buy the story outright. “I never liked the story. I thought it was bullshit and knew it was going to be huge in a way that was totally unjustified in what it actually revealed,” he says. “I think it tried to overstate the importance of what that document was.”…

To be catty: Glenn Greenwald has a vast sympathy for willowy young men with sensitive mouths. Square-jawed frauleins in hiking boots, not so much. (To be fair, many extremely heterosexual civil-libertarian men tend to prefer the company of their brothers — misogyny is gender-neutral, in that sense.)

But regardless of how soon or how thoroughly his hand-waving dismissals of Russian election tampering are debunked, this profile makes it seem like Greenwald will never return to the United States. He’s got a nice life and a happy family in his walled compound, and presumably he’s tucking a chunk of those Omidyar dollars away against a change in the prevailing political winds. And as a libertarian, isn’t that all he really ever wanted?

Betteridge's law of headlines definitely at play here. ?? pic.twitter.com/YeiXeREYei

— Smelodies (@SmelOdiesOG) January 21, 2018

Betteridge’s law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the principle is much older.

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141Comments

  1. 1.

    Patricia Kayden

    January 22, 2018 at 10:18 pm

    Glad that Greenwald is no longer invited to be on MSNBC. Thank goodness for small mercies. He’s obnoxious and his Russia apologia is pathetic. Will be fun to watch his reaction to Mueller’s findings though.

  2. 2.

    Mike J

    January 22, 2018 at 10:19 pm

    “I thought you were going to say this was one of the most beautiful girls. What about these others?”

    https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4710759/senate-hot-mic

  3. 3.

    Aleta

    January 22, 2018 at 10:23 pm

    in Ipanema ?

    Ipanema sounds like an anti-euphoric medication to me now.

  4. 4.

    sharl

    January 22, 2018 at 10:27 pm

    LOL, I want a refund of the time I spent reading that piece. Nothing new or worthwhile in it. Greenwald loved the piece, but hated the title; neither is surprising.

    The title doesn’t match the content at all. Was the editor who titled it thinking of maximizing hate clicks? Or maybe protesting the piece’s content? Who knows??? I first thought it would be a hit piece based on that title, but as you noted, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines and all that… In any event, it’s way past time for Glennzilla to fade into obscurity.

  5. 5.

    Redshift

    January 22, 2018 at 10:28 pm

    Christ, what an asshole.

  6. 6.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    January 22, 2018 at 10:28 pm

    Griftwalds = White Supremacist

    “The parade of evils caused by illegal immigration is widely known,” Greenwald wrote in 2005. The facts, to him, were indisputable: “illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” Defending the nativist congressman Tom Tancredo from charges of racism, Greenwald wrote of “unmanageably endless hordes of people [who] pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability to assimilate.” Those hordes, Greenwald wrote, posed a threat to “middle-class suburban voters.”

    In several cases over a five-year span, Greenwald represented [pro bono] Matthew Hale, the head of the Illinois-based white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, which attracted a small core of violently inclined adherents. In one case, Greenwald defended Hale against charges that he had solicited the murder of a federal judge. Hale was eventually convicted when the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, produced the FBI informant with whom Hale had arranged the killing. Greenwald’s other clients included the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who were implicated in an especially horrible crime. Two white supremacists on Long Island had picked up a pair of unsuspecting Mexican day laborers, lured them into an abandoned warehouse, and then clubbed them with a crowbar and stabbed them repeatedly. The day laborers managed to escape, and when they recovered from their injuries, they sued the National Alliance and other hate groups, alleging that they had inspired the attackers. Greenwald described the suit as a dangerous attempt to suppress free speech by making holders of “unconventional” views liable for the actions of others. His use of a euphemism like “unconventional” to describe white nationalists was troubling, but on First Amendment grounds, he had a strong case and he made it successfully.

    Who represents Nazis for 5 years for free. Especially someone as greedy as Griftwald. (link)

  7. 7.

    KickBoxBanana

    January 22, 2018 at 10:29 pm

    I don’t understand why you people never seem to get it.

    When these grifters are always heading in the most lucrative direction of the poltical winds don’t you think that is a huge red flag? Anyone who now thinks J Rubin is awesome and who might still think Griftwald is awesome (or ever was) is a fool! These people are grifters. Nothing more.

  8. 8.

    Corner Stone

    January 22, 2018 at 10:29 pm

    Wait a second. Greenwald is 50?! That’s it. I’m taking my willowy body and sensitive mouth to greener pastures!

  9. 9.

    JR

    January 22, 2018 at 10:31 pm

    In our French Revolution timeline, is Greenwald the Comte de Mirabeau? He’s nowhere near the speechifier. Did the Austrians have trolls back then?

  10. 10.

    geg6

    January 22, 2018 at 10:31 pm

    I read this and found the underlying tone pretty hilarious. Really exposes him for the privileged fucking asshole that he is. Arrogant, hypocritical and narcissistic. I laughed and laughed.

  11. 11.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    January 22, 2018 at 10:32 pm

    Greenwald’s home is located on a dead-end cobblestone street, under a thick canopy of trees, a few miles inland from Ipanema Beach. The grounds are large enough to comfortably accommodate Greenwald; his husband, David Miranda; their two recently adopted children; household staff; 24 formerly stray dogs; and some dog poop, which, when I visit the day before his appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, I step in.

    Greenwald greets me in his cathedral-like living room dressed in his usual shorts and polo. When I joke that he lives in a gated community — a guard in a booth controls access to the street — he seems wounded and explains that he could afford the place only because the recent Brazilian recession had devastated Rio’s housing market. He plays coy when I ask him who owned the house previously. “I think it was some hedge-fund pig,” he says.

    foh with that bullshit, Glenn

  12. 12.

    Aardvark Cheeselog

    January 22, 2018 at 10:33 pm

    Greenwald is a total dick. The world would be a better place if everyone emulated Maddow, Klein et. al and just ignored him.

  13. 13.

    mad citizen

    January 22, 2018 at 10:35 pm

    I was reading this and had to quit from boredom 4-5 paragraphs in. How is this dude “in the arena” from Argentina?

  14. 14.

    SiubhanDuinne

    January 22, 2018 at 10:35 pm

    “You’ve seen how I live, right? When I leave my computer, that world disappears”

    I so want him to be subjected to plagued by a DOS attack.

  15. 15.

    cmorenc

    January 22, 2018 at 10:36 pm

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Glad that Greenwald is no longer invited to be on MSNBC. Thank goodness for small mercies. He’s obnoxious and his Russia apologia is pathetic. Will be fun to watch his reaction to Mueller’s findings though.

    Most of us won’t give a shit what deflections / denials / apologia Greenwald spins out of pure shit in reaction to the eventual release of Mueller’s findings. Greenwald exemplifies Upton Sinclair’s famous maxim: ““It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – and what exactly is Greenwald’s billionaire backer for Greenwald’s publication paying him to understand or not about Mueller?

  16. 16.

    chopper

    January 22, 2018 at 10:36 pm

    “How,” he frets, “can I go on Fox News dressed like this?”…

    dude it’s fox. you can go on camera wearing a garbage bag as long as you tell them what they want to hear.

  17. 17.

    opiejeanne

    January 22, 2018 at 10:36 pm

    @Redshift: Well said.

    The comment just under yours informs/reminds us just how awful he really is.

  18. 18.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    January 22, 2018 at 10:37 pm

    @Patricia Kayden: why was he banned from msnbc?

  19. 19.

    Mnemosyne

    January 22, 2018 at 10:37 pm

    Wonkette’s take is pretty hilarious.

  20. 20.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 22, 2018 at 10:37 pm

    @mad citizen: Argentina and Brazil are not the same place.

  21. 21.

    Gin & Tonic

    January 22, 2018 at 10:38 pm

    He makes a half-mil for that crap? There truly is no justice.

  22. 22.

    Mary G

    January 22, 2018 at 10:38 pm

    @geg6: I agree, I was thinking whole time, what an asshole, doesn’t he see how he’s going to come across? I read somewhere that GG thought the whole article was a hit job, and that seemed right to me. He lives in a “hedge-fund pig’s” house, that makes him a pig.

    Also, too, nobody there picks up the poop from 24 dogs. That’s just gross. They have a whole “household staff,” surely there’s enough money and room to hire some poor person to do the dooty,

  23. 23.

    Gin & Tonic

    January 22, 2018 at 10:38 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: But they share a border. Take that, smart guy.

  24. 24.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 22, 2018 at 10:41 pm

    @Gin & Tonic: I know enough about futbol to make sure I don’t confuzzle them.

  25. 25.

    Yarrow

    January 22, 2018 at 10:42 pm

    @Mary G: With 24 dogs I could imagine that even if some staff members are given poop scooper duties that a few piles of dog poop could be missed. That would be a lot to keep up with.

  26. 26.

    randy khan

    January 22, 2018 at 10:42 pm

    I know that Greenwald moved to Brazil because his partner was unable to emigrate to the U.S. in the days when it was hard for gay people to get green cards, and so I have some empathy for his decision to keep living there. But I do think that the distance and, well, isolation, makes it easier for him to build a theoretical U.S. based on his preconceived notions, rather than on what’s actually happening here.

    Also, he’s extraordinarily invested in his own self-regard. Okay, that’s probably the dominant factor.

  27. 27.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 22, 2018 at 10:42 pm

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Especially someone who is both Jewish and gay, both of which are abhorrent to American neo-NAZIs.

  28. 28.

    opiejeanne

    January 22, 2018 at 10:42 pm

    @Mary G: 24 dogs, maybe the staff just hadn’t caught up with all of the poop produced overnight.

  29. 29.

    Patricia Kayden

    January 22, 2018 at 10:42 pm

    Not sure. I’m going by the highlighted article where he makes that claim. He certainly seems to hate Rachel Maddow and others from that network so it would probably be awkward for him to be on any of the MSNBC shows where the Russian investigation is taken seriously.

  30. 30.

    Mnemosyne

    January 22, 2018 at 10:42 pm

    I’m not the only one who suspects that the “hedge-fund pig” who sold the house at such a bargain price will turn out to be a Russian oligarch, right?

  31. 31.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    January 22, 2018 at 10:44 pm

    @Mary G: I hope they’re all vaccinated, at least.

    Then again, maybe not.

  32. 32.

    Yarrow

    January 22, 2018 at 10:44 pm

    @Mnemosyne: Not the only one. Seems like that wouldn’t be that difficult of a detail to track down.

  33. 33.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 22, 2018 at 10:46 pm

    @Mnemosyne: Drug dealer.

  34. 34.

    Yutsano

    January 22, 2018 at 10:49 pm

    @Mnemosyne: Heh. I was just about to go digging for that.

  35. 35.

    Patricia Kayden

    January 22, 2018 at 10:50 pm

    @Mnemosyne: That would explain Greenwakd’s pro-Russia stance even in the face of overwhelming evidence of its interference with our presidential election. Dying for him to be exposed. Then he can go away.

  36. 36.

    opiejeanne

    January 22, 2018 at 10:50 pm

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: He may not be banned, exactly. Just not invited because why would they want to?

  37. 37.

    Mnemosyne

    January 22, 2018 at 10:50 pm

    @Yarrow:

    They tend to hide behind a bunch of legal red tape, so it would probably be difficult for an American reporter to uncover. I hope some enterprising Brazilian journalist gets curious enough to look into it.

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Also possible, particularly since Greenwald seems (at best) naive about exactly what types of people own those homes in places like Brazil.

  38. 38.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 22, 2018 at 10:50 pm

    Oopsie!

    It was really weird! Senate pages are high school students!

    Here's the clip (that I made courtesy of @cspan)https://t.co/iUTlOMnTPE

    — Amelia Frappolli (@AmeliaFrappolli) January 23, 2018

  39. 39.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    January 22, 2018 at 10:52 pm

    @Mnemosyne: I used to think he was just an useful idiot, but when out of the blue he started attacking Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, who the Putin hates so much he banned her from entering russia, I started to think he’s following orders, and not simply a fellow traveler.

  40. 40.

    Ben Cisco

    January 22, 2018 at 10:53 pm

    To hell with Griftwald, that racist, misogynist sack of crap.

  41. 41.

    efgoldman

    January 22, 2018 at 10:54 pm

    Why the fuck does anyone give a flying fuck what Putin’s puppet Greenwald thinks about any goddamned thing?
    He moves no votes. The leftier-than-thous over whom he may have influence don’t vote, and don’t care or give a shit about winning elections. If his magazine were made from dead trees instead of pixels it would properly go straight to the recycle bin.

    Fuckem

  42. 42.

    Yarrow

    January 22, 2018 at 10:59 pm

    @Mnemosyne: With the right incentives, such information can be found. Brazil is kind of struggling, so I don’t know how things are going there. Some neighbors were working there for a several years and moved back. Said it had gotten dangerous in Rio.

  43. 43.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 22, 2018 at 10:59 pm

    @efgoldman: How do you really feel?

  44. 44.

    ruemara

    January 22, 2018 at 10:59 pm

    His lovely husband. Whom he started dating when said husband was 19 and he was 38. Squick. Moves like Woody Allen.

  45. 45.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 22, 2018 at 11:03 pm

    @ruemara: George Clooney is 18 years older than his wife.

  46. 46.

    eemom

    January 22, 2018 at 11:05 pm

    Would be awesome if he showed up now to smite us all with his mighty wrath, like he’s done in past threads of which he was the subject. Is there some way to “tag” him?

  47. 47.

    ruemara

    January 22, 2018 at 11:06 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Did he start dating her when she was 19?

    @eemom: Ugh, please dear goddes no.

  48. 48.

    Jay

    January 22, 2018 at 11:06 pm

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    Freeland has “issues”. Her “Gramps” was not a “anti-Nazi Cold War Refugee”, as she claimed, but instead, a UAN-UPO member, organizer, who when the war in Ukraine got hot, relocated to Occupied Poland where he made his living publishing a Nazi Rag and railing on about “The Jews”.

    As we saw most publically with the Croat refugee community during the Yugoslav break up, a lot of the post war Refugee’s Canada took in, based on their anti-Communism, never left their Nazism behind.

  49. 49.

    No Drought No More

    January 22, 2018 at 11:06 pm

    At this point, God alone knows how many Americans have been corrupted by Russia.

    That is, beyond the number now employed in the White House, and the precise number of republicans in congress so compromised (it being likely both God and Mueller’s investigators each know that tally).

    Greenwald is a base turncoat to be spewing such un-American rubbish. His reputation as a fool and tool can never be rehabilitated now. Barring a confession from the idiot (of having committed an egregious error of judgement), he will hereafter be remembered, if at all, as a genuine American villain. My best advice to all those annoyed by his ugly schtick is all too self evident: tune him out, he’s not worth the aggravation. Remember life before you ever heard of the miserable fuck, and then ask yourself: why on earth did you ever begin to care in the first place?

  50. 50.

    Amaranthine RBG

    January 22, 2018 at 11:07 pm

    To be catty: Glenn Greenwald has a vast sympathy for willowy young men with sensitive mouths.

    Why don’t you just call him a faggot?

  51. 51.

    opiejeanne

    January 22, 2018 at 11:09 pm

    @eemom: Greenwald? Here?

  52. 52.

    David Fud

    January 22, 2018 at 11:10 pm

    I used to think Greenwald was interesting. Not sure where that guy went. Wasn’t that him that left a huge angry skid mark across the comments in this blog? People make jokes about Soros bucks, but Greenwald hit it big with Omidyar. I wonder where one has to surrender their integrity to cash in on that revenue stream.

  53. 53.

    Amaranthine RBG

    January 22, 2018 at 11:10 pm

    Who represents Nazis for 5 years for free.

    The ACLU, for one.

  54. 54.

    danielx

    January 22, 2018 at 11:11 pm

    But regardless of how soon or how thoroughly his hand-waving dismissals of Russian election tampering are debunked, this profile makes it seem like Greenwald will never return to the United States.

    That would probably be prudent on Greenwald’s part.

  55. 55.

    Mnemosyne

    January 22, 2018 at 11:11 pm

    @Jay:

    So what does Greenwald have against her? He has a long history of defending neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

  56. 56.

    danielx

    January 22, 2018 at 11:12 pm

    @David Fud:

    I wonder where one has to surrender their integrity to cash in on that revenue stream.

    Been searching for it for years; I’m not cheap but I can be had.

  57. 57.

    Bailey

    January 22, 2018 at 11:12 pm

    @Patricia Kayden:

    That would explain Greenwakd’s pro-Russia stance even in the face of overwhelming evidence of its interference with our presidential election. Dying for him to be exposed. Then he can go away.

    He has to be skeptical of the Russia story. Aside from being an Assange cheerleader, his entire claim to fame is Snowden–if it turns out that Snowden is nothing but a stooge for Putin (He is, but, I’m sure there are still some who worship him)–and the Russia story comes crashing down, Greenwald is done. Of course he downplays it.

    I’d be curious to know what Matt Tiabi’s hangup is on the matter, though.

  58. 58.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 22, 2018 at 11:13 pm

    @ruemara: GG and his spouse were both legal adults. I won’t attack him on those grounds.

  59. 59.

    Mnemosyne

    January 22, 2018 at 11:13 pm

    @Amaranthine RBG:

    White dudebros gotta stick together, eh, comrade?

  60. 60.

    Jay

    January 22, 2018 at 11:20 pm

    @Mnemosyne:

    She took to the gate against Russia and the Russian-Ukrainians in the Ukraine from day one.

    Purity trolls don’t do nuance, or history, or economics.

    Freeland and Greenwald are on opposite extremes on the issues there.

  61. 61.

    MomSense

    January 22, 2018 at 11:21 pm

    @Bailey:

    Taibbi spent some drug and sex fueled time in Russia. I’d link to his article about it but once through that sexist, juvenile mess was enough for me.

  62. 62.

    Jay

    January 22, 2018 at 11:23 pm

    @Bailey:

    I still give Snowden the benifit of the doubt, ( Bush Years), but Assange has shown himself for whom he is.

  63. 63.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 22, 2018 at 11:24 pm

    @Jay: Snowden was a planned Russian op.

  64. 64.

    Mnemosyne

    January 22, 2018 at 11:24 pm

    @Jay:

    Yeah, I suspected it would be over Ukraine.

  65. 65.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 22, 2018 at 11:25 pm

    And look who has decided to run interference for Ms. Manning:

    @joshuamanning23 @josh_weinberg pic.twitter.com/6hypczuvAp

    — Robert Caruso (@robertcaruso) January 22, 2018

  66. 66.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    January 22, 2018 at 11:30 pm

    @Jay: Freeland is an extremist for opposing Russian invasion of Ukraine?

    Are you saying Griftwald supported that?

  67. 67.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 22, 2018 at 11:31 pm

    @efgoldman: I know Democratic-voting liberals who are just now starting to realize that Greenwald and Julian Assange might not be worth listening to.

  68. 68.

    Jay

    January 22, 2018 at 11:34 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Maybe, maybe not.

    Snowdon’s principal damage was to the US’s “Shining City on the Hill” mythology,

    Not dead spies, blown ops, NSA/CIA cryptosabotage tools released into the wilds.

    The only difference between Snowdon and Winner is how Glen treated them, one he helped escape, the other, he betrayed.

  69. 69.

    FlipYrWhig

    January 22, 2018 at 11:37 pm

    I love how the guy whose whole shtick is the most smug, tired Holden Caulfield-esque “everyone’s a phony but me because I have principles, interesting ones!” an act seen in politics repeatedly for decades (e.g. Nat Hentoff, Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn) if not centuries, nonetheless thinks he’s brash, unconventional, and unique.

  70. 70.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    January 22, 2018 at 11:37 pm

    2016: a choice between Donald Trump and Goldman Sachs.

    — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 28, 2016

    Drumpf repeatedly called for Snowden’s “execution” and yet he was offering his support for Putin’s candidate. What a coincidence.

  71. 71.

    chris

    January 22, 2018 at 11:38 pm

    @Mnemosyne:

    To that purpose, the Globe and Mail’s Tuesday, March 7 article, headlined “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor on Nazi newspaper,” was intepreted by the glamorous American celebrity paranoiac Glenn Greenwald—the most assertive champion of Edward Snowden, the famous U.S. National Security Agency hacker who has been enjoying the perks of Russian asylum ever since he absconded to Moscow in June 2013—in this way: “The exposé on how Canada’s Foreign Minister knowingly lied for 20 years about grandfather’s past, now blames Russia.” link

    She likes Russia and speaks the language, she does not like Putin at all.

  72. 72.

    Adria McDowell

    January 22, 2018 at 11:38 pm

    GG is the epitome of a BernieBro.

    @Adam L Silverman: LOL, sure she did.

  73. 73.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 22, 2018 at 11:41 pm

    @Jay: What new illegal activities did Snowden expose?

  74. 74.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 22, 2018 at 11:42 pm

    @Jay: You are wrong. I will provide open source news reporting on this. Beyond that I will say no more. Do not ask me to.
    https://www.geekwire.com/2016/edward-snowden-boss-steven-bay-speaks/

    The days after that were devoted to damage control. Eventually, it came out that Snowden had been planning his moves for several years. The fact that he was skilled in information technology and gained access to classified information made him the ultimate “insider threat,” Bay said.

    “It turns out, as [Snowden] admitted a few weeks later, he targeted our contract directly,” Bay said. “Somehow he figured out that our contract, and what we did on that contract, were the types of gates he needed to get access to.”

    http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/intel-heads-edward-snowden-profound-damage-us-security/story?id=22285388

    Snowden’s admitted theft of hundreds of thousands of highly classified files detailing U.S. intelligence collection programs has caused “profound damage,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a Senate committee hearing dedicated to the gravest threats facing the U.S.

    “What Snowden has stolen and exposed has gone way, way beyond his professed concerns with so-called domestic surveillance programs,” Clapper told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the public hearing. “As a result, we’ve lost critical foreign intelligence collection sources, including some shared with us by valued partners.”

    “What I do want to speak to as the nation’s senior intelligence officer is the profound damage that his disclosures have caused and continue to cause. As a consequence, the nation is less safe and its people less secure,” Clapper, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, somberly explained.

    CIA Director John Brennan said his spies have determined that al Qaeda terrorists “are going to school” with each classified document provided to journalists by Snowden. Brennan said they are aiding al Qaeda with “their counter-intelligence program” because all al Qaeda members have to do is “pick up the papers sometimes or do some Google searches for what has been disclosed and leaked.”

    The Snowden leaks are “allowing them to burrow in and it’s made it much more difficult for us to find them and the threats that they pose,” Brennan added.

    “What we’ve seen the last six to eight months is an awareness by these [terrorist] groups…of our ability to monitor communications and specific instances where they’ve changed the ways in which they communicate to avoid being surveilled or being subject to our surveillance tactics,” said NCTC Director Matthew Olsen.

  75. 75.

    Adria McDowell

    January 22, 2018 at 11:43 pm

    “Confronting”? SureJan.gif

    https://mobile.twitter.com/yashar/status/955169542757666816

  76. 76.

    PJ

    January 22, 2018 at 11:45 pm

    @FlipYrWhig: I’m not sure about Hentoff, I don’t recall him talking about himself, and I never read Cockburn, but what Greenwald and Hitchens have in common is their devotion to their massive egos above all else.

  77. 77.

    Jay

    January 22, 2018 at 11:45 pm

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    Freeland wasn’t in office when Russia aided the Novarussian’s against the Kiev Coup.

    But, shortly after coming into office, she promoted Russian Sanctions, ( good), and arming and training Nazi’s, ( bad).

    Not the Ukrainian Army, the Nazi groups.

    During the last Nazi resurgence in Canada, (80’s and ’90’s), Croatian Social Clubs and Churchs, became a hotbed of Nazi reorganizing and promotion. During the dissolution of Yugoslavia, they held fundraisers to buy weapons for the Croat Nationalists, to kill Canadian Peacekeepers, supplied many of the most extremist Croat leaders, ( 27 convicted war criminals).

  78. 78.

    Aleta

    January 22, 2018 at 11:46 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    Legal adults, yes. A definition that depends on where you are. Fwiw: Some newer ideas about the brains of adults vs teens:

    The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so.
    In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.
    In teen’s brains, the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing—and not necessarily at the same rate. That’s why when teens experience overwhelming emotional input, they can’t explain later what they were thinking. They weren’t thinking as much as they were feeling.

    https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=3051

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    January 22, 2018 at 11:46 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    That’s pretty much the schtick of white libertarians everywhere. I’m so hip and edgy that I make racist jokes that Henny Youngman would have found old-fashioned!

  80. 80.

    Mandalay

    January 22, 2018 at 11:51 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: You are offering Clapper as a reliable source of information?! Not sure if serious.

  81. 81.

    Bailey

    January 22, 2018 at 11:52 pm

    @Jay:

    I still give Snowden the benifit of the doubt, ( Bush Years), but Assange has shown himself for whom he is.

    I don’t. The dude went straight to Russia and then participated in some truly ghastly Putin dog and pony shows. They’re not keeping him there for his charming personality.

  82. 82.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 22, 2018 at 11:53 pm

    @Mandalay: I am very serious.

  83. 83.

    Jay

    January 22, 2018 at 11:58 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Way too much political posturing in public statements by Administrations in the US. I don’t have access to the “non-public” records, ( might if I live another 50-100 years), but history shows that one takes many “real time” “US Official Claims”, with a couple of cups of salt. Too many “Team B’s”, and now that so much of the US Intelligence “network” is subcontracted to Corporations, more so.

    Glenn and Julien have clearly exposed themselves, IMHO, for me, the “book” is still out on Snowdon.

  84. 84.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 22, 2018 at 11:58 pm

    @Aleta: Gosh, you are right. What a shit GG is.

    Everyone is different. I won’t attack him on this front. You can do what you want. Judge me if you choose.

  85. 85.

    Corner Stone

    January 23, 2018 at 12:01 am

    @Adam L Silverman: Going to need more than this.

  86. 86.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:02 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    US and 5Eyes survelliance of pretty much everything, went far beyond what was legally authorized.

  87. 87.

    Anne Laurie

    January 23, 2018 at 12:03 am

    @Bailey:

    The dude went straight to Russia and then participated in some truly ghastly Putin dog and pony shows. They’re not keeping him there for his charming personality.

    FWIW, there are commentors to the NYMag article positing that Greenwald is being ‘blackmailed’ into supporting Russia because Putin’s holding Snowden hostage. Which would’ve been believable, somewhat, back around 2014…

  88. 88.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 23, 2018 at 12:03 am

    @Jay: I don’t mean to seem rude here, but you are aware of what I do for a living?

  89. 89.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:03 am

    @Bailey:
    Nope, they arn’t, but he wasn’t supposed to wind up in Russia.

  90. 90.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 23, 2018 at 12:04 am

    @Corner Stone: Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I can no longer tell when you’re joking, trolling, or being serious.

  91. 91.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:06 am

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Yes.

    I am also aware that if you provided what you have access to, to try to prove your point, you would go to jail.

    I am also aware that “people like you”, also don’t get to see everything.

    Team B dude, 3 times.

  92. 92.

    patroclus

    January 23, 2018 at 12:08 am

    My opinion of what Dear Leader Greenwald thinks, says and writes (since 2007ish) is not positive at all, but I will admit that he was on fire from roughly 2005 to 2007 and I think he did earn that Pulitzer. And I’m not all that inclined to gratuitously insult him (although mocking his opinions is fun). What I remember especially about GG is all the food fights he spawned on this very blog back when Cole was one of his biggest fanbois. Cole knew that Dear Leader’s very name could almost always trigger a clickbaiting TBogg and he routinely trolled his own blog. Fun times!

    Now, I could not care less about the Dear Leader and I expect that he’ll grift away and then fade away into obscurity. I think David Horowitz is the best comparison – as a kid, I loved Ramparts. Since roughly 1980, he’s been mostly worthless.

  93. 93.

    Mandalay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:08 am

    @Aleta: You’re citing something with no author which was reviewed by a RN and an MD? Perhaps you should let GG and his partner know that their loving relationship for the past 12 years has been a mistake!

    Your post says way more about you than it does about GG.

  94. 94.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:08 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    nope, Glen only cares about Glen.

  95. 95.

    eemom

    January 23, 2018 at 12:08 am

    @opiejeanne:

    Yup. He used to be friends with Cole. (Maybe still is for all I know.)

    It was hilarious. He is no less than Trumpian in his all encompassing self adoration, paper thin skin, and furious invective hurled at anyone who doesn’t kiss his ass.

  96. 96.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 23, 2018 at 12:09 am

    @Jay: Sources?

  97. 97.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 23, 2018 at 12:09 am

    @Jay: He was. He wasn’t supposed to wind up anywhere else.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/report-snowden-stayed-at-russian-consulate-while-in-hong-kong/2013/08/26/8237cf9a-0e39-11e3-a2b3-5e107edf9897_story.html?utm_term=.e01e17e2bde7

    MOSCOW — Before American fugitive Edward Snowden arrived in Moscow in June — an arrival that Russian officials have said caught them by surprise — he spent several days living at the Russian Consulate in Hong Kong, a Moscow newspaper reported Monday.

    The article in Kommersant, based on accounts from several unnamed sources, did not state clearly when Snowden decided to seek Russian help in leaving Hong Kong, where he was in hiding to evade arrest by U.S. authorities on charges that he leaked top-secret documents about U.S. surveillance programs.

  98. 98.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:11 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Try wiki

  99. 99.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 23, 2018 at 12:11 am

    @Jay: Perhaps you’ll take the word of former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin?
    https://venturebeat.com/2014/05/22/former-kgb-general-snowden-is-cooperating-with-russian-intelligence/

  100. 100.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 23, 2018 at 12:15 am

    @Jay: Darling boy, you are making claims. I am asking you to support them. Can you?

  101. 101.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 23, 2018 at 12:16 am

    @eemom: Define friends.

  102. 102.

    eemom

    January 23, 2018 at 12:20 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    What am I, a philosopher?

  103. 103.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 23, 2018 at 12:21 am

    @eemom: No, you tend to be an asshole.

  104. 104.

    JerryRich

    January 23, 2018 at 12:24 am

    @ruemara: If he did, so what?

  105. 105.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:24 am

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Adam, I love what you write here, it’s one of the reason’s I hit several times a day, but I also read a lot, from Emptywheel, through Digby, and the Rectification of Names.

    I’m also old. I remember the Pentagon Papers, and not as history.

    I was also one of the Fulda Gap “guys”, because I had passible Russian, German and Polish.

    For now, Snowden’s in the “unconfirmed file”, including the category of “Usefull Idiot”,

    Funny thing is, so am I. Environmental activism in the 80’s and ’90’s really garnered some “weird” National Security claims. All I wanted was clean drinking water and some old trees to look at.

    For now, lot’s of salt in the diet.

  106. 106.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 23, 2018 at 12:38 am

    Funny thing is, so am I. Environmental activism in the 80’s and ’90’s really garnered some “weird” National Security claims. All I wanted was clean drinking water and some old trees to look at.

    That was you?

  107. 107.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 23, 2018 at 12:42 am

    @Jay: In my experience, Fulda Gap guys were guns and armor. Pony up.

  108. 108.

    mike in dc

    January 23, 2018 at 12:48 am

    Any evidence Mueller uses for indictments is going to be thoroughly vetted, verified and corroborated. So the likelihood of evidence of Russian interference or collaboration with Trump being “manufactured” is going to be pretty close to nil. But, so long as those indictments haven’t happened yet, GG is free to be skeptical, even where such skepticism is highly unwarranted.

  109. 109.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:51 am

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Yup, 25 years of applying for Government jobs, wasted.

    Did well enough in the Private Sector, away from Goverment contracts.

    Funny thing was, my Dad was RCMP, so I knew most of my survelliance squads from family BBQ’s, birthdays, etc.

    Black Comedy in many regards, you know, except for my pension, etc.

  110. 110.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 12:52 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    LMFAO

  111. 111.

    Yarrow

    January 23, 2018 at 12:57 am

    I guess Glenn feels he’s safe from this kind of violence in his gated community.

    Violent deaths of LGBT people in Brazil have hit an all-time high following a sudden spike last year, new research reveals.

    At least 445 LGBT Brazilians died as victims of homophobia in 2017 – a 30% increase from 2016, according to LGBT watchdog group Grupo Gay de Bahia.

  112. 112.

    eemom

    January 23, 2018 at 12:59 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Fuck you, nouveau-psycho.

  113. 113.

    sharl

    January 23, 2018 at 1:01 am

    @Jay: I’ve been lurking in these comments, trying to put together the bits-&-pieces you’ve offered here about your life. If any of this is written anywhere, and you wouldn’t mind sharing its whereabouts, I for one would read the hell out of it.

  114. 114.

    different-church-lady

    January 23, 2018 at 1:06 am

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    2016: a choice between Donald Trump and Goldman Sachs.

    — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 28, 2016

    SHOULDA PICKED SACHS, YOU FUCKING MORON.

  115. 115.

    different-church-lady

    January 23, 2018 at 1:14 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    FWIW, there are commentors to the NYMag article positing that Greenwald is being ‘blackmailed’ into supporting Russia because Putin’s holding Snowden hostage.

    Well, that makes it all better then, doesn’t it? Let us endeavor to ensure his hot-takes continue driving knee-jerk reactions thinking amongst our progressive betterers. /s

  116. 116.

    Jay

    January 23, 2018 at 1:14 am

    @sharl:

    Yeah, hell no.

    Back in the ’90’s, you could actually try to have a “conversation” on social media,

    In the ‘aughts, RW Trolls perfected the “circular” argument.

    Now, social media is even in the “best of places” a swamp.

    While you arn’t “anon” on the web to way to many “many”, now, you open yourself up to everything from death threats to identity theft.

    Those who post public details have way more balls than me.

  117. 117.

    sharl

    January 23, 2018 at 1:19 am

    @Jay: Understandable and logical; thank you for the response. Best wishes for as long and satisfying a life as you can attain.

  118. 118.

    cokane

    January 23, 2018 at 1:25 am

    read that profile yesterday and despite the misleading headline it’s a great article. the line about Greenwald’s lack of original reporting, late in the story, is absolutely devastating and spot on

  119. 119.

    NobodySpecial

    January 23, 2018 at 1:25 am

    Greenwald’s biggest sin and most easy trigger is pride. He doesn’t admit being wrong because his entire self-identity is about being right and the smartest guy in the room. Combine that with a lavish lifestyle and you get an easy tool.

    That said, anyone throwing shade on his relationship can go fuck a dead goat. That’s bullshit no matter who you’re slinging it at.

  120. 120.

    different-church-lady

    January 23, 2018 at 1:26 am

    DAMMIT, PEOPLE, LGM still gets a TBogg out of GG post. What the hell has happened to this joint?

  121. 121.

    Mnemosyne

    January 23, 2018 at 1:27 am

    @different-church-lady:

    With Trump, we got Sachs, too — win/win! //

  122. 122.

    different-church-lady

    January 23, 2018 at 1:27 am

    @NobodySpecial:

    Greenwald’s biggest sin and most easy trigger is pride. He doesn’t admit being wrong because his entire self-identity is about being right and the smartest guy in the room.

    Sounds… familiar, somehow…

  123. 123.

    Mnemosyne

    January 23, 2018 at 1:28 am

    @different-church-lady:

    Not enough people here give a shit about him anymore. He’s beclowned himself too much.

  124. 124.

    Dmbeaster

    January 23, 2018 at 1:30 am

    @opiejeanne: heh, you should read the whole article that is linked. Plenty of other damning info.

  125. 125.

    Anne Laurie

    January 23, 2018 at 2:48 am

    @different-church-lady:

    Well, that makes it all better then, doesn’t it?

    Obviously I don’t agree with them — one reason I didn’t put those comments in my post — but people *are* telling each other the story they want to hear. ‘Glenn’s not mislead, he’s just under pressure from the Deep State(tm)!

  126. 126.

    Anne Laurie

    January 23, 2018 at 2:57 am

    @NobodySpecial:

    Greenwald’s biggest sin and most easy trigger is pride. He doesn’t admit being wrong because his entire self-identity is about being right and the smartest guy in the room… That said, anyone throwing shade on his relationship can go fuck a dead goat. That’s bullshit no matter who you’re slinging it at.

    Yep, like Ted Cruz, but gay. Ergo, without the easy pipeline to right-wing Christianist/Dominionist funding, starting during high school / college.

    Not gonna dissect his personal relationships, but being not-heterosexual has obviously had an influence on Greenwald’s career, in ways both useful and otherwise. You really think he’d have been so sympathetic to Edward Snowden or (then) Bradley Manning if they’d looked like, say, Jonah Goldberg? Much less Reality Winner? Because I don’t. (And if Snowden was indeed a Russian plant, I’m sure his handlers would’ve made sure to pick a ‘honeypot’ that Greenwald would find attractive.)

  127. 127.

    Skippy-san

    January 23, 2018 at 3:09 am

    @chopper: Awesome snark!

  128. 128.

    NobodySpecial

    January 23, 2018 at 3:12 am

    You really think he’d have been so sympathetic to Edward Snowden or (then) Bradley Manning if they’d looked like, say, Jonah Goldberg? Much less Reality Winner? Because I don’t.

    Possibly. Possibly not. My take is that he’s a useful idiot with an axe to grind against government in general.

    My pique with the whole angle of attack on his marriage is that it’s much too close to the ‘gay=pedo’ framing to start clucking about how young his husband is, especially when we give a pass to people on our side if the social issues, as someone else noted above. It’s historically been hard enough for consenting gay men to even look for love to use Republican framing when we don’t like them.

  129. 129.

    Chet Murthy

    January 23, 2018 at 3:13 am

    @Adam L Silverman: Adam, here’s the problem: how do we distinguish Clapper, from the cast of _The Best and the Brightest_? I just got thru reading that, and I gotta tellya, it was shocking how far those guys got up their own butts, prosecuting the Vietnam War. I’m not saying you’re wrong — just that, we’ve learned that taking the word of the intelligence community at face value even when they’re not suborned by malefactors like Cheney is unwise.

    I’m somewhat open to the argument that Snowden was a Russian op. But only somewhat open. Why? B/c without him, we’d be so much more in-the-dark about the things our government is doing to us. And that would be to our collective detriment

    It is very, very, very difficult to take anything seriously, from folks who want to leave us all open to every cyber-criminal on Earth. Who clearly don’t care about our civil liberties. As they clearly did with Heartbleed, for instance. Kinda takes the sheen of “I’m an honest man” off ’em. And then there’s the clear violations. Recall during Occupy, that activists were targeted by Homeland Security — COINTELPRO all over again.

    [So one might ask: why do we trust the IC to even protect us against Trump? For me, it’s b/c the IC is the weapon of the “sane beillionaires”. [In Mancur Olson’s terms, “stationary bandits”.] And they aren’t about to give up their possession (the USA) to Russia. That doesn’t mean that those “sane billionaires” will give us freedom, or anything else. I just don’t think they’re going to roll over for a bunch of insane billionaires and roving bandits.]

  130. 130.

    Kathleen

    January 23, 2018 at 3:51 am

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: He also referred to the plaintiffs as odious and repugnant.

  131. 131.

    Chet Murthy

    January 23, 2018 at 3:55 am

    @Chet Murthy: The … “good faith” of our IC leaders when it comes to proper oversight by the people (who are after all sovereign) is difficult to accept, when we remember what happened to Thomas Drake. And that the Obama administration (yes, we -can- walk and chew gum at the same time) has been remarkably aggressive in prosecuting whistleblowers.

  132. 132.

    Kathleen

    January 23, 2018 at 3:56 am

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: So GG and Maddow were buddies. I knew there was a reason I didn’t like her.

  133. 133.

    Kathleen

    January 23, 2018 at 4:00 am

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: His Snowden escapade revealed him to be someone who actively sought to undermine Obama and US. And he won a Pulitzer, as did Maureen Dowd.

  134. 134.

    Kathleen

    January 23, 2018 at 4:01 am

    @efgoldman: You, Sir, have been on fire! I always want a cigarette after I read your comments!

  135. 135.

    J R in WV

    January 23, 2018 at 5:13 am

    @Amaranthine RBG:

    Who represents Nazis for 5 years for free.

    The ACLU, for one.

    If you can’t see the difference between the ACLU and Glenn Greenwald, you must be…
    A Troll !!!

  136. 136.

    J R in WV

    January 23, 2018 at 5:29 am

    @NobodySpecial:

    When I graduated from HS at 17 I was sure that I was the smartest guy in the room. And at (rare) times I was back then. But as an adult I have worked with some truly intelligent folks, and long ago learned that I was not always the smartest guy in the room.

    Anyone who at 50 still even suspects they are the smartest guy in the room is at least unobservant, and more likely not nearly as smart as the believe they are.

  137. 137.

    matt

    January 23, 2018 at 6:07 am

    @Amaranthine RBG: They don’t really, sorry.

  138. 138.

    different-church-lady

    January 23, 2018 at 6:31 am

    @Anne Laurie: Sorry, I was late night posting without good judgement, and the snark tag was probably too subtle — snark not aimed at you.

  139. 139.

    NCSteve

    January 23, 2018 at 9:42 am

    So, I’m late to this party, but one significant fact about Greenwald that, in turn, bears on the “actively cooperating asset or dupe” question has become clear and, in hindsight, was always clear. Greenwald and Trump have at least one thing in common: both of them have a severe case of Narcissistic Personality Syndrome. Trump is what NPD looks like in a stupid guy who was born rich, Greenwald is what it looks like in a very smart guy who was not born rich, but they both have it. Both of them have the same endless self-regard and lash out at anyone who dares gainsay them or take issue with anything they said in the smallest regard because they suffer the same psychic wound from it that a normal person would feel upon discovering their S.O. shagging their best friend.

    It only became clear–to me, at least–because of the awareness of NPD Trump has forced upon us. But even back in his Salon days, when I read Greenwald’s knifework on the Bushies with delight, I was repeatedly unnerved by the way he would dive deep into the comments on his story and viciously heap vitriol and abuse on commentators who made even the slightest criticism of his pieces. Even then, I’d see him do that–or go off on some very personal rant against someone who criticized him in the press in his daily two or three updates to his initial piece–and get that “dang, there’s something kind of wrong with this guy.” His personal beefs with other media figures are, at this site of course, notorious. His inability to let go of an injury or slight. The way Obama instantly got under his skin by earning the admiration and devotion that were rightfully his. The way people who work with him so often find themselves screwed over. The way he basks in the cultish devotion of people who have willed themselves to believe in him as perfect and infallible.

    Sounding familiar?

    And I point this out, because narcissism, if not NPD, seems to be to foreign intelligence services like honey is to flies. It’s a huge lever. John Walker and Robert Hanssen, at least, seem to have been motivated by ego more than the money, which was just a token of their great value and appreciation (Hannsen even more than Walker, who at least spent the money rather than hoarding it up under the floorboards of his house). It would, to coin a phrase, be sooo easy to recruit someone with some simmering bundle of resentments and slights and unrequited thirst for vengence against those who failed to appreciate his genius generated by NPD.

    Doesn’t mean that Greenwald or Trump are Russian assets. But if not, it’s difficult to believe it was for lack of trying.

  140. 140.

    raptusregaliter

    January 23, 2018 at 10:29 am

    The easiest thing in the world to be is a douchebag contrarian. Sounds like Greenwald has nailed it.

  141. 141.

    InternetDragons

    January 23, 2018 at 4:16 pm

    @Amaranthine RBG: Yep. I detest Greenwald, but choosing this frame of attack (“a vast sympathy for willowy young men with sensitive mouths” — really??) isn’t “catty” – it’s just plain offensive. The fact that he’s an asshole doesn’t excuse it.

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