I loves me some hot Glenn Greenwald on Jeff Goldberg action. And since everyone’s favorite gonzo Goldberg publicist is back from the DL, this seems like a good time for some more of it (h/t Turbulence):
“I don’t think that just because someone is wrong about something that they should forever have their credibility impaired,” he (Greenwald) told me in a phone interview. “But I think there are two things that distinguish this case. One is the consequentiality of it and the centrality he played. It wasn’t like he was just kind of wrong about something, he was one of the leading people validating the war. The thing that happened in the Iraq War is that obviously the right got behind it because the people on the right — the leaders on the right — were clearly behind it. But in order to make it a majoritarian movement, they had to get centrists and liberals behind it. So they needed liberal validators … There’s probably nobody that you can compare in influence to getting Democrats and liberals to support the war than Jeffrey Goldberg. It wasn’t just that he was for the war, he was using his status as a reporter to feed lies. I mean he didn’t just write one New Yorker piece but a second one too, and he was all over the television with this stuff saying that Saddam had a very active nuclear program and most importantly that Saddam had an enthusiastic alliance with al-Qaeda.”
[…..]“[Goldberg’s responses] are all substance free,” he told me. “It’s funny. It’s almost like his responses are three or four years behind. When I first started writing about criticizing media figures — establishment media figures — that was very much the reaction. It was a very lame sort of not-really-attentive response, just dismissive or plain mockery. Like, ‘I don’t have to respond because in my world he’s nobody and I’m somebody so the most I’m going to do is be derisive about this.’ That’s a journalist/blogger cliché from 2005, and most journalists know they can no longer get away with it. He’s living in a world where he thinks it doesn’t affect his reputation. Among his friends it doesn’t. I’m sure he calls [TIME writer] Joe Klein or whoever else I’ve criticized and he’s like ‘he’s an asshole and a prick, don’t worry about that.’ But I guarantee you that there are a lot more people reading the stuff I write than the stuff he writes, in terms of sheer number. And the level of impact that that kind of level of critique has is infinitely greater than it was three years ago. So I’m sure he tells himself and convinces himself that it doesn’t actually matter but it does. And it’s hurting his credibility.”
Let’s get a few things out in the open to save time. Just as Al Gore is fat, Glenn Greenwald is an asshole. It’s silly to talk about this at all, because the bombing will never happen and it’s also silly to to criticize Jeff Goldberg for saying it will happen. And to quote Wonkette, you are all anti-Semites for even reading this post.