There is nothing liberal or progressive on display here. There is no great, intellectual insight. There isn’t even a shred of intellectual honesty. Because if you go beyond the 5,000 word screed, you discover that what he truly believes is nigh indistinguishable from your average libertarian comment troll.
Responding to the implication that he should take more responsibility for his support of the Iraq War, Glenn Greenwald had this to say over at the Lawyers Guns Money Blog.
If you can go to a top law school, work for a NYC corporate law firm, supposedly do constitutional law for a few more years, and make it almost to 40 years old and not fully see through Bush’s warmongering …
Say the loyal Democratic partisans who revere Bill Clinton, cheer for Joe Biden, and will work in 2 years to put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office, notwithstanding the fact that they did more than anyone this side of Dick Cheney to make the Iraq War happen, to say nothing of enacting the supremely bigoted DOMA, “reforming” welfare, themsleves bombing Iraq and imposing a devastating sanctions regime on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of children, overseeing expansions of the Drug War that imprison huge numbers of minorities, all while swooning for the current President as he routinely kills Muslim children, expands secrecy, persecutes whistleblowers, protects Wall Street and torturers from prosecution, and eagerly and repeatedly proposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Sure. Blame the Clintons for the Iraq War. Why not? It works for conservatives. They blame the Clintons for virtually everything else so why not Iraq too? Nevermind that both Iraq wars, and the consequences of them, were presided over by the Bushes and left to the next administrations to clean up.
As for President Obama — next thing ya’ know Glenn is going to tell me the president gleefully cut $700 billion from Medicare, right? Of course we all know the only thing protecting us from that darn Obama and his deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare (which he proposes “eagerly and repeatedly”) is the Republicans in congress.
To say the president “routinely” kills Muslim children — aside from being an incredibly ugly thing to say — is to imply that foreign policy is not a subject that the president takes seriously or one that weighs heavily on him while anyone paying the least bit of attention knows better.
To say this of a president who may be the only force standing between us and war with Iran, who just last week went into Israel and compared his own daughters to Palestinian children and told Israelis to their face that encroaching on and occupying Palestinian lands is not the answer, reveals to me that you more than disagree with him. It says to me that you hate him and that hate colors virtually all of your commentary from top to bottom.
I don’t feel the need to elaborate on the rest. Bradley Manning is not a whistleblower. Dumping hundreds of thousands of documents indiscriminately is not whistleblowing nor is President Obama singularly responsible for pushing the military to prosecute Manning within the confines of a court of military justice. Much of what Wall Street did was legal, but the Department of Justice has and continues to pursue civil lawsuits against them.
If I didn’t tell you who wrote that comment, you could have assumed it was any other random troll who has ventured into these parts over the last four years to tell us that Obama is worse than Bush and that a Paul, whether Ron or Rand, is the answer to everything.
I’ll file this one under “Wingnuts.”