USA vs. Brasil

The Daily Banter: Brazil To Declare War on U.S. (or Today's Glenn Greenwald Fever Dream)/9.24.13

Quote of the Day

"Fein told the WSJ that a U.S. TV producer called her and told her that Greenwald had been 'shopping around an exclusive interview with Mr. Snowden for seven figures.' Greenwald called the accusation 'defamatory' but did tell the WSJ that he had a discussion with NBC about conducting an interview with Snowden and licensing it to them for $50,000."

-- From a Business Insider column titled "Edward Snowden's Father Doesn't Trust His Son's Closest Allies," which details a conversation with Mattie Fein, Lon Snowden's wife, in which she expressed her husband's reservations about Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks

I love this quote. I love everything about it. It's so wonderfully -- Greenwald.

"How dare you accuse me of shopping around a seven-figure interview with Edward Snowden!" And then in the pretty much the very next sentence, "Well, I mean, I am asking for five figures to license an interview with Edward Snowden, but that's completely different!"

It's rare that the semantic gymnastics and naked con artistry Greenwald regularly engages in and which make him so untrustworthy are put right out there for anyone and everyone to see. But there you have it.

Tweet of the Day

Uh-huh. A baby, a dick, and then both -- tonight on CNN.

The Self-Importance of Being Glenn

Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine recently posted a really good little column that draws some fascinating parallels between Glenn Greenwald's personality and that of Ralph Nader. For something so quick and to-the-point, it's honestly one of the most insightful pieces examining what makes Glenn so wonderfully "Glenny" that I've ever read; to say that Chait has nailed Greenwald's essence is an understatement.

Take a look:

"Greenwald, like Nader, marries an indefatigable mastery of detail with fierce moralism. Every issue he examines has a good side and an evil side. Greenwald, speaking not long ago to the New York Times, said something revealing about his intellectual style:
'I approach my journalism as a litigator,' he said. 'People say things, you assume they are lying, and dig for documents to prove it.'
That is a highly self-aware account. Of course, the job description of a litigator does not include being fair. You take a side, assume the other side is lying, and prosecute your side full tilt. It’s not your job to account for evidence that undermines your case — it’s your adversary’s job to point that out.

This way of looking at the world naturally places one in conflict with most liberals, who are willing to distinguish between gradations of success or failure. Nader and Greenwald believe their analysis not only completely correct, but so obviously correct that the only motivation one could have to disagree is corruption. Good-faith disagreement, or even rank stupidity, is not possible around Greenwald. His liberal critics are lackeys and partisan shills. He may be willing to concede ideological disagreement with self-identified conservatives, but a liberal who disagrees can only be a kept man."

A journalist can certainly be part litigator; every journalist to some extent is an advocate. But what makes Greenwald the furthest thing from a journalist is that his tendency toward litigation in favor of his intransigent beliefs causes him to not only overlook facts that contradict his central argument but to then lash out through verbal and intellectual violence at those who point out his negligence. As Chait says, he leaves it up to his adversaries to present the side of the debate that he believes he has no responsibility to consider and promote. However, since he holds so firmly to the case he presents and thinks so highly of both himself and the causes he embraces, there's no way those adversaries can be anything but immoral by taking an opposite position.

The thing is, though, that while a journalist is part litigator, as I've said a few times before, he or she is also part scientist. A good journalist has to constantly be testing his or her theories and findings for signs that a bias might be getting the better of the commitment to the truth. In other words, journalists try to prove themselves wrong as often as they try to prove themselves right, just to make sure that an adversary has no contrary argument. Not one that holds water anyway. Greenwald will have none of this. He doesn't check his facts and he doesn't seal up a story airtight because he doesn't approach his work like a journalist -- he approaches it like an ideologue.

Case in point: Over the weekend, Greenwald embarrassed himself entirely by instinctively going on the attack on Twitter against Daniel Serwer. Serwer, the father of Mother Jones and MSNBC contributor Adam Serwer, had pointed out that Greenwald, through his constant supplication and fan-girl teasing of new details directly from the mouth of his teen idol, is doing little more than being a PR flack for Edward Snowden. As criticism, this may be somewhat stinging, but in Serwer's defense it has the benefit of being absolutely correct. Greenwald's reaction was exactly what you would expect: He fired off a snotty, petulant tweet in response aimed at putting Serwer in his place:



Here's the only problem with Greenwald's response: He's provably, quantifiably wrong; Daniel Serwer has actually done more to make the world a better place in his lifetime than Snowden or just about anybody else ever will.

Here's his résumé, compliments of the Center for Transatlantic Relations:

"Daniel Serwer (Ph.D., Princeton) is a Professor of Conflict Management, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a Scholar at the Middle East Institute.

Formerly Vice President for Centers of Peacebuilding Innovation at the United States Institute of Peace (2009-10), he led teams there working on rule of law, religion, economics, media, technology, security sector governance and gender. He was previously Vice President for Peace and Stability Operations at USIP, where he led its peacebuilding work in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and the Balkans and served as Executive Director of the Hamilton/Baker Iraq Study Group. Serwer has worked on preventing interethnic and sectarian conflict in Iraq and has facilitated dialogue between Serbs and Albanians in the Balkans.

He was a minister-counselor at the Department of State, serving from 1994 to 1996 as U.S. special envoy and coordinator for the Bosnian Federation, mediating between Croats and Muslims and negotiating the first agreement reached at the Dayton peace talks. From 1990 to 1993, he was deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, where he led a major diplomatic mission through the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War."

This is the guy who Glenn Greenwald thinks has done less than Edward Snowden in his lifetime. What this shows is that Greenwald is either A) so delusional in his dauntless worship of Snowden that he truly believes that Serwer's accomplishments pale in significance, or B) such a knee-jerk and piss-poor journalist that he didn't bother to check his facts before running his mouth off. Either way, Greenwald's comment cements, for those who still require it, why he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously and why everything he writes should be eyed with suspicion. This kind of bullshit -- the kind of thing we're very much used to from Greenwald -- isn't the behavior of a journalist, even a necessary, iconoclastic asshole journalist (and there are many of those). It's the behavior of a pissy child.





Adding: Cesca posted not only the full conversation between Greenwald and Daniel Serwer but Adam Serwer's totally fair response to Greenwald's insult, which included the words "Hey Glenn, fuck you." He also put up the best responses to the resulting Twitter hashtag game based around Greenwald's "best Snowden brags." You can find it over at Bob's blog.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"You're going to have to wait along with everybody else. I will say that there are vast programs, both domestic and international spying, that the world will be shocked to learn about, that the NSA is engaged in with no democratic accountability and that's what driving our reporting."

-- Glenn Greenwald to Fox News's Eric Bolling today

A tease. A tease, you fucking hack.

I swear, I'm going to deck the next person who tells me that Glenn Greenwald is a serious journalist and not a narcissistic child who's strictly doing this for the shot of pure adrenaline into the heart of his sense of self-importance it's giving him. First of all, Greenwald talks to a racist piece of crap like Eric Bolling as if he's someone whose views are worth taking seriously -- then he drops back to coy-little-girl mode just as Bolling decides can't take it anymore and needs to show his appreciation and excitement by basically pulling his dong out and stroking it for him.

Jesus, Greenwald's a joke.

Snowden Blower

Well, this is pretty much the most insane thing you'll see today: a five-minute film apparently thrown together quickly by a couple of Hong Kong filmmakers detailing the events that made Edward Snowden into, well, whatever he is these days. It's already received upwards of 100-thousand hits on YouTube with the comments on it, as you can imagine, ranging from thoughtful to barely legible due to what has to be the problem of trying to keep the tin-foil hat from falling over your face while you're typing.

The acting is laughable -- with an American-born English teacher living in Hong Kong stepping up to play Snowden -- and the overbearing soundtrack music sounds like Hans Zimmer being beaten to death with a foghorn. Since this isn't Michael Bay, Paul Greengrass or even John Woo we're talking about here, it doesn't end with a lot of action -- just an audio clip from the actual first interview Snowden gave to Glenn Greenwald, back before we knew for sure that he was a staggeringly naive political nihilist destined to collapse under the weight of his own relentless sense of self-importance.

The movie is called Verax.

If you can figure out why it exists, please let me know.

Comment of the Week

In response to today's earlier post, reference Nick Denton's insinuation that Glenn Greenwald's home in Rio is often overrun with "boys" -- really, what appears to be more like young men -- who sleep over and play videogames. Denton's comment came attached to a piece at Gawker detailing Greenwald's involvement in the business end of a gay porn operation years ago:

"Having gone back and read the post Denton's comment appeared under, my favorite bit was this:

'With Greenwald's help, the company began making money, but when it came time to pay up, Haas refused, saying Greenwald had demanded changes to the content of the videos which were and are unacceptable.'

I can only imagine. At first, they filmed and released a half-hour gay porn vid. But then, Greenwald decided they needed a five-minute post-credits scene. After a second set of credits, this was followed by an additional three minutes of extra footage, complete with a third set of credits. The now 38 minute video was finally released to the public, but after a scathing review in an adult video industry mag, Greenwald insisted the video be recalled and had an additional ten minutes of footage shot, which were appended to the end of the video, which was then re-released. The release delays prompted complaints from several adult video rental stores; these complaints infuriated Greenwald, who recalled the video a second time and re-released it with an additional forty-two minutes of footage, followed by yet another credits roll, followed by nine minutes of deleted scenes....

As last observed, the half-hour gay porn video is now only available as a seventeen-hour box set. Greenwald's former business partners obviously can't afford a sequel.

-- Eric"

The only thing missing is Greenwald openly attacking critics of the film as cultists and intellectually dishonest servants of the gay entertainment media complex who cravenly show fealty to the brand of male-on-male 69-ing deemed acceptable by the authorities.

Incidentally, I really wanted to try to start a #GreenwaldPorn titles meme this morning on Twitter because it's so ripe for great material, but there's no way in hell anyone would go near something like that.

I was gonna start with "Manning Bradley" and work my way down from there.

Anyway, congratulations, Eric. As always you win a brand new Chrysler Cordoba and you can pick it up at Morty's office.

Quote of the Day

"I did hear another story, not from Greenwald himself, about the Guardian writer's life in Brazil. The Out profile of him mentioned the pack of stray dogs that Greenwald had adopted. But it skipped over the boys — mainly friends of his partner David Michael Miranda — who sleep over and play videogames at the house. That would have given too much ammunition to Greenwald's conservative critics."

-- Gawker Publisher Nick Denton on Glenn Greenwald

I'm really not sure what the hell to make of this. There's a story in today's New York Daily News that digs pretty deeply into Greenwald's life and finds that he used to be involved in the business side of a gay porn company and that he continues to have all kinds of problems with the IRS, including tens of thousands of dollars in outstanding debt, but I honestly don't care about that. As Greenwald essentially says, everybody's got their trouble. It is entertaining to get further confirmation that he's a pissy, demanding little pain-in-the-ass who lives for unnecessary melodrama and who thinks his shit doesn't stink -- also that he considers ancient history to be about ten years ago -- but for the most part the Daily News revelations are meaningless.

Now Denton's insinuation, on the other hand, seems pretty nasty. But the above quote is really all he says about it aside from saying that he met Greenwald in Rio 18 months ago, which means, I assume, that he's claiming to know about Greenwald and videogame-paying boys from some kind of personal experience, either with Greenwald himself or someone close to him. Denton threw the link to Gawker's story on the Greenwald report up on Twitter just a little while ago with this headline: "Finally, an excuse to share my Glenn Greenwald gossip."

It's a pretty damning charge to make, even as subtle innuendo. I hope Denton's got something to back this kind of thing up seeing as how vindictively sue-happy Greenwald has proven himself to be over the years.

This is one of those cases, though, where whoever loses, we win.

Quote of the Day

"Greenwald has not yet made a public evaluation of whether or not he agrees that he made that mistake. He owes it to us to do so, with as much speed as practicably possible. It’s not too much to say that the fate of his broader NSA project might hinge on doing so effectively—because the powers that be will find it very easy to seize on this one error to discredit his every NSA revelation, even the ones he nailed dead to rights... Such distraction campaigns are how power does its dirtiest work. Think of the way the questions about the authenticity of the 'Killian documents' were able to obscure the fact that George W. Bush actually did go AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard or how the unrelated or how the unrelated killing of a CIA station chief in Greece was used to discredit the congressional investigations of CIA wrongdoing in 1975—cases with which Greenwald should be well-familiar. So, Glenn Greenwald, what’s the word? The fate of our civil liberties may depend on it."

-- The Nation's Rick Perlstein on questions being raised about Glenn Greenwald's dubious reporting on the PRISM program and the NSA's data-mining in general, including an apparent mistake that Perlstein is calling Greenwald's "epic botch"

Meanwhile, over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has some questions of his own about Edward Snowden. What's interesting is that Drum links back to Andrew Sullivan, who links to the guy who's turning out to be Patient Zero in the push-back against Greenwald and Snowden's claims, the guy who first started asking very serious questions and demanding that Greenwald clarify his claims: Bob Cesca. These people are basically quoting Cesca and the stuff he's been writing for the Daily Banter all week, word-for-word.

A big standing-O for Bob today, my friends. He's doing a yeoman's job.

Holy War

Today's Daily Banter column is a bit of a monster. It's pegged off of an e-mail exchange between Sam Harris and Glenn Greenwald.

Here's the opening shot:

"I'm a fan of Sam Harris. A very big fan, in fact, despite not agreeing with him across the board. His 2004 book, 'The End of Faith,' is just about the seminal guide to refuting faith-based religion through bulletproof fact and near-flawless argumentation. If you're an atheist, it's basically, well, your Bible. Harris prides himself on his intellect and on an absolute reliance on reason, which means that he's a formidable foe to debate simply because his logic is generally made of concrete and titanium. I admit that while Harris himself dislikes having to constantly defend himself against the same ridiculous attacks on his beliefs over and over again -- typically from those who either misunderstand statements he's made perfectly clear or who feel like they need to purposely twist his arguments to serve their own ends -- I enjoy watching him rip those who go up against him to shreds. He does it with such confidence but, provided the adversary in question isn't just being an asshole, with such respect that it makes you glad people like him exist to act as intellectual super heroes when our culture needs them.

One of the more ludicrous accusations that's been leveled at Sam Harris throughout the years has to do with his supposed tendency toward 'Islamophobia.' As with his contemporaries in the "new atheist" movement, people like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, Harris believes that radical Islam represents an especially insidious and dangerous form of faith simply because it often manifests itself in physical violence aimed at both non-believers and believers alike. It may be politically incorrect to say that Islam is the most pervasive and immediate religious threat our world is facing at this moment in its history, but it's not necessarily factually incorrect."

Read the Rest Here

Unleash Hellfire

I like to think that my misanthropy is having a positive impact on Cesca.

His Daily Banter column today once again takes on Glenn Greenwald, only this time he foregoes ceremony and that "all due respect" nonsense and just thunders away at him. And that's an unqualified good.

The Daily Banter: The Most Terrifying Drone Ever! Run Away!/3.13.13

Quote of the Month

"A screed of pure personal and profane invective."

-- David Sirota's description of my Daily Banter column from yesterday, which took aim at his and Glenn Greenwald's hysteria over drones, the Obama administration's use of them, and Rand Paul's supposedly principled stand against them

I'll give Sirota this: He knows personal and profane invective when he sees it, because that's exactly what my piece was. To be honest, while I knew going into it that Sirota loved the sound of his own voice and had a tendency to not only Google himself regularly but respond in appropriately butt-hurt fashion whenever he felt he'd been insulted, I didn't think I'd hear from him in response to my column. And you know what? I didn't hear from him. There wasn't a word from him aimed in my direction. What I started, though, unintentionally, was a pretty epic Twitter fight between him and MSNBC contributor Goldie Taylor.

Taylor tweeted out a link to my post yesterday evening and Sirota completely lost his mind. Given that she's a much bigger target than I am, he immediately turned any guns that he may have been ready to train on me directly toward her. What resulted was one hell of a back-and-forth, with Sirota pompously moralizing about how there was "(n)othing more distasteful than privileged US elites telling everyone not to care about people we're murdering abroad" -- he actually did RT the link to my piece to his acolytes -- and Taylor eviscerating him for being a rich white guy scolding a black woman about elitism.

Now Sirota's wise enough in the ways of self-promotion to know that going after Goldie Taylor, again a nationally recognized figure, will garner much more attention than punching down to a nobody like me. While I won't defend his relentless silliness, he's also got a point when he expresses shock that an MSNBC face would retweet a piece that came right out and said "fuck David Sirota and Glenn Greenwald." I actually think it's pretty damn cool that someone in the spotlight put her name to something so caustic, but he's right that it violates accepted protocol. I wouldn't be surprised, knowing his predilection for self-righteous umbrage, if Sirota approaches MSNBC and tries to make a stink about this whole thing.

If not that, then you can almost be sure that he'll try to spin shit into gold for himself by challenging Goldie Taylor to come on the show he deigns to co-host with Michael "Heckuva Job Brownie" Brown in Denver.

Sirota blocked me on Twitter, by the way, which is amusing given that I'm not following him, would probably never tweet him, and generally don't do Twitter anyway, let alone get into Twitter feuds. Also, Greenwald, predictably, isn't saying a word. Even if he did read what I wrote, he would never bother coming down from his Rio Olympus just to crush a mere mortal like me.

Endless Drone

Today's Daily Banter column cuts to the chase on the subject of Glenn Greenwald, David Sirota, Rand Paul, and, of course, drones.

Here's the opening shot:

"This has been alluded to a couple of times here over the past two days, mostly by the always thoughtful and analytical Bob Cesca, but as usual I’ll be the one to dispense with all the pleasantries and just come right out and say it: Fuck Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota. Fuck them because their opinions don’t deserve to be taken the least bit seriously. Their supposedly bottomless reservoir of intellectual honesty is really puddle-deep and, in fact, they’re nothing more than what their fiercest critics have always accused them of being: sanctimonious jokes who pretend to be dedicated, indignant fighters of all manner of civil liberties injustices when in reality they’ve bequeathed to themselves wide latitude to choose which sins to prosecute and which to forgive or overlook completely. They don’t care about all affronts by authority to your civil rights. They only care about the select few they’ve chosen to plant their flag in and dig deep on and if their slavish devotion to those signature issues happens to force them into a position of defending a set of civil rights offenses they care less about but which are in the grand scheme no less awful, then so be it."

Read the Rest Here

Picture of the Day

Okay, at this point it's becoming comedy. Here's the giant headline currently running over at the Huffington Post, your new headquarters for all things associated with drone hysteria. Sure, very serious guys like Glenn Greenwald can relentlessly self-flagellate over the horror of drone technology but they aren't usually into using Google Image Search to help drive their point home.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject of Greenwald, Cesca made what I consider to be the colossal mistake of going down the sanctimony-and-intransigence rabbit hole by getting into a debate with him over drones via Twitter on Saturday.

He wrote about it today over at the Banter.

The King of Comedy

It's been a while since I've bothered to bring up Glenn Greenwald but this is simply too good to pass up.

Ben over at the Daily Banter has posted definitive proof of Greenwald's complete lack of anything approaching a sense of humor. It comes during an exchange in the comment section of Greenwald's piece today in which he practically climaxes all over himself at the fact that Zero Dark Thirty didn't win an Oscar in any of the major categories last night, which he of course sees as an indictment of the film's treatment of the subject of torture and its supposed lionizing of the CIA. (Greenwald hilariously calls Oscar night a "bad evening" for the CIA, apparently failing to grasp that Best Picture-winner Argo was basically a love letter to the agency.)

Anyway, Greenwald can't help but crow about how he was right -- as he always is -- and the movie critics who raved about Zero Dark Thirty were wrong. And that's when a few commenters have their way with him -- and his response to them is truly priceless.

The Daily Banter: Glenn Greenwald Literally Has No Sense of Humor Whatsoever/2.25.13

I love it when Greenwald proves what an insufferable little cunt he is. And no, unlike with the Onion tweet, that crack wasn't aimed at us -- it was aimed squarely at Greenwald.

Perez Greenwald

It's been a long time since I bothered mentioning Glenn Greenwald and that's by design. I've come to believe that the best way to deal with his insufferable sanctimony is to either ignore him completely or treat the irrelevant self-parody that he's become as just that: irrelevant self-parody.

With that in mind, this is the best thing you'll see all week. Adrian Chen and Max Read of Gawker potentially spawning an entirely new satire column -- one that would be just fucking brilliant.

Picture of the Day

I'm not sure there's ever been an image that's more flawlessly summed up everything that is Glenn Greenwald.

The choice of writing only from among his stable of four or five rotating topics. The indignant defense of Julian Assange. The involuntary lashing out at the evil, imperial U.S. for its unlawful and immoral persecution of the world's most saintly individual. The implication that everyone should agree with him and let Assange off the hook for trying to run off to a South American country -- sound familiar? -- and the almost certain implication that those who disagree and think that Assange is a coward who's evading the justice system because he arrogantly doesn't think he should have to face its potential judgment are jingoistic barbarians. The four -- four -- Aspergerian updates.

It's just all so -- Glenny.

I realize I'm violating my current policy of not even bothering to click the link whenever I see a Greenwald byline, but I'm glad I did this time. This kind of comedy gold is priceless.

No Respect

My latest piece for the Daily Banter is now up -- and it deals with a topic that's been discussed at length quite a bit at Banter over the past several days: Glenn Greenwald, the "professional left" and the progressive civil war they've been on one side of.

My column specifically focuses on one particular aspect of any left-leaning criticism of Greenwald -- and asks why it's necessary.

Here's the opening shot:

"So over the past week this site has turned into the 'Let’s Take a Few Shots at Glenn Greenwald' show, with two of its highest-profile columnists — Banter founder Ben Cohen and blogging machine Bob Cesca — penning pieces that take issue with Greenwald’s smugness and intransigence in the face of political reality. One of the essays that started it all actually quoted something I’d written months ago, but I’ve been loathe to step into the fray myself around here simply because these days I honestly regard Glenn Greenwald as a nonentity, having come to the conclusion quite a while back that the less I think about Greenwald’s insufferable sanctimony and ongoing propensity for childish tantrum-throwing, the better. I genuinely don’t read what he writes at all anymore; I see the headlines over at Salon, know in short order exactly what he’s going to say before he even says it, chuckle and shake my head for a second, then move on to something more informative, balanced and worth taking seriously.

With that in mind, though, I do think there’s one thing worth addressing when it comes to the discussion of Greenwald..."

Read the Rest Here

Pompous Circumstance

I'm still trapped in the middle of project hell at the moment, but Ben Cohen over at the Daily Banter published a piece a little while ago that takes on Glenn Greenwald for being, well, so Glenn Greenwald-y.

I got a pretty big mention in the column and I happen to agree with most of what Ben has to say -- I say most because, no, I don't respect Greenwald at all. I think he's actually a sanctimonious turd who's proven that he deserves to be paid almost no attention -- but that's just my opinion.

Anyway, read on before Glenn begins punching down to me and Ben on Twitter and his army of myrmidons joins in.

The Daily Banter: Tired of the Lecturing Left: A Message To Glenn Greenwald/6.12.12

Picture of the Day

Six updates. Six. Designated by roman numerals.

I swear, sometimes I think Greenwald is purposely out to make parodying him impossible -- or at the very least unnecessary.