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(s) of the Day

"When Bush first appeared on the political scene, and especially during the apparently successful first couple of years of his presidency, his defenders swatted away questions about his mental acuity by pointing to his success. If he’s so dumb, how has he achieved so much? Well, he didn’t. He oversaw a disastrous administration for precisely the reason his critics always grasped: Bush was an intellectual simpleton, a man who made up his mind in absence of the facts, who swatted away inconvenient realities as annoyances."

"The core of (Jennifer) Rubin’s defense is that Bush was terrific if you exempt him from any blame for the disasters that occurred during his presidency, and credit him entirely for the non-disaster periods. This sentence is a particular masterpiece: 'Unlike Obama’s tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11.' In fact, it is not true — there were small terrorist attacks on the United States, both abroad and at home, after 9/11. But exempting the most disastrous attack on the United States from Bush’s record of avoiding terrorism is a feat of propaganda that, while common, continues to boggle the mind. Emperor Honorius Kept Rome Safe, except that one time it was sacked by the Visigoths."

"The failures of Bush’s governing method — the staffing of hacks and cronies, the disdain for evidence — was perfectly reflected in the outcomes. The Bush presidency was a full disaster at home and abroad, and whatever small accomplishments that can be salvaged barely rate any mention in comparison with the failures. The general reckoning of Bush is not too harsh. It is too kind."

-- Excerpts from Jonathan Chait's essay, "Yes, George W. Bush Was a Terrible President, and No, He Wasn’t Smart," in New York Magazine online today, the day of the official dedication ceremony for the George W. Bush presidential library

George W. Bush was easily the worst president of my lifetime -- and I was born during the Nixon administration -- and may very well be the worst president this country has ever seen. The revisionists can try to spin him all they want, he was an unqualified, unmitigated disaster and that's how he'll be remembered.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They’re right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies... The GOP is the party arguing for splurging on a long vacation at the beach rather than repairing the roof. Naturally, they want to have this argument only when it’s sunny and never when it’s raining. There’s no reason to accommodate them."

-- New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait on why it's essential for the Democrats to use Hurricane Sandy to point out the political differences between President Obama and Mitt Romney

I'm not sure I can add anything to that.

You Can't Ever Get What You Want

As a complement to David Frum's dissection of what's wrong with the party he happens to be an avowed member of, Jonathan Chait takes to New York Magazine online to write the definitive takedown of the arrogant, whining, pouting, tantrum-throwing left. The whole thing is dead-on, but here are just a couple of pertinent quotes.

"Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president."

...

"'Monty Python’s Life of Brian' has a classic bit depicting the followers of 'Brian,' a thinly disguised satire of Jesus, as left-wing activists. The movement contains bitterly feuding splinter groups with such names as the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, the Judean Popular People’s Front, the Campaign for a Free Galilee, and the Popular Front of Judea—the last consisting of one man—all of which hate each other more than the Romans.

The joke was that left-wing politics has always taken the same form: that lefties in Palestine 2,000 years ago would act pretty much like their counterparts in seventies Britain. Political psychologists have found for decades that the joke is pretty much true. Conservatives, compared with liberals, have higher levels of respect for and obedience to authority and prefer order over chaos and continuity over change. They are more likely than liberals to agree with statements like 'It is more important to be a team player than to express yourself.'

The 1968 Democratic convention—'which consisted of spokespersons for about 253 major ideological factions giving each other the finger through clouds of tear gas,' as Dave Barry put it—is the sort of scene that could not occur within the Republican Party. Or consider the contrast in style between the tea party and Occupy Wall Street. These two movements, allegedly mirror images of each other, perfectly display the differences between the right and the left. The Occupy activists abhor anything that would force any member to subsume his or her individual autonomy to the greater good. Did the drum circles drive everybody else to distraction? Too bad—you can’t tell the drummers what to do, man. There are no leaders, no organized speakers, no attempts at organizing anything except addressing the protesters’ elemental need for food and shelter. The tea party was mostly able to suppress the racist signs that popped up in the early stages of the movement. Occupy Wall Street has been unable to silence a handful of anti-­Semites because it can’t silence anybody."

...

"Obama will never match among Democrats Reagan’s place in the psyche of his own party, as reflected in the endless propaganda campaign to give him full credit for the end of stagflation and communism, the dogmatic insistence that everything the great hero said offers the One True Path for all time, and the project to name every possible piece of American property after him. Republican Reagan-worship is a product of a pro-authority mind-set that liberals, who inflate past heroes only to criticize their contemporaries, cannot match. If recent history is any guide, they are simply not capable of having that kind of relationship with a president. They are going to question their leader, not deify him, and search for signs of betrayal in any act of compromise he or she may commit. This exhausting psychological torment is no way to live. Then again, the current state of the Republican Party suggests it may be healthier than the alternative."

Seriously, read the whole piece. It says everything I've been saying for two years now and sums up just about every point I've ever made to those who argue with me or write me off as some kind of Obama apologist. In other words, if you decide to bitch about any of this in the comment section, spare yourself the effort.