There is a strange new religion in the world - one defined not by its belief in the value of anything real or imagined, but its passionate and utterly impenetrable faith in the principle that one man - President Barack Obama - is the source and embodiment of all evil. No evidence to the contrary can break through the psychological absolutism of this faith - everything good he does is just some kind of diabolical ploy, or else it was someone else's doing; every position short of some robotic, punch-card-fed ideological program is a cynical attempt to sabotage our principles rather than competent managerial discretion; every disagreement is a betrayal; every error, absolute proof of a sinister agenda. Nothing exists in context; no fact is allowable that punctures the central principle that Barack Obama is Satan; that all that he does is wrong and vile by definition; and that all wrong, vile things that occur are attributable to him by definition. I only wish this description was exclusive to teabaggers.
History is basically rejected by people who subscribe to this agenda: Every event, every individual, and every broad understanding of the past that in any way contradicts the precious narrative is simply discarded as an impure and morally suspect thing. And since all of history contradicts the narrative, all of history is judged corrupt and disposed of. The past does not matter - as it fails to uphold the narrative, it is just one more tool of the great Satanic enemy whose conspiracies pervade all of time and space. Even the future does not appear to matter, since there is no attempt to envision a logical pathway from where we are to where we would like to be - thinking about political logistics is the mark of the non-believer, and instantly casts one under suspicion of being a (gasp) pragmatist.
All that matters is whether at any given second, events viewed through a keyhole of proud ignorance and interpreted by a bigoted mind feed their bigotry greatly, or feed it weakly - there is no third option to contradict their bigotry. It is absolute. In a world where President Obama's actions somehow magically manage to avoid giving even the remotest, most delusional pretext, one imagines the brains of such people would simply shut down and they'd fall into comas for lack of neurological stimulation, so greatly does their entire view of politics depend on Orwellian faith in the double-plus-ungoodness of one man.
But there is another man in the picture, Glenn Greenwald, and while not exactly a messiah he is nonetheless regarded as an example of "pure" liberal-progressive ideals by some with rather strange understandings of the concepts involved. Anyone familiar with both liberal-progressive ideals and Greenwald's extended body of work should find this association perplexing at best. I first became acquainted with Mr. Greenwald as a commentator very early in Obama's presidency, and the reason I took note at the time was the shocking degree of monotonously and disproportionately negative, inappropriately personalized, often irrational, and nearly always vindictive rhetoric leveled at the President by him.
I went into his archives in the first half of 2009 and read every last editorial he had ever written, and found that greater than 90% of his mentions of the Obama administration and Obama personally were negative - and this was back when we were getting gazillions in stimulus money, progressive energy and transportation projects were being funded, appointees were being approved, and progress was occurring far more rapidly than today. And while I haven't repeated that survey - and don't really know if I'd even have the stomach to try - specific commentaries I've read of his since then make it doubtful he's changed for the better. If anything, the fixated malevolence in his comments on the administration seems to have accelerated beyond all boundaries into Limbaugh territory without even Rush's thin pretense at having a sense of humor.
To read Glenn Greenwald is to be transported to an alternate universe with an implicitly different history, and a radically different form of government that we neither have, should have, nor have ever had. To use just one of many examples, if in this universe, a terrorism suspect in Somalia held by Somalis is questioned by a U.S. agent, in the mirror universe of Greenwaldistan what's happened is that Somalia is under US occupation, the place where the suspect is being held is a US installation, and even in the absence of a specific claim to that effect, the fact that the man was questioned by Americans means he was tortured - because that's what we dirty Americans do when we question people, we just can't help ourselves. Oh, and did I forget the part where all of this has occurred under the direct orders and knowledge (if not personal participation, perhaps involving the twirling of a mustache) of Barack Obama?
The scenario as it is borders on schizophrenic delusion, but when it's distilled to the point where a story about a U.S. agent being allowed to question a Somali terrorism suspect in the custody of other Somalis is interpreted as the Obama administration operating torture prisons in Somalia, either Greenwald is clinically deranged or he's a common liar on the Republican mold, getting a kick out of making shit up about people he hates for his own obscure reasons. And that was just a tiny, insignificant grain of sand on a whole beach of similarly crazed perversions of reality, and it just gets more outlandish with time.
In Greenwaldistan, the interpretation of the US/NATO presence in Afghanistan stops just a hair's breadth short of outright Trutherism - no doubt out of prudence rather than any actual shame of being so insane - civilians killed in war zones in US attacks were deliberately and personally targeted by the President; he conducts "assassinations," and detains Americans indefinitely without trial; and basically the whole world is under the thumb of God-King Ozymandias Obama, who is the perfected demon of whom Bush and Cheney were mere prototypes. It's more or less the teabagger delusion with more words and slimy faux-self-righteousness in place of fervid wingnut identity-politics.
Since 2009, he has accreted a bit of a cult around himself, feeding the disenchanted the opiate of blame so unreal and impervious to logic it cannot be defeated. Once you've fallen so far down the moral and philosophical food chain that you're willing to accept as fact things that are demonstrably false, there is nothing that can get in the way of your belief - and that's a very powerful salve to the painfully disillusioned. It's not that he and those who parrot him lie with such ease and evident enjoyment that really gets to me - shit happens, and people who are shit happen. What bothers me is the insult to liberalism and progressive values - the profane hijacking of morality as a pretext for bigots and sullen, misanthropic paranoids. What motivates a person to put on such a peacockish display of sanctimony, only to then piss all over the very concept of truth holding inherent value? Is he a left-wing version of the fire-and-brimstone evangelical sermonizer who spends his off hours snorting coke off a hooker's tits?
Greenwald's commentaries are so predictable in the ways they corrupt reason and toy with weak minds, I've mused about the idea of creating a Greenwald-emulating computer program where you feed in data about events and it spits out a "Greenwaldian" editorial. Hypothetical input: Bus crash in New Delhi kills 10. Faulty part to blame. Output:
Obama's India Massacre
In the administration's ruthless focus on economics, there was little thought about the potential far-reaching consequences of rescuing GM from bankruptcy. Now it appears some of the human toll of that ruthlessness has come to light in the form of ten dead innocent people on a New Delhi street. In keeping the GM factories rolling in Detroit, thousands of different parts suppliers - and suppliers to the suppliers - have stayed in business that would otherwise have disappeared. One of those suppliers is Blankety Blank Bolts Inc., which also sells its products to Toyota - the manufacturer of the bus in India that crashed last week due to a bolt-related mechanical failure, killing ten passengers.
This is hardly the first time Obama's policies have taken innocent lives, and it certainly won't be the last, but the painful insincerity and indifference of the administration's condolences to the families of the victims just underscores how little regard this President has for the lives of civilians. There has been no offer of reparations to the families of victims or to survivors for their ordeal, despite clear American culpability in the incident, and the administration has vehemently refused to apologize for its role in the catastrophe, calling into question President Obama's oft-repeated rhetorical commitment to human rights. Which makes me wonder just how many Indian lives he's prepared to throw away for the sake of automobile company profits.
Unfortunately, now that I've written that, someday the above is going to be quoted by a Greenwaldian as something that actually happened and they'll actually endorse the views made in the fake editorial snippet. Zombie memes attacking President Obama are utterly unkillable in the hands of either teabaggers or Greenwaldians, because the distinction between true and false doesn't exist in either's headspace - there's just that which feeds their egos, and that which detracts from it, and the latter will never be acknowledged as legitimate by them. They have zero capacity for the minimal humility needed to process such information, so they just ignore it. And that's just something we have to accept - it's every person's choice whether or not truth is inherently valuable to them, and you can neither enlighten the corrupt nor corrupt the enlightened without their permission. But what is within our purview is how seriously to treat people who have so little regard for anyone else that they piss on the only thing that allows human beings to trust each other.
To me, the solution is simple, and it's one I generally use with respect to Republicans: I completely ignore everything they say, and deal with them only phenomenologically - as actions and tendencies toward action. This is viable because their dishonesty essentially makes the words that come out of their mouths irrelevant, and dealing with those words is nothing but a pointless distraction. If Glenn Greenwald stands for anything, I haven't been able to find it in his writings - just a whole lot of pretexts for serving a very simple, and wholly unprogressive agenda: He piles one false pretense on top of another, one fallacy on top of another, one deluded and indefensible supposition on top of another, and does it with such regularity and predictable pathology that it's almost impossible he isn't aware of it. The one constant, and only thing that ties it all together, is that he hates Barack Obama, and makes it clear that his interpretations of events flow from that fact rather than vice-versa.
I don't know why he has this overriding, compulsive contempt - sublimated racism is as good a guess as any, although I'm sure there could be other valid interpretations - but far more importantly, I don't care. Greenwald has done nothing to deserve the kind of respect shown to him by even discussing his work, except as a case study in political counterfeiting. Use his editorials as gateways to primary sources if you find it convenient, but don't bother relying on his interpretations of them or regarding them as credible summaries - he just picks what he wants out of them and makes up the rest, or cites past commentary as evidence of current commentary. It would be standard intellectually-bankrupt punditry if not for the scary Travis Bickle psychology guiding it. People who think that's a liberal-progressive need to seriously level-up their ability to distinguish reality from narrative or they're not going to be of much use to their own causes.
Barack Obama = liberal and progressive. Greenwald = hater. That's the reality-based summary of their respective professional achievements, and also - unsurprisingly - the only set of conclusions that explains both of them. Haters gonna hate.
11:18 AM PT: You'll have to forgive me if I don't respond to comments immediately. Sleep calls, and I have to answer.