Beach Party Bang-Go

Glenn Greenwald is a relentless crusader for civil rights and the Constitution and hence a national treasure. The flip side is that he is a moralist and a scold who never seems to have a happy thought - except possibly at the misery of one of his enemies.

Joe Klein would not exactly make my list of saintly Americans, but I wouldn't put him in the Heydrich, Cheney, Umbridge class either. Glenn Greenwald has a stricter standard. Here he is doing a tag-team hat dance on Joe Klein's head with Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog. You want to watch out for those beach parties.

Time's Joe Klein was at a beach party last weekend and was confronted about his recent, vague statement that "there are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection." The person doing the confronting was Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog -- who also happens to be the granddaughter of I.F. Stone (which ends up being relevant to the confrontation) -- and she masterfully recounts the revealing and hilarious Klein outburst that ensued, during which, among other things, he accused me of being "evil," a "crazy civil liberties absolutist" and "crazily anti-national security."

Much of this is just standard Klein. He's been "accusing" me for years of being what he calls a "civil liberties extremist" or "monomaniacal on the subject of civil liberties" -- as though that's some type of insult, when I view it as being exactly the opposite. For reasons I recently explained -- in response to to Michael Massing's Chuck-Todd-echoing accusation in The New York Review of Books that I fail to take into account "practical considerations" when advocating various views -- it's impossible to believe in constitutional principles and the rule of law without being "extremist" and even "absolute" because that is the nature of those guarantees.

A lot of Greenwald's and Aimai's anger seems to be aimed at Joe Klein's real and perceived offenses past, but there also seems to be a lot of "he called me names" first. A moralist, and Greenwald is first a moralist, goes off the track when he starts confusing personal enmity with his causes, and Greenwald is walking pretty close to that line here.

Greenwald has done great work, and continues to do great work, but his combination of devotion to ideological purity and insistence in nursing old grudges is starting to erode his cause. Unlike the Republican wackos, he is outraged (mainly) by real outrages against decency and the Constitution, but he really doesn't seem to understand at all that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Obama, like Lincoln, understands that same statement with every fiber of his being.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more