Too much name-calling because someone does not toe the party line.
May I clarify right up front that I am not a "lover" or "hater" of any political figure. I am a person who thinks for herself, and I speak out loudly against injustices by any party. My particular thing right now (in case you hadn't noticed) is posting about the hostile takeover of public schools by a Democratic administration. Need to clarify I voted for and campaigned for Obama both times.
Something else bugs me.
Using the term libertarian as an insult against a blogger and whistle blower.
There's a lot of that around lately. Frankly there are views of libertarians that I despise, such as the idea that the government has no role in the care of its people. That's just wrong, I agree.
But when those of any political mind criticize the massive mind-blowing attacks on personal privacy by government agencies like the NSA...I tend to agree.
I feel that the deliberate use of that term against a blogger who is simply not affiliated or loyal to any party at all....is wrong.
In a defense of himself on this issue Glenn Greenwald posted his views and stances, and he said people should decide for themselves what to call him....if anything.
From Daily Kos:
Glenn Greenwald Responds to Widespread Lies About Him (on Cato, Iraq War, and more)
Be sure to look at the right hand side of the page to see the vast number of recommends this post got. Sounds like an open-minded group there.
Greenwald presents a list of his views on various topics, and then he asked readers to decide for themselves.
here are views I've publicly advocated. Decide for yourself if the "libertarian" label applies:
* opposing all cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (here and here);
* repeatedly calling for the prosecution of Wall Street (here, here and here);
* advocating for robust public financing to eliminate the domination by the rich in political campaigns, writing: "corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture" (here and here);
* condemning income and wealth inequality as the by-product of corruption (here and here);
* attacking oligarchs - led by the Koch Brothers - for self-pitying complaints about the government and criticizing policies that favor the rich at the expense of ordinary Americans (here);
* arguing in favor of a public option for health care reform (repeatedly);
* criticizing the appointment of too many Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street officials to positions of power (here, here and here);
* repeatedly condemning the influence of corporate factions in public policy making (here and here);
* using my blog to raise substantial money for the campaigns of Russ Feingold and left-wing/anti-war Democrats Normon Solomon, Franke Wilmer and Cecil Bothwell, and defending Dennis Kucinich from Democratic Party attacks;
* co-founding a new group along with Daniel Ellsberg, Laura Poitras, John Cusack, Xeni Jardim [sic], JP Barlow and others to protect press freedom and independent journalism (see the New York Times report on this here);
* co-founding and working extensively on a PAC to work with labor unions and liberal advocacy groups to recruit progressive primary challengers to conservative Democratic incumbents (see the New York Times report on this here);
I am not an "Obama Hater", and I despise the term "haters gonna hate." I am not a Glenn Greenwald "lover", but I do respect his work as a whistle blower. I learned a valuable lesson in 2003-2004 when my late hubby and I worked hard for and spent a lot of money on the Dean Campaign. However I think I went overboard in my zeal, and so did hubby. But it meant so much to hear the truth about the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Still, because I was too adoring of a political figure back then, I can see it clearly in different guise now. It's not healthy.
And neither is hatred for the whistle-blowers who have let us know how badly our privacy has been invaded.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks for reminding me of his book. Nice post. 
Cause that never happens. I've got a bookmark of a thread that was entertaining a troll. I offered opposition and the DU members backed him up. All of a sudden the troll disappears, assuming MIRT saw the obvious, then crickets. Soon as he disappeared the folks that supported him here on DU went dead. Crickets!
Yes it happens, *sigh* 
-p
And I think 69 of them, at the moment, have rec'd this OP!
See, there's a lot of it going around. 
I'm not close personal friends with them (I met them back when I was a grassroots leader in the Dean campaign), but I've been to their house for Joe's birthday parties and when I see his wife around town we will stop and chat.
Anyway, I was taking a rhetoric course after the 2004 election and for my final project, I wanted to analyze the Dean campaign's use in 2003 of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" toward the end its existence. I contacted Kathleen (Joe's wife) and asked if she could put me in touch with the staffer who wrote Dean's "Common Sense for a New Century," which she did.
I asked him a lot of questions for my project and he gave me a lot of intriguing insights (one gem: "A presidential campaign is a much different beast from an actual movement. The Dean campaign tried to build a movement around a candidate, and now having attempted this twice, I can say that it's impossible. The presidency is an inherently undemocratic institution...An actual movement is much more diffuse."
Anyway, I was surprised by the following critique he gave of Dean: "The candidate had little or no sense of American history and even less grasp on the contemporary problems of our political system."
I have no idea if that was sour grapes or not, but it vindicated how I felt about the Dean campaign in a way. I would always say during the campaign that, while I thought Dean would be much better than Bush, I was more interested in the movement aspect of the campaign than I was in Dean himself.
that I'm in complete agreement with everything he has listed that he advocates for...
from spying on us, I wonder if there might be a way to render it meaningless. I recall that Russians used to sit on park benches to discuss important matters because it was hard for the snitches and the bugs to listen in because of the background noise. I wonder if it might not be possible to overwhelm the system with data, like leaving a phone on and sending a recording of a novel in a foreign language 24/7. 
Most don't.
as long as I can remember. Thanks for all of them.
Amazing.
"Some of my ancestors walked the Trail of Tears. Some of them sent my ancestors on the Trail of Tears. That means I hate myself. Damn! "
Love it, so true.
I have always appreciated your posst, though we sometimes disagreed on candidates years ago. You write thoughtful stuff, and it is nice to read.
general which is where it counts.
And where is the cute little Democratic Donkey symbol we used to have? Someone please tell Skinner we need our cute little Democratic Donkey back so we can give posts good old fashioned Democratic Kicks.
the donkey is still there. When you see the choice of dots at the end of the visible ones, click it and see the rest. Took me a while to discover it. 
You do good work, keep it up.
That was a nice thought.
..though I know she doesn't see DU as a competition.
and then write zeroes after it until you get tired. That's a googolplex. 
"In a defense of himself on this issue Glenn Greenwald posted his views and stances, and he said people should decide for themselves what to call him....if anything. "
The same tired Greenwald excuses.
Repost: This is Greenwald's debunk of his support for the Iraq war?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024931400#post14
Originally posted here:http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023134060
Glenn Greenwald Responds to Widespread Lies About Him (on Cato, Iraq War, and more)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/30/1182442/-Glenn-Greenwald-Responds-to-Widespread-Lies-About-Him-on-Cato-Iraq-War-and-more#
These claim [sic] are absolutely false. They come from a complete distortion of the Preface I wrote to my own 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act? That book - which was the first book devoted to denouncing the Bush/Cheney executive power theories as radical and lawless - was published a mere six months after I began blogging, so the the purpose of the Preface was to explain where I had come from, why I left my law practice to begin writing about politics, and what my political evolution had been..
The whole point of the Preface was that, before 2004, I had been politically apathetic and indifferent - except for the work I was doing on constitutional law. That's because, while I had no interest in the fights between Democrats and Republicans, I had a basic trust in the American political system and its institutions, such that I devoted my attention and energies to preventing constitutional violations rather than political debates. From the first two paragraphs:
When the Iraq War was debated and then commenced, I was not a writer. I was not a journalist. I was not politically engaged or active. I never played any role in political debates or controversies. Unlike the countless beloved Democrats who actually did support the war - including Obama's Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - I had no platform or role in politics of any kind.
I never once wrote in favor of the Iraq War or argued for it in any way, shape or form. Ask anyone who claims that I "supported" the Iraq War to point to a single instance where I ever supported or defended it in any way. There is no such instance. It's a pure fabrication.
At the time, I was basically a standard passive consumer of political news: I read The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic: the journals that I thought high-end consumers of news would read and which I assumed were generally reliable for getting the basic truth.What I explained in the Preface was that I had major objections to the Iraq war when it was being debated:
During the lead-up to the invasion, I was concerned that the hell-bent focus on invading Iraq was being driven by agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks. The overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak, particularly given that it would lead to an open-ended, incalculably costly, and intensely risky preemptive war. Around the same time, it was revealed that an invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein had been high on the agenda of various senior administration officials long before September 11.
Nonetheless, because of the general faith I had in political and media institutions, I assumed - since both political parties and media outlets and journalists from across the ideological spectrum were united in support of the war - that there must be some valid basis to the claim that Saddam posed a threat. My basic trust in these institutions neutralized the objections I had and led me to passively acquiesce to what was being done ("I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country."
.
Like many people, I became radicalized by those early years of the Bush administration. The Preface recounts that it was the 2002 due-process-free imprisonment of US citizen Jose Padilla and the 2003 Iraq War that caused me to realize the full extent of the government's radicalism and the media's malfeasance: "I developed, for the first time in my life, a sense of urgency about the need to take a stand for our country and its defining principles."
As I recount in the Preface, I stopped practicing law and pursued political writing precisely because those people who had an obligation to act as adversarial checks on the Bush administration during the start of the war on civil liberties and the run-up to the Iraq War - namely, Congress, courts, and the media - were profoundly failing to fulfill that obligation.
I wasn't a journalist or government official during these radical power abuses and the run-up to the Iraq War, and wasn't working in a profession supposedly devoted to serving as watchdog over government claims and abuses. I relied on those people to learn what was going on and to prevent extremism. But I quickly concluded that those who held those positions in politics and journalism were failing in their duties. Read the last six paragraphs of the Preface: I started writing about politics to bring light to these issues and to try to contribute to a real adversarial force against the Bush administration and its blind followers.
It is true that, like 90% of Americans, I did support the war in Afghanistan and, living in New York, believed the rhetoric about the threat of Islamic extremism: those were obvious mistakes. It's also true that one can legitimately criticize me for not having actively opposed the Iraq War at a time when many people were doing so. Martin Luther King, in his 1967 speech explaining why his activism against the Vietnam War was indispensable to his civil rights work, acknowledged that he had been too slow to pay attention to or oppose the war and that he thus felt obligated to work with particular vigor against it once he realized the need ("Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam"
.
I've often spoken about the prime benefit of writing about political matters full-time: namely, it enables you to examine first-hand sources and not have to rely upon media or political mediators when forming beliefs. That process has been and continues to be very eye-opening for me.
Like most people who do not work on politics or journalism full-time, I had to rely back then on standard political and media venues to form my political impressions of the world. When I first began writing about politics, I had a whole slew of conventional political beliefs that came from lazy ingestion of the false and misleading claims of these conventional political and media sources. Having the time to examine political realities first-hand has led me to realize how many of those former beliefs I held were based on myth or worse, and I've radically changed how I think about a whole slew of issues as a result of that re-examination.
The purpose of the Preface was to publicly explain that evolution. Indeed, the first sentence of this Preface was this quote from Abraham Lincoln: "I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday." When I still trusted and relied upon the claims of the political and media class - when I was basically apolitical and passive - I tacitly accepted all sorts of views which I've come to see are warped and misleading. I've talked often about this process and am proud of this evolution. I have zero interest in hiding it or concealing it. Quite the contrary: I want readers to know about it. That's why I wrote the Preface.
But anyone using this Preface to claim I was a "supporter" of the Iraq War is simply fabricating. At worst, I was guilty of apathy and passivity. I did nothing for or against it because I assumed that those in positions to exercise adversarial scrutiny - in journalism and politics - were doing that. It's precisely my realization of how profoundly deceitful and failed are American political and media institutions that motivated me to begin working on politics, and it's those realizations which continue to motivate me now.
Think about this claim from above:
At the time, I was basically a standard passive consumer of political news: I read The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic: the journals that I thought high-end consumers of news would read and which I assumed were generally reliable for getting the basic truth.What I explained in the Preface was that I had major objections to the Iraq war when it was being debated:
He claims he never wrote in support of the war and that he was "a standard passive consumer of political news" who thought "high-end consumers of news" was "reliable."
Really? That's intended to debunk the claim he supported the war? He was clueless and gullible?
From the preface Greenwald links to.
<...>
Soon after our invasion of Iraq, when it became apparent that, contrary to Bush administration claims, there were no weapons of mass destruction, I began concluding, reluctantly, that the administration had veered far off course from defending the country against the threats of Muslim extremism. It appeared that in the great national unity the September 11 attacks had engendered, the administration had seen not a historically unique opportunity to renew a sense of national identity and cohesion, but instead a potent political weapon with which to impose upon our citizens a whole series of policies and programs that had nothing to do with terrorism, but that could be rationalized through an appeal to the nation's fear of further terrorist attacks.
<...>
The 9/11 attacks were not the first time our nation has had to face a new and amoral enemy. Throughout our history, we have vanquished numerous enemies at least as strong and as threatening as a group of jihadist terrorists without having the president seize the power to break the law. As a nation, we have triumphed over a series of external enemies and overcome internal struggles, and we have done so not by abandoning our core principles in the name of fear but by insisting on an adherence to our fundamental political values.
So if the war was a legitimate defense against the "threats of Muslim extremism," it would have been OK?
Maybe this explains why he's so touchy about other people supporting President Obama.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=95092
Afghanistan and Iraq wars and Citizens United?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/100293141
Greenwald is not the left.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024931733
Guess all that "hero" worship of Greenwald has blinded so many here who just can't seem to see the facts when they are right in front of their faces.
"He didn't mean it when he said he changed his mind about supporting the war"
Especially silly thing to pull out of one's neither regions by quoting the preface to a book that was a scathing criticism of the war and those that led us into it.
Please post the facts that for some reason did not load on my computer
I have experienced it up close and personal as you know, Andy.
The Glenn Greenwald hatred has jumped the shark.
"GiGi"?
thanks
Always relevant and interesting. Your a DU treasure madfloridian and I truly enjoy reading what you post.
You might enjoy this book by Greg Mitchell, tea and oranges.
Mitchell is an excellent reporter/researcher/author. His account of the 1934 California Gubernatorial campaign is one of my favorites.
So many good points, so pertinent.
Thank you, madfloridian!
Every word of this post rings true. 
Thanks for standing up for education and thanks for being here, madfloridian.
Cheers,
Agony