Tucker? I hardly know 'er!

 

Everybody has to put in their take on Tucker, I guess, including his pal Glenn Greenwald:

Can't decide whether Grindelwald here is so focused on advancing the Russian program that he can't see anything else or so anxious to change the subject from white nationalism that he can't do anything else https://t.co/KACHRT8PEz

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) April 25, 2023

Or I guess it must be opposite sides of the same coin, Glenn's leftist Putinism (the story that the bloodthirsty US started the war in Ukraine by forcing pacifist Putin to launch another involuntary invasion like those in 2014 or in Georgia in 2008) serving as a beard for the fascist Putinism (Tucker's) he can't quit associating with.

That's basically Glenn's theory of why Carlson was axed at Fox—specifically, over Carlson's "passionate defense" of the four members of the African People's Socialist Front in Florida charged a couple of weeks ago with taking money from Russia's FSB foreign intelligence agency to "covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda, and interfere illegally in U.S. elections", or as Glenn puts it, being "dissidents" against US support for Ukraine. 

For the Record: Grindelwald on "Mainstream Democrats"

I didn't spend much time on the East Side during my ten years in Buffalo, to my shame, if you like, and certainly to my loss, as is proven by the one occasion I remember—a visit to a jazz club somewhere near Jefferson Avenue to hear a couple of sets by the McCoy Tyner Quartet, which was transcendentally good, maybe 1978. 

I won't say I was like Bill O'Reilly being astonished to learn that they had cloth napkins in Sylvia's in Harlem, because I wasn't, but I wish I would have thought about going there more often.

For the Record: Don't Make a Federal Case of It (or Try If You Want to, But You'll Fail)

 

That's pretty ridiculous, right? The video is mocking January 6 organizers inside the House, like Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar!

Somebody on Gosar's staff is a regular Jonathan Swift!

— Toxic Positivity (@Yastreblyansky) November 18, 2021

Because personally, if I'm a member of Congress and somebody portrays me as a cartoon serial murderer, I'm not going to think it's making fun of somebody else. If I were involved in it, of course, I'd put it more in the old Warner Brothers style than anime—that looks more satirical to me—putting Gosar's face on Elmer Fudd. And he'd fail to get his kill, that's a lot funnier, trust me.

And in Sinemascope

Literary Corner: A Greek Invocation to Call Fools Into a Circle

Already forgot what GG outrage prompted this, but had something to do with how candidate Joe Biden is indistinguishable from Emperor Trump in some views.

To the lost tune of Amiens's song from Shakespeare's As You Like It, here as imagined by Dr. Arne:


Under the Greenwald tree
Who loves to write with me
Drowning his feckless foes
In bucketsful of prose
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see
No enemy
But all our friends together.

Whose takes are so darn hot
They're more than what he's got
Making him want to seem
Increasingly extreme
Come hither, come hither,  come hither:
Here shall he see
The enemy
Is all our friends together.

An if it should come to pass
He's really just an ass
Dumping upon his friends
To questionable ends
Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame:
Here shall he see
The enemy
Is him if you just ask me.

And here as Donovan imagined it, of course, since you can't expect me to skip an opportunity to post a Donovan cut, though the maestro gets some things wrong, notably confusing Shakespeare's an meaning "if" with and meaning "and" and mispronouncing the "Greek invocation to call fools into a circle" ducdame, which must rhyme with "come to me":

Nothing is easier than getting an indictment

Once someone starts to cite a grand jury indictment as their proof that a prosecutors' charges have merit, they've demonstrated how weak their case is. Nothing is easier than getting an indictment. And either way, you haven't seen the evidence to assess it.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 14, 2018

Trying to imagine how an investigation team that had a bunch of flashy assertions with no evidence managed to compose a couple of paragraphs like these from the indictment (from the money laundering count 10):

59. ...To further avoid creating a centralized paper trail of all of their purchases, the Conspirators purchased infrastructure using hundreds of different email accounts, in some cases using a new account for each purchase. The Conspirators used fictitious names and addresses in order to obscure their identities and their links to Russia and the Russian government. For example, the dcleaks.com domain was registered and paid for using the fictitious name “Carrie Feehan” and an address in New York. In some cases, as part of the payment process, the Conspirators provided vendors with nonsensical addresses such as “usa Denver AZ,”'“gfhgh ghfhgfh fdgfdg WA,” and “1 2 dwd District of Columbia.” 

60. The Conspirators used several dedicated email accounts to track basic bitcoin transaction information and to facilitate bitcoin payments to vendors. One of these dedicated accounts, registered with the username “gfadel47,” received hundreds of bitcoin payment requests from approximately 100 different email accounts. For example, on or about February 1, 2016, the gfadel47 account received the instruction to “[p]lease send exactly 0.026043 bitcoin to” a certain thirty-four character bitcoin address. Shortly thereafter, a transaction matching those exact instructions was added to the Blockchain.

Like this?

Would you like spies with that?

Kilauea eruption, 1983, via Hawaii Volcano Expeditions (When I write about Greenwald, as I haven't done in a while. I like to illustrate it with volcano pix in tribute to the special qualities of his prose).

An odd thing in relation to the scandal du jour over the weekend, and the revelation that the FBI had asked an academic in England to try to worm some information out of both George Papadopoulos and Carter Pageon their knowledge of the conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian state (and, as it later turned out, Michael Flynn as well, though that was possibly just in 2014, and Papadopoulos's and Page's boss in the campaign, Sam Clovis, who talked to him about relations with China), or as Donald Trump put it, sounding more and more hysterical every day, put it,

Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true - all time biggest political scandal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2018

Yipes! Though I didn't see any reason why they shouldn't have had an embedded informant in the heart of this criminal conspiracy, as they might inside a mafia family, there was no reason to supposed that they did in fact have one. As we soon learned (apparently The Daily Caller was the first to report it), what they had was Stefan Halper, a veteran of Republican administrations who has been for some time a Fellow of Magdalen College and was director of Cambridge's American Studies program, who enticed Papadopoulos to talk by commissioning a bona fide research paper from him and engaged him over dinner and drinks and apparently failed to get him to talk about the tens of thousands of incriminating Hillary emails; and had what Page described as "benign interactions" with that person.

Republicans, of course, decided to go with the Deep State Infiltrates Spy Into Trump Campaign line, where they were joined by our old friend Glenn Greenwald, as I learned from LGM, has been at work reinforcing that in The Intercept, demonstrating how especially sinister Stefan Halper is, with the allegation that he

Simple answers to simple questions

For the people who keep saying this Iran deal would "avert a war": who would start that war?
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 3, 2015

That would be the president you could elect in 2016 if you convince enough Democrats to stay home, Glenn.

Image by Associated Press/The Wire.

The Cold who came in from the Spies

Joshua Cold, that is.

Via whatdoesitmean.

THE “SNOWDEN IS READY TO COME HOME!” STORY: A CASE STUDY IN TYPICAL MEDIA DECEIT

BY GLENN GREENWALD @ggreenwald

WEDNESDAY AT 1:30 PM

Most sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the most authoritative tones. But it’s nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works. In that spirit, let’s take yesterday’s numerous, breathless reports trumpeting the “BREAKING” news that “Edward Snowden now wants to come home!” and is “now negotiating the terms of his return!”....

Greenwald's story is over 2,330 words long. That would be nearly eight typewritten pages. It is entirely about how these allegations, if you want to call them that, because they sound harmless enough, are not false, but not breaking news either, since Eduardo has been saying he wants to come home and working with lawyers ever since he arrived in Hong Kong. That is an "egregious case" of "typical media deceit" (neat trick being egregious and typical at the same time, too), and it takes more words for Greenwald to expose it than Hemingway needed for "Up in Michigan". I would guess that most sentient people have not even asked themselves how authoritative are the tones with which the US media routinely disseminate their stories and falsehoods, let alone accepted the fact, rationally or otherwise. Worldwide, most sentient people don't follow the US media at all.

But the story (at least as I saw it, very calmly and concisely reported by Alexandra Odynova in the New York Times) is not really all that breathless, misleading, or outright. (You get a little more breathlessness from the Daily News, but not all that much, considering.) Though they missed the part I would have liked to read, which you can get some idea from poking around (thanks, Google Translate!) in the Russian press.

Cheap shots and free associations

Poster by Mungo Thomson, 2004.

@matthewstoller @emptywheel @AlexanderAbdo @froomkin I know that, Matt- I've never, ever thought "reform" would come from USG - still don't.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 18, 2014

No, of course, how could a branch of government institute reform in a government agency? Like, how would that even work? It makes no sense at all!

Cheap shot: Not grim, not dank

Lindsay Mills, in a YouTube screenshot captured by Stimme Russlands, Moscow's German-language radio station, where the Cold War does not seem to be quite over—I'm talking about pleased announcements that the Russian Federation has overtaken the US in the number of strategic nuclear warheads.

If you happened to be worried about Eduardo Snowden and how he's been bearing up in his strange new life of exile and whatever, and I'm not saying you were worried, but just in case, Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept wants to assure you that you need worry no longer, because he's doing just fine:

Glorious Fifth: Postscript

Looks like the promised sky-covering fireworks naming of Snowden names at Pierre Omidyar's Intercept really has taken place after all, not on the fifth of July, but close. It's possibly the most shocking misbehavior by the NSA reported in the Snowden documents so far—involving the targeting of American citizens and even a Republican!—and I'm really glad to see it come out:

Glorious Fifth

South Fayetteville, PA.

Was that the grand finale of the Snowden fireworks display that showed up in the Washington Post on Saturday (instead of the Intercept, which went silent three weeks ago), with the unacceptable part, the naming of victims, removed?

“As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last,” Greenwald told GQ magazine. “The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicoloured hues.” (Real Clear Politics)

The Glennemy within

Chips and sandwich. Photo by Jim Rice, Sydney Morning Herald.

It is quite possible that I will never read any reviews of Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, NSA and the US National Security State, but if I do, Michael Kinsley's effort in the New York Times Book Review will not be one of them, because I'm one of those stupid people whose judgment of who to pay attention to is biased by prior experience; I hardly ever read anything by Greenwald unless the fact of his writing it is the news in its own right or I'm really looking for trouble, because I can't stand his style and figure if he has anything important to say somebody else will repeat it; and I never read anything by Kinsley because I can't imagine he would have anything important to say. Well, OK, I'll look at it.

Yup, he does say

And in the international Greenwalding circuit

Used for somewhat relevant purposes by YoStatus.

Earlier this week, Greenwald came so close to noticing himself being wrong about something:

Snowden was almost certain this meant that the NSA had identified him as the likely source of the leaks, but I was sceptical. "If they thought you did this, they'd send hordes of FBI agents with a search warrant and probably Swat teams, not a single NSA officer and a human-resources person." I figured this was just an automatic and routine inquiry, triggered when an NSA employee goes absent for a few weeks without explanation.

But the moment passed quickly. It wouldn't be the last time, anyway, that he was unnecessarily terrified of the jack-booted thugs of our police state. There was this, for instance, from October 2013:

Glenn Greenwald would like to go home to the United States, at least for a visit. But the Guardian journalist and blogger is afraid to do so. He still has material and unpublished stories from his contacts with fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden that he believes U.S. authorities would love to get their hands on.  The nine-hour detention and interrogation of Greenwald's Brazilian partner David Miranda by British security services at London's Heathrow airport in August has only compounded his fears.

I remember! I was so struck by the way Wallace Shawn was forced to go to hot, unpleasant Brazil to stage a private performance of his Greenwald play just last January so Greenwald could see it without risking his life. And yet our intrepid journalist managed to show up in April to collect his Polk Award. So now he's afraid to go to England:

There’s only one country that has been consciously excluded from the tour – in fact, only one country in the world that Greenwald says he absolutely will not visit. It is the UK. The wounds left by the detention under the Terrorism Act of his partner, Miranda, at Heathrow airport last August, are still open and deep.... “I don’t trust them not to detain me, interrogate me and even arrest me. Their behaviour has been so extreme and offensive, and the political and media class was so supportive of it, that I feel uncomfortable with the entire atmosphere,” says Greenwald.

Does that mean he's angling for a Hackademy Award from the Press Gazette for his work getting interviewed by Guardian reporters? Only Time (or more likely Spiegel) will tell. Meanwhile Zandar the Great and Terrible informs us that Glenn got that movie deal, with Sony Pictures, or as Glenn affectionately calls them

Liberal Hollywood has produced the ultimate hagiography of the most secretive arm of America's National Security State, while liberal film critics lead the parade of praise and line up to bestow it with every imaginable accolade

 so it's all good.

Merkelwürdiges Gefühl im Kopf

"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland". Photo by Armin
Kübelbeck, via Konrad Werner.

Jon Queally at CommonDreams passing on some Greenwaldian goose bumps which may turn out to be a little more excited than the occasion calls for:

Perhaps one of the most striking and revelatory aspects about the latest NSA surveillance news story, this one published Sunday by The Bild am Sonntag newspaper in Germany, was that it was not based on leaked documents from the now famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

What the paper reported, based on information provided by a "high-ranking NSA employee in Germany," was that the U.S. spy agency—after being outed [jump]

Greenwald's literary errors

Santiaguito, Guatemala, 2005.

Bureaucrat Decries Unauthorized Disclosures that Make Him Look Bad

Or as Glenn Greenwald's copy editor at The Intercept, who I believe is Glenn Greenwald, put it,

First look at FirstLook

Drone-bird. AeroVironment, June 2011.

But before I get to Omidyar, Greenwald, Scahill, and what appears at first sight to be a $250-million WordPress blog (sorry, I stole that crack), I'd like to call everybody's attention to a truly important story that is not getting covered enough: about some really bad, no good, horrible practices developed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan under Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, apparently covered in Mark Urban's Task Force Black (2010) and subsequently blogged in a fine post at Truthout by Gareth Porter.

Cheap shots and million-dollar troupers

Wikipedia.

I think you've got something there, Billo:

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Tuesday said he was unhappy with how some media outlets characterized his questions for President Obama during the pre-Super Bowl interview.

"I was watching the cable competition last night, and the unusual suspects are going, 'Oh! A Republican!' The Associated Press, their headline of the interview was: ‘President Obama Defends Himself from Republican Charges,'" O'Reilly said on "Fox and Friends." "These aren't questions that all Americans should be interested in?" (TPM)

Yes! They aren't! In fact if there are any non-Republican Americans in the audience who are interested in the IRS investigations of Tea Party 501(C)(4)s, the issue of whether [jump]

Slope-a-dope

For 2014, all those claiming telephone or email metadata isn't invasive should voluntarily & regularly post their own for the world to see.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 1, 2014

You're tempted to agree with him for a minute, right? Fuck yeah, Orwellian scum, why don't you just show everybody yours.

In fact, I would totally do it, as a kind of conceptual art project if you will, if I could get a grant for it sufficient for paying somebody else to do the actual data entry work, or better, program an automated daily upload from all my email addresses and phone [jump]

Image by darkuncle.

Cheap shots and extreme shrieking

Secrets of Glenn's success:

Greenwald: "Extreme hackery", "endless shrieking" made me what I am today.

Extreme hackery: Democrats, who shrieked endlessly about NSA during Bush, now most pro-NSA group of anyone http://t.co/HygELQJnTA
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 21, 2013

@firetomfriedman Depends what Dems you mean - my platform was pretty much built by liberal bloggers linking constantly to my NSA work
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 21, 2013

Hey, you're welcome. Any time you need me shrieking and hacking so you can advance your career another step, pal. 'Coz everybody really loves being treated as an asshole by the person they essentially created.

The Shrieking Affliction. From Magic: The Gathering, via.

Lamar!  and Leviticus! and more below the fold: