Glenn Greenwald's latest J'accuse

First off, we certainly should “want to see the evidence about whether NSA spied on Carlson's emails..." I agree.

But to simply presume that the NSA is guilty is not a journalistic standard we should support.

Greenwood's two examples are 1. Julian Assange, the Wikileaks guy. Were we seeing "the prosecution of a journalist" or were we seeing an asset getting caught while serving a foreign power? Assange crossed the line between being a journalist and between being an asset when he released Democratic emails right at the beginning of the 2016 Democratic Convention. By deliberately and consciously acting to affect politics, he lost the presumption that he was simply a journalist when he did that.

And 2. "NSA leaked Flynn's conversations with a Russian official!" A. If the NSA caught such a conversation, that's because they were spying on the Russian official and Flynn took the initiative of contacting that official. The NSA is certainly not going to stop listening simply because an American official has entered the picture. In fact, they should perk up their ears and should pay even closer attention, which is apparently what they did.

B. I am very much aware of the 1980 "October Surprise," which was an example of what happens when an incoming presidential administration takes the initiative to contact a foreign adversary and starts conducting negotiations without going through the incumbent administration. The accusation is that Reagan's people talked with Iran about the hostages that were taken by the Iranians in 1979. The assertion is that Iran's leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, agreed and waited until Reagan was actually inaugurated before releasing the hostages. In return, Iran received weapons which they used against Iraq.

So, in no way, shape or form should we consider Flynn's actions to be innocent or harmless. We have historical precedent that says we should be immediately and deeply suspicious when an incoming administration starts playing the lone cowboy before taking office.

Are the liberal media guilty of never taking risks or are they simply more responsible and more willing to base their stories on actual evidence? Because Tucker stating that “some nameless guy I ran into said he saw my emails!“ is not exactly what I would consider compelling evidence.

Two claims from the President

President:

“The Democrats have gone crazy… they have to be careful because when the shoe’s on the other foot and someday hopefully in the very long distant future, you’ll have a Democrat [sic] president, you’ll have a Republican House and they’ll do the same thing because somebody picked an orange out of the refrigerator and you don’t like it.”

So, the Democrats should be aware that something like Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment could happen. The Republican Party could undertake a completely partisan impeachment for trivial reasons. Hmm. Okay. Got it.

Why the President doesn't want any of his people testifying at the impeachment hearings:

“I would like them to testify but these are very unfair hearings,” the president insisted. “For the hearings, we don’t get a lawyer, we don’t get any witnesses. We want [Joe] Biden, we want the son, Hunter. Where’s Hunter? We want the son. We want Schiff. We want to interview these people.”

So he'd prefer a lot of distractions as opposed to serious witnesses who would shed light on his actions. Why is this? Unfortunately, starting with President Nixon, but really accelerating with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party has become hyper-partisan. We saw this extreme partisanship during the presidency of Barack Obama, with the Senate Minority, then Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sacrificing national well-being, goals and priorities for purely partisan gains.
The Republican Party under McConnell never showed why the ACA/Obamacre was a bad thing or how it could be improved upon, it just dug in its heels and opposed it, period! During the President's impeachment hearings, we have not seen any members of the President's party crossing the aisle to condemn Trump's actions, even though Democrats have made a very clear case that the crimes he has been charged with are very real, have been amply proven and are very deeply serious.

Special Olympics and Trump Administration

Yeah, it's pretty difficult to cut a small program like Special Olympics and to then turn around and say you have a heart just like everyone else. 

And keep in mind that while Special Olympics costs $18 million a year, DeVos's around-the-clock security detail cost $7.54 million last year and will be $7.7 million this year.

"DeVos defends plan to eliminate Special Olympics funding"
Two statements that caught my eye:

“Given our current budget realities..."

What "realities" might those be? Oooh yeaaah! The massive tax cut that's pretty much the sole legislative accomplishment of Speaker Ryan, Majority Leader McConnell and President Trump.
 

DeVos replied that she thinks the group is “awesome” but should be supported by philanthropy.

That's a defensible idea, but how about some sort of transition? How about a planned move from being government supported to being self-sustaining? I know, I know, that would require, y'know, work and effort and something more than just lounging around on your yacht.

Education Secretary DeVos gets overruled on funding the Special Olympics. She then desperately pretends to be okay with that. "I am pleased and grateful the President and I see eye-to-eye on this issue..." Neither one explains how the issue arose in the first place or why her initial decision was overruled.

“The White House, Not DeVos, Wanted to Slash Special Olympics Budget”
I had heard the first part of this statement, but not the second. The second makes no sense unless one “accepts the premise that the White House, not DeVos, ordered the cut in the first place.

After Trump reinstated the funds, DeVos issued a statement saying she was “pleased and grateful the President and I see eye-to-eye on this issue.” She then adds“This is funding I have fought for behind the scenes over the last several years.”

The Benghazi situation

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Jon Stewart's Daily Show covers the Benghazi "scandal" where no one has ever identified what was being covered up or what the Obama Administration ever hoped to achieve with it. As this piece reviews the three events, Watergate, Iran-Contra and yes, even Whitewater, all had some discernable motivation behind them. In each case, there was a good reason for the Nixon, Reagan and Clinton administrations to want to carry them out. In the case of Benghazi, the actions took place in early September of last year, here it is May and no one has yet defined exactly what the Obama Administration was attempting to achieve. Rachel Maddow covered the Benghazi hearings from the perspective of general Republican/right wing craziness (Her specific comments on Benghazi start at the 12:50 mark). She states straightforwardly that she can't "reverse-engineer" why and how Benghazi was supposedly a positive for Obama.

Daily Kos examines various questions: "Why wasn't the Special Forces unit sent to the scene of the fighting?"

...they weren't some fully outfitted Delta Force unit ready to obliterate the men who had dared attack American facilities. They were just four guys in all, no doubt brave and eager to go. But they weren't combat ready, being armed solely with 9mm sidearms.

"Why weren't jets sent?"

They couldn't have gotten there in time, something examined in full by the Accountability Review Board's independent report.

"There was a '40-man Special Operations CIF [Commander's in-Extremis Force] unit in Europe at the time of the attack,' why weren't they sent?"

     The nearest airfield where the 40-man team could have landed was 30 kilometers away from where the incident took place. Yes, they had a plane that could have carried vehicles that could have gotten them there on time, but it  takes time to load those appropriate vehicles onto a plane. By the time that could have been done, the fight would have long since been over. No, there was no realistic way that the team could have gotten to the fight in time to make a difference.

In short, there was really no conspiratorial explanation for why the personnel in the Benghazi diplomatic compound could not be saved. There simply wasn't time to do much. There were too few forces, too far away, to have made any difference.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked all three expert witnesses at the May 8th "whistleblowers" hearing if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's name at the bottom of all of the relevant cables meant anything. All three witnesses replied that it is standard protocol to credit all cables to having been written by the SecState whether she had anything to do with them or not. So no, Clinton's name at the bottom of all the cables meant nothing. Did the House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) learn anything from the hearing? His own statements indicate that the hearings were a complete waste of time and that nothing was learned. Heck, even Fox News was cutting away from their own coverage because there was so little that was new and interesting coming out of it.

So what's the point? Why are Republicans putting so much time and effort into the story? Daily Kos figures it's "The GOP's Benghazi investigation, aka the Stop Hillary 2016 campaign." After all, President Obama was mentioned 29 times whereas Clinton was mentioned 71 times.

Update: And did anybody truly think that Republicans would be embarrassed into silence? Ha. Ha. Ha.  Not Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK)!

“Of all the great cover-ups in history — the Pentagon papers, the Iran-Contra, Watergate and all the rest of them — this … is going to go down as the most serious, the most egregious cover-up in American history,” Inhofe said during an appearance on The Rusty Humphries Show.

Obviously, Inhofe just speaks for himself, but it seems pretty clear that there will be some never-say-die fanatics on this. 

The "a few bad apples" defense

A local columnist summarizes the current rap against ACORN:

...consider the ACORN videos, in which a fake pimp and prostitute seek help from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to set up a brothel, commit tax fraud, and engage in sex trafficking of underage illegal immigrants. ACORN employees at five offices seemed happy to help.

He goes on to say racism is a bogus defense that an ACORN board member used. From what I've seen of the case, I agree with the columnist that racism appears to be completely irrelevant to the launching of the sting operation. For me the question is: Just how much of a problem did the sting operation uncover? ACORN's CEO, Bertha Lewis, said:

Well, when you run an organization, what you need to do is to make sure that everyone knows your standards and everyone is trained to understand how to do intake. I think, in the end, most of these employees just felt like, well, I have to talk to whoever comes in here. However, that cannot trump common sense and also it cannot trump someone going to their supervisor and saying this is unusual, what do I do? So, in any case, though it's indefensible, that's why I terminated everyone. And I am making sure not to take this lightly. My board was outraged, and I think I owe it to the other employees that did the right thing. It's just a handful of folks out of hundreds and hundreds of employees.

The use of "It's just a handful of folks..." raises immediate red flags because we heard that for the Roman Catholic priests who were engaged in pedophilia. Father John Geoghan was identified as a child rapist by the alternative newspaper The Boston Phoenix in March 2001 (The Boston Globe followed up in January 2002 shortly before Geoghan was convicted, whereupon the case came to the attention of the public at large). A major aspect of the case from the very beginning was that Father Geoghan's activities were so extensive that it was suspected immediately that his activities had to have been known of by his superiors. He was "suspected of fondling, assaulting, and raping hundreds of children over three decades." And, "parents had complained to Geoghan’s superiors about his behavior with children as far back as 1973."

During the investigation and trial, Fitzpatrick, among other victims, charged that top Church authorities at the Diocese of Fall River had known about Porter’s behavior all along. ... Cardinal Law infamously blasted reporters for focusing on what he termed “the faults of a few”: “We deplore that.... By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.” ... At the time Law made these remarks, Geoghan had already been placed on temporary “sick leave” at least once, according to the Official Catholic Directory. This leave of absence, as alleged in court records, followed a complaint of abuse against Geoghan by one mother of an alleged victim from Jamaica Plain.

Since then, pedophile priests have shown up in Ireland - In April 2002, the Irish government began its own investigation and issued its report in October 2005 and in Italy - The Meter Association, founded by Italian Father Fortunato Di Noto announced the existence of "A hundred online pedophile communities" in September 2009 and said they'd be dismantled and prosecuted.

Defenders of pedophile priests certainly tried to claim that the problem was limited to "a few bad apples," and while it's certainly true that it's wrong to physically attack priests "As if all priests are pedophiles. As if all priests are perverted. As if all priests are immoral, or corrupt, or just bad" (emphases in original), it was clear from the very start that the problem was an institutional one, that it wasn't just a couple of rogue individuals.

Torture at the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib was also allegedly limited to "a few bad apples," but the US made a very poor case for that owing to the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq in the first place and again, the problem didn't trace back to just a few rogue individuals. The historical roots of the practice of torture with American assistance traced back to the Shah of Iran and his agency SAVAK. The Red Cross had found serious problems with US treatment of and policy towards Iraqi detainees as early as March 2003, the month that the US invaded Iraq. By March 2006, the website Salon had collated a list of government and private investigative reports.

It was also confirmed in May 2009 that the Bush Administration had a few low-level employees write out some torture-justifying memos, memos that opined on the authority of the President to order the lawless abuse of helpless prisoners at will. As the blogger Christy Hardin Smith put it:

The ACLU has put together a video of these words of tortured logic being read aloud. Watch it.

The words you are hearing were written by and for the US government. As guidance for governmental agencies acting in all of our names.

So, again, we're not dealing with just a couple of rogue individuals, we're dealing with an institution that went seriously off the tracks.

Back to ACORN, do we have any evidence that we're dealing with a deep, systemic problem? Any indication that ACORN is a corrupt institution? Well, the NPR story that quotes the ACORN CEO came out on September 21st and the quote from a local columnist came out today, October 4th. As one can see, there are no new developments in the case. There is no evidence that any of the employees who agreed to help the fake pimp and prostitute brought their case up to any higher levels. There's no evidence that any money actually changed hands or that any organizational favors were actually granted. As Anonymous Liberal points out, it's entirely understandable for people, faced with a completely unexpected situation to improvise as best they can and importantly, in as non-confrontational a mode as they can. This does not, of course, excuse the people who agreed to help the fake prospective clients, but it does make their actions more understandable.

No, I think the ACORN case is one where the idea of "a few bad apples" does indeed apply.

The value of mea culpas (Not much)

Glenn Greenwald acknowledges the sort-of mea culpa offered by the Politico's John Harris in which Harris admits that he and his organization focused too much on:

Trivial stories -- the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top -- can dominate the campaign narrative for days. . . .

As leaders of a new publication, Politico's senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other websites. The way to get links is to be first with news -- sometimes big news, sometimes small -- that drives that day's conversation. [emphasis added by Greenwald]

It's all very fine and well that Harris is now sorry over his and his organization's misguided emphasis on going after audience traffic at the expense of serious reporting, but I'm reminded of another scandal in the political media:

On May 26, 2004 -- more than a year after the invasion of Iraq -- the Times published a belated semi-mea-culpa article by two top editors, including executive editor Bill Keller. The piece contended that the Times, along with policy makers in Washington, were victims rather than perpetrators: “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one.”

But the Times did not “fall for misinformation” as much as jump for it. The newspaper eagerly helped the administration portray deceptions as facts.

Even worse, on 10 Feb 07, the NY Times reporter Michael Gordon published a piece on how Iran was sending a diabolical device into Iraq that was killing American soldiers, i.e., Iran was waging a proxy war against the US by arming Iraqi insurgents. Media Matters reports that Gordon was permitted to issue this without any hint of skepticism or even any voices other than those of government spokespeople. On 5 May 08, Gordon did it again, acting as a stenographer for anonymous government sources and passing on the scary, scary tale of how Iraqi insurgents were receiving training in Iran. In a slight modification (Owing to the skepticism that the EFP story had received, such as in: "EFPs are Made in Iraq by Iraqis") the story now read:

In a possible effort to be less obtrusive, it appears that Iran is now bringing small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants to camps in Iran, where they are taught how to do their own training, American officials say.

The militants then return to Iraq to teach comrades how to fire rockets and mortars, fight as snipers or assemble explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made of Iranian components, according to American officials. The officials describe this approach as “training the trainers.”

Of course, one could also say "In an effort to make our propaganda less blatantly obvious, we're just saying that Iranians are teaching Iraqis how to make EFPs as opposed to saying the Iranians are producing EFPs." The point is that although the NY Times issued a "semi-mea-culpa article" on Judith Miller and her fanciful WMD tales they haven't changed their essential mode of reporting and are still putting out highly questionable stories that seem designed to lead to war.
Only time will tell if Harris' reporting in the Politico will change for the better. All we have now is a "semi-mea-culpa article" that may or may not lead to any changes in how they cover the issues.