It may be a good day for health care and The Public Option, but Glenn Greenwald had to call out DKos today, specifically for the obedience and hypocrisy demonstrated in a diary and poll. To say that criticizing Obama's leadership makes Huff Po "conservative" is Orwellian.
As a result, Obama-venerating readers of Daily Kos this morning have declared Huffington Post to be suspect, untrustworthy, and even "right-wing" in a top recommended diary. A poll accompanying that dairy finds that 57% of readers believe that Huffington Post -- which just recently hired Dan Froomkin as its Washington Bureau Chief -- "is turning conservative." In other words, Huffington Post reported on facts which reflect poorly on the leader and which contradict what they are eager to believe. Anyone who does that must be discredited, impugned and declared to be the enemy. That way, the unpleasant facts can be dismissed away by attacking those who point them out, and fantasies of the leader can be blissfully maintained. Doesn't that also sound familiar?
And a more insightful quote, below the fold.
The diary with the embarrassing poll results is here.
From Greenwald today, here's an equally relevant passage, where he's agreeing with this morning's NY Times editorial's "scathing condemnation of Obama" and his enablers:
There is simply no way that a person with even the most minimal levels of intellectual integrity could have objected to these actions during the Bush years yet defend them now that Obama is doing them, or even refrain from objecting just as loudly. What would it say about a person who spent years warning of the dangers posed by these very policies, yet found ways to excuse them now that there's a new President who is affirming and further institutionalizing them?
The fact that Obama has done good things in other areas or "is not as bad as Bush" in this realm doesn't negate that fact in any way. Those who were genuinely horrified by radical Bush/Cheney secrecy and immunity claims -- as opposed to those who pretended to care about those things because it was an effective Bush-bashing tool for partisan gain -- have no choice but to reach the conclusion which the NYT Editors today propounded: "The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up."
The partisan bottom line (I guess that's all that matters to some folks): If Republicans ever want to prove that the moral high ground we've held on detention, torture, secrecy, rule of law and civil liberties was really just unprincipled, opportunistic Bush-bashing in disguise, 56% of us just helped them out.
And some of us will be ready with a simple answer: Don't trust Greenwald! He and Freiheit are conservative right wingers in disguise!
UPDATE:
Thank you! I'm not feeling so embarrassed anymore. Many readers rightly pointed out that a self-selecting poll in a single diary, even topping the Rec list, can't speak for the majority at DKos. With over 600 recommends and over 340 tips at the top of the list, this diary added some balance - all day.
Many readers were delighted to be discovering Glenn Greenwald, who has been in our Blogroll for years and frequently hat-tips DKos writers.
Greenwald's diary is titled NYT condemns what it calls "Obama's cover-up" and didn't mention DKos. Later in the day he noticed the "HuffPo turning conservative" diary and poll and threw on a single paragraph addendum about it, since it seemed to fit a point he had made earlier.
Evidently hundreds of readers failed to click the links and, no matter how many people corrected them, falsely assumed that Glenn Greenwald wrote a diary about DKos - about them - that included the two paragraphs above. The shoe fit too perfectly. Some apparently read only my intro and wound up outrageously caricaturing my diary's "Don't trust Greenwald!" punchline, proving its point.
(The level of the angry comments is typified in "oh boo hoo. Huff Post peeps had their feelings hurt. So sad, too bad.", which received over 160 recommends. The commenters apparently imagined Greenwald works for Huff Post. He's at Salon.com. The Huff Post had completely ignored their criticism.)
Amid the hundreds of angry comments, I haven't found one that refutes, concedes, or even acknowledges the New York Times' and Greenwald's conclusion that Obama is engaged in a war crimes cover up. They just want it to be crystal clear that they are being as critical of the President as they ought to be.