Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics
By Glenn Greenwald
Crown Publishers, New York, 2008
Last Sunday I reviewed Glenn Greenwald's new book, Great American Hypocrites. Glenn wanted to join us then, but travel snafus prevented it, so he's here today. Here's a snippet from that review:
It's not about the hypocrisy, it's about the damage that the hypocrisy has done to our political processes and to our political discourse, leading to the ultimate example this weekend when the entire media has spent more time and real estate on "Bittergate" than on the fact that the highest officials in our government--including the President--conspired to commit acts of torture. It's the logical outgrowth of the Drudgified political world, which Glenn documents from its inception--creating the myth of the Great American Republican--through this cycle's presidential race.
That was written before the ABC debate debacle, when ABC (ironically the news outlet that brought us the torture story) reached yet another low. Here's Glenn's reaction.
My favorite (unintentionally revealing) media commentary about the debate is from The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut and Dan Balz, who devoted paragraph after paragraph to describing the substance-free "issues" that consumed most of the debate -- Obama's "remarks about small-town values, questions about his patriotism and the incendiary sermons of his former pastor . . . gaffes, missteps and past statements" -- and, at the end of the article, they added:
The debate also touched on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, taxes, the economy, guns and affirmative action.
It's just not possible to express the wretched state of our establishment press better than that sentence does.
Revealingly, not everyone is displeased with Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos' conduct of the debate. To the contrary, two constituencies which frequently work in harmony are quite impressed and very pleased with the whole spectacle -- right-wing noise machine members and establishment journalists....
Last night was a perfect microcosm of how our political process works. The Right creates stupid, petty personality-based attacks to ensure that our elections aren't decided on issues (where they have a decisive disadvantage). Media stars -- some due to sloth, some due to ideology, some due to an eagerness to please the Right and convince them how Good and Fair they are -- eat up the shallow trash they're fed and then spew it out relentlessly, ensuring that our political discourse is overwhelmed by it, our elections dictated by it. That happens over and over. It's how our media and our elections function. Last night was just an unusually transparent and particularly ugly expression of it.
Glenn's book, which details how the "petty, personality-based" focus on politics was built up, and how the Right got the traditional media to buy into it, couldn't be more timely. This week's debate proves every point in Glenn's book. He doesn't break new ground in exposing either hypocrisy or the failure of most of America's leading political reporters to their job even adequately, but he does reinforce what every Democrat and every Democratic politician needs to be cognizant of when dealing with a press that plays lackey to the Right.
I've reposted the e-mail interview portion of last week's review below the fold, and Glenn will join us in comments.
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