Nonsense…and more Nonsense

“We’re just bring you the news, folks. Any and all attempts to smear this very good piece of reporting as propaganda is propaganda.”

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/talking-head-like-a-hole/

And how is it allegedly pro-war? Because it truthfully presents a terrible moral dilemma–that if Afghanistan proves resistant to our attempts to save it from itself (a very likely scenario, by the way), a great many women are going to suffer at the hands of the Taliban.

A comment I wrote on another post earlier today actually seems more appropriate here:

“This post is implicitly asking the question, “Is saving the women of Afghanistan worth this much blood and money?” But before you even ask that question, you have to ask, “Is all this blood and money saving the women of Afghanistan?”"

If the answer is no – which even you acknowledge is the “very likely” answer – what moral dilemma is there?

This a tragedy, not a moral dilemma. Sending our soldiers to die in a doomed war, and spending billions of much needed dollars in the process, is only adding to the tragedy.

You seem to be a little bit more p!ssed off than usual Joe. Congratulations on getting kicked off McCain’s though. That @sshole gets far more attention than he deserves.

Very well put, Rose. Certainly, all people of good will can admit that the cover was shameful propaganda.
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The allegation at the link is that “the Time reporter who wrote a story bolstering the case for war appears to have benefited materially from the NATO invasion” through her husband’s contracts. It’s not nothing. Maybe it’s misplaced, but it’s not something that only stupidheads care about.

ditto, rose
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The Afghan women don’t want us there, precisely because we are slowing any chance they have of reforming their own country towards respect of women, and we are funding two governing entities and providing recruits for a third, all of which subjugate Afghan women.

Very well put. Things are what they are and have been forever. The idea that we can change it, as much as we may want to, is another American illusion. We half did the original job. Now time to say adios, and bid women in Afghanistan to be sure to honor their fathers and husbands to avoid unpleasantness.

In this case, he has taken a mistaken assumption from one of Jeff’s New Yorker pieces–that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program
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Well, that’s a hugely inaccurate reading of Greenwald’s piece.
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Hussein did have a nuclear program – after Israel bombed Iraq:
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1. Iraq had no genuine nuclear weapons program before the 1981 Israeli attack on Osirak. That was the conclusion of the chairman of Harvard’s physics department at the time (who inspected the site after the bombing). This was later confirmed by defecting Iraqi nuclear scientists Imad Khadduri and Khadir Hamza. And it was then doubly confirmed by the head of what became the Iraqi nuclear weapons program, Jafar Dhia Jafar. In fact, all the Iraqis say the Israeli bombing caused Iraq to seriously pursue nuclear weapons. Moreover, it was likely a big factor in Saudi Arabia’s willingness to give Iraq $5 billion to do it.

2. Even if Iraq had had a big nuclear weapons program in 1981, the idea that the Israeli attack succeeded in “halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions” is COMPLETELY INSANE. Iraq had a gigantic nuclear weapons program from 1981 to 1991.

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http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003356.html
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Also:

Here’s the first sentence of Goldberg’s article: “It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

The official position of the U.S. intelligence community about this remains the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. And it said Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003. Maybe it was wrong, or maybe something’s changed since then. But it is the essence of Goldberg-itude to simply ignore this and assert the opposite as unquestionable fact.

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From the same link as before.

“The boy does need his vendettas”

Mr. Greenwald is a grown man with the stones to match, Mr. Klein–not a “boy”.

These are boys:

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/first-person-sho0ter/

We are morally in debt to the people associated with us in Afghanistan. The general condition of the country may, as someone has said, be a trajedy about which we can do nothing. But we need to save the lives of those who worked with us by offering them a home here. That will mean several hundred thousand people. That Afghan community will be a grace and benefit to our country.

Sorry to comment a second time. No, in response to michaelfury, Greenwald is a bully who does not care about the facts. He is pathologically invested in the idea of himself as the lonely courageous voice, speaking truth to power. I actually agree with his politics. I just know too many examples of his twisting the facts to find the latest villian. Comically, that villian is usually someone like Joe Klein or Matthew Yglesias who’s toward (although not as much as he or I) toward the ideological left. He’s a perfect example of the exaggerated enmity provoked by small differences.

He is pathologically invested in the idea of himself as the lonely courageous voice, speaking truth to power.
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Do you know him personally?
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Is he a family member?
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How do you know with such precision what goes on in the mind of Glenn Greenwald?
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Did you two date at length?

FADE IN:

INT. OFFICE – NIGHT

Veteran Time correspondent JOE KLEIN proofreads his final blog post for the evening. The post — a defense of Aryn Baker — is aggressive, challenging, and, most importantly…right.

JOE KLEIN’s finger hovers over the keyboard. He pauses a final time as he prepares to propel his gallant defense of his colleague along the intertubes.

But a doubt enters his mind.

JOE KLEIN
(to himself)
Not too Lefty?
No. Come on, Joe Boy. Just send it.

But creeping doubts have a tendency to creep. His finger now lowers, but not to send the post. JOE KLEIN leans back in thought.

JOE KLEIN
Stop second-guessing, dammit.
Just because you’re a professional
and on the left doesn’t mean
that you are on the “professional Left”.

Finally, JOE KLEIN settles on the solution. A little “balance”. Maybe something pro-Petreus? No…. Of course! A second defense of a colleague. But this time in defense of a “neoconservative” target of Leftists. Heck, even JOE KLEIN was starting to get sick of his recent dustups with the crew at Commentary. Perhaps this would give lead to a little detente.

And, best yet, the target would be…

JOE KLEIN

Glenn, Glenn, Glenn.
Why can’t you keep your mouth shut?

FADE OUT

Extraordinarily well put, Rose.

Joe Klein:
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And how is it allegedly pro-war?
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It’s pro-war because it made the most declaratory and graphic statement that the occupation is necessary to avoid a moral failure on Americans’ part.
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It did nothing to communicate the tragedy inflicted on the civilian population by our ongoing campaign, even though that’s just as real of a consequence of continuing the current policy. The reality of the situation –as you, yourself have admitted in print multiple times– is that a deal with the Taliban will ultimately be necessary, which will grant these monsters just this sort of horrific jurisdiction over a vast portion of Afghanistan, whether we leave or stay.
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Even though this suffering happened on our watch, the headline accompanying the tragic photo of the mutilated girl was “What Happens When We Leave,” not “What Happened While We Were There For Nine Years.”
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It just doesn’t get more obviously propagandistic than that. Pravda couldn’t have done a better job of whipping public sentiment in official direction.
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If you’re not playing professional or rhetorical outrage games, Joe Klein, and you really harbor some doubt in your otherwise bright brain about how the piece was “allegedly pro-war,” then ask yourself if this was pro-war:

President, Mrs. Bush Mark Progress in Global Women’s Human Rights
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The White House Website
03/12/2004
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THE PRESIDENT: In the last two-and-a-half years, we have seen remarkable and hopeful development in world history. Just think about it: More than 50 million men, women and children have been liberated from two of the most brutal tyrannies on earth — 50 million people are free. All these people are now learning the blessings of freedom.
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And for 25 million women and girls, liberation has a special significance. Some of these girls are attending school for the first time. It’s hard for people in America to imagine. A lot of young girls now get to go to school. Some of the women are preparing to vote in free elections for the very first time.
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The public whippings by Taliban officials have ended. The systematic use of rape by Saddam’s regime to dishonor families has ended. He sits in the prison cell.
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The advance of freedom in the greater Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women. And America will do its part to continue the spread of liberty.
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Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed. He is a barbaric person. He violated people in such a brutal way that some never thought that the spirit of Iraq could arise again. We never felt that way here in this administration. We felt that people innately love freedom and if just given a chance, if given an opportunity, they will rise to the challenge.
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http://www.embassyofafghanistan.org/inthenews/in22.html

Well, Joe Klein?
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Was that the propaganda-laden, pro-war exploitation of the suffering of women and girls, or was that the genuine acknowledgment of “what is actually happening on the ground,” as Rick Stengel put it.
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Was that recitation in the service of policy, or was that merely the “context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time?”
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We’ve had nine long years of this sort of thing emanating from government officials and the establishment, national publications that cover them. Nobody outside of the offices of TIME Magazine finds Stengel’s fatuous proclamation “We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it” even remotely credible.
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Look, the recently released Afghan War Logs were significant, in that they detailed in the open what had only been alluded to by mysterious, anonymous sources who are Beltway reporters’ bread and butter. The Guardian, one of the three publications that were granted first access to the documents, wrote this

The three papers mined revelations about the cruel toll on civilians in the nine-year conflict, and about futile firefights which have cost the lives of so many western soldiers.

And what is Rick Stengel’s response, his publication’s reaction to the hard evidence of the misery and tragedy of this failed enterprise?
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It’s this:

What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.

When confronted with incontestable, military documentation, your magazine put a picture of a mutilated, molested young girl on its cover, and told Americans “don’t pay attention to the vast evidence of failure, feel the ‘emotional truth’ of the necessity of this war.”
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If that’s not “pro-war,” Joe Klein, I don’t know what is.
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Don’t you know the difference anymore, yourself?

Actually Glenn is just amplifying the conclusion reached by Jonathan Schwarz. I know that Joe and Glenn have a bit of history but if you want to defend Jeff Goldberg from the charge of being a propagandist, it would be more effective to actually examine the source of the notion rather than simply shooting the messenger.

I personally found the tiny revolution post reasonably convincing without having even encountered Glenn’s contribution.

that if Afghanistan proves resistant to our attempts to save it from itself (a very likely scenario, by the way), a great many women are going to suffer at the hands of the Taliban.

So we kill all the men in order to protect the women which works great except for the women who happen to live with the men we’re killing. Who protects them?

Thank you for taking the time to articulate this.

And so much more insightful and smart than the guy who gets paid millions to tell us all what’s what. No wonder people are so disgusted with the elite caste in this country. Clueless, grossly overcompensated and completely unaccountable to the public at large (unless you count regular rhetorical beatings on blogs).

rose: If only Joe and other pundits could speak the truth so clearly. Thank you.
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Nations who are now fighting in Afghanistan should offer asylum to as many women and children that can be gotten out of that miserable country, provide a means to transport them, and then get the h*ll out of there.
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While Joe and others are pondering the moral dilemna, Afghans and the troops are dying.
This is the picture we should be seeing:
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Why shoehorn your onion paper thin defense of Aryn Baker and TIME to go after Greenwald?
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I will give you this-”some couch potato press critic” is pretty funny.
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It makes not a lick of sense, but I’m sure it was fun writing.
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I just wished you weren’t so transparent, pretending to defend your colleagues when you are really defending yourself.

It would seem that Glenn Greenwald has become a very effective pinpricker of the annointed aka The Beltway Media. Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece strikes me as a stage setter: a pre-emptive piece to warn off the President, provide ammo for the Kristolcons and point to Saudi collusion on the issue of air space access.

But is it journalism?

“If Afghanistan proves resistant to our attempts to save it from itself (a very likely scenario, by the way), a great many women are going to suffer at the hands of the Taliban. Does anyone doubt the truth of that? Can anyone question the accuracy and sensitivity of Aryn’s reporting of this important story? Or do the left-wing media critics, just like their squalid counterparts on the right, feel a need to discredit every bit of reality that falls outside their worldview?”

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9 years and women continue to suffer under the Muslim tyranny which the men in not only Afghanistan, but all over the Muslim world inflict upon them. “A great many women HAVE been suffering at the hands of not only the Taliban, but also the Saudis, the Libyans, the Egyptian, Syrians, and now to a lesser amount the Iraqis. Isn’t that right Joe Klein?
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Isn’t it more of a cultural problem? A religion which you and the rest of the liberals on this very site defend? The same muslim creeds and practices which liberals like Joe Klein attempt to defend in order to build a mosque less than a mile from ground zero. The same muslim creeds and practices this President defends when he makes grand and glorious speeches in front of the Cairo University to put down Americans who “have acted badly”. Isn’t that right Joe Klein?
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Perhaps you should read this article from Huda Jawad. She describes what you and your friend Aryn Baker fail to describe. In Jawad’s statement she says…
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“TIME magazine must be experiencing a severe case of amnesia, judging by the cover of this week’s issue which asks, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan .” At best, this effort by TIME is irresponsible slick journalism; at worst, it is one of the most blatant pieces of pro-war propaganda seen in years. The world owes Afghanistan’s women an honest answer as to why we apathetically allow their condition to deteriorate from horrible to simply unspeakable. Instead, TIME is willingly deceiving readers into thinking that the condition of Aisha – the woman pictured on the cover – is a product of the Taliban 10 years ago. It is not. Aisha’s scarred face is a heart-wrenching reflection of the state of Afghan women today in the year 2010, and under the absurd assertion of democracy and the presence of thousands of US and NATO troops in the country.”

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While Jawad attacks not only the TIME cover of the noseless, earless victim of a cruel and vile religion, she also attacks the USA of not really caring about the women in Afghanistan, but more about what is in the best interest of the USA. While I do not agree for the most part with Jawad, one has to at least look at what she says…
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“Those absurd enough to propagate that the US is out to liberate Muslim women seem at a loss to explain why the US is not currently sending F-16′s into Saudi Arabia to free its women from the chains of oppression, and from the threat of honor killings and child marriages. Then again, the United States has no qualms about supporting Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars in military aid each year – in addition to whiskey and other unmentionables – in order to maintain the status quo that currently operates the Middle East for American interests”.

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So which is it Joe Klein? Defense of women or defense of the liberal supported muslim religion which allows these practices to occur in the first place?
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In order to solve any problem, you have to first dig deep to the root of the problem. In my mind, you cannot support a perverted religion on one hand, and then attempt to be outraged by acts committed in it’s name on the 2nd hand. Isn’t that right Joe Klein?
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If you want to read more from Huda Jawad and her attack of the US of A and TIME Magazine, go here…
http://www.countercurrents.org/jawad090810.htm

But don’t you want to know who was getting ready to bomb NYC, how, why, and what it means?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/movers-and-shakers/

Thanks everyone!

1) it’s not a mosque
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2) how far from Ground Zero would it have to be before you would not object?
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3) are you sure that the “liberals on this site” and Obama “defend” the practices of the more extreme, inane, and arguably insane elements of Islam?
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4) Does someone (do you?), if defending Christianity, automatically support its crackpots? Say, abortion doctor killers or the Spanish Inquisitors?

in all fairness, when someone writes as prolifically as Greenwald, you probably have better access to his mind than you do with people you know personally

Greenwald’s thoughtful and detailed columns are real works of journalism…he’s a tireless muckracker, who is doing a job that other journalists should be doing, except that they’re too busy kissing up to their DC subjects.

Goldberg was one of the journalists who pushed hard for the US invasion of Iraq, and with the help of yourself and many other so-called “journalists” enabled George W. Bush to take this country into a disastrous and immoral occupation that still has no end.

We need more Greenwalds and fewer Goldbergs.

I look forward to reading your “Iran: Requiem for a Profound Misadventure” in 2017.

Right, Joe, there is no agenda about the mutilated Afghan woman on the cover. Public opinion begins to turn against the war and Hey presto! the most graphic horrors are put in front of the public to keep the war going. Just a coincidence, right?

Who knew that we invaded Afghanistan to protect women from mutilation. You never told us that. When we were arming and financing the Taliban to kill Russians, were we protecting women then too? Maybe Time Inc. had a different agenda then.

And Jeffrey Goldberg is just a disinterested journalistic professional, right? He just happens to want America to destroy any nation that is hostile to Israel. So what if he was wrong about Iraq? You were wrong too, and you apologized, so everything is OK now. All Goldberg has to do is apologize after a million Iranians have been killed FOR NOTHING, and everything will be just fine.

You journalistic professionals are really very remarkable people. Your status is in no way influenced by the quality or veracity of what you write. It seems to depend entirely on how well it serves our permanent warfare state.

Isn’t it time for you to go on another helicopter ride with General Petraeus, Joe, to learn more about how he won the war in Iraq?

Joe, do you have nightmares about Greenwald? You’ve definitely got issues. You take every chance you get to slam the guy, most of the time because you don’t bother to read what he’s written or you don’t comprehend it. And when the two of you get in to it, he invariably ends up kicking your ass. You wanna stick up for a hack like Goldberg, with your past, that’s understandable. You want to keep on thinking you’ve got some kind of equal spat going with Greenwald who is committed to his principles, friends and beliefs and does not flip with the latest Time/Salon memo, for your own sake, give it a rest.
You are the one who doesn’t understand journalism. I didn’t ask Aryn Baker to risk her life to write a pro-military article on a lost war and I could care less if she’s married to Karzai. I didn’t write a bonehead cover tag like What Happens When We Leave since what happened to this woman happened when we were there. So what’ll they do when we leave, yank out all her teeth too? Time thinks we should sink our economy, keep killing civilians and our kids to prevent the unpreventable? And you’re there, marching behind them, her and your bud at the New Yorker every step of the way, asking the completely wrong question as usual.
“Because it truthfully presents a terrible moral dilemma–that if Afghanistan proves resistant to our attempts to save it from itself (a very likely scenario, by the way), a great many women are going to suffer at the hands of the Taliban. Does anyone doubt the truth of that?”
No, I don’t doubt the truth of that. Do you doubt the truth that we’re never going to save Afghanistan from itself? That’s the question you should be asking if you had the guts of a newt instead of reading off the latest Stangl memo.
We’re broke, Klein, we aren’t going to save anything in Afghanistan and we can’t spend trillions fighting every society that mutilates women – or men and children. It’d be nice but it can’t be done. Now or for the foreseeable future — like forever.
Get your head out of your Timekeeper and quit with the stupidly written defenses of your friends and co-writers and stand for something that’s right for a change. If you’ve forgotten how, start reading Greenwald regularly and you should get your mojo back.

There are a billion and half Moslems in the world, are you claiming that everyone in this “perverted religion” mutilates criminals, adulterers, or infidels? Don’t you think there’d be women walking around all over the world looking like this if that were the case? Or don’t you think, which is the problem here.

In a perfect world, we’d stop mutilation of every kind, people throwing rattlesnakes at each other, and bombing scores of thousands of civilians in our attempts to kill off or scare off a few thousand radicals — but it ain’t a perfect world, is it? You got lunkheads in this country who want to go back to the laws of the old testament which would leave a number of us with no hands, noses, tongues, private parts, feet and what have you.

And it doesn’t make one a liberal to defend Moslems or their religion in this country, it makes one an American. They are guaranteed their religion on the exact same level you are. And I’m free to ignore all of your superstitious nonsense. I’ve heard of no such cases here, outside of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and the stoning in Iran, I hear of very few in the mideast. It’s not a liberal policy to support cruel and unusual punishment, that’s generally conservatives who want that sucker to burn when he sits in the chair.

It does not come down to defense of women or defense of the Muslim religion. Only a simpleton thinks all Moslems treat crime like that, just like only a simpleton thinks all Moslems are jihadists who want to kill all infidels and take over the world.

If you want to argue about our supporting corrupt leaders of countries all over the world, then I’m there. Narrowing it down to attack an entire billion and a half people on the actions of a tiny selection of their lunatics,you can keep your simpleton views out of this.

cute, from the man who questions people’s loyalty based on their religion.

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/06/24/surge_protection/

while i’m linking, here’s an earlier version of the same:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewish_Question

Why is Joe Klein so defensive in his screed? It’s because he knows he is wrong, and sets up several straw man arguments to bolster his side.

If a reporter who was married to someone that did work for the Bush administration (or Obama administration, take your pick) did a high-profile piece showing the consequences of abandoning a presidential policy, you’d better believe we’d raise questions about the piece’s integrity and objectivity — and so would Klein.

About Goldberg over at The Atlantic: First, he was once a member of the Israeli army, which indicates a bias toward Israel. Two, his judgment about the need to attack Iraq was faulty, leading us to question his judgment now.

Third, and more importantly, Goldberg writes, “I suspect that the price of inaction might be greater than the price of action, but the opposite could just as easily and plausibly be true.”

If that’s the case, I’d rather err on the side of diplomacy and not military action.

This is unconvincing–Glenn generally goes into detail and is rarely challenged successfully on the facts. If you really agreed with him on politics you’d be as outraged as he is about the role of the mainstream press and overpaid and far too influential pundit/reporters like Goldberg and Klein.

What does it say about a journalist’s perspective and objectivity, when he or she when refers to Mr. Netanyahu, as “Bibi”, a term of endearment coined by Mr. Netanyahu’s grandmother, instead of using his real first name? Both Mr. Klein and Jeffrey Goldberg (or “Jeff” as Mr. Klein calls him) like to use “Bibi”. They both wish to convey attitudes of friendly familiarity.