Catching Up…
…out in meetings all day, so let’s take a look around:
Glenn Greenwald notes the rare harmony among left and right on the David Irving story, and uses it as a launchpad to wonder why the core issues underlying the NSA story don’t provoke the same level of agreement…
Tom Maguire looks at Greenwald’s theory of the Bush cult with respect to the Arab port controversy and wonders why the cult’s brainwashing techniques appear to be on the fritz…
Pajamas has new video up from this weekend’s Intelligence Summit, and an interview with James Woolsey on why he pulled out (I’m sure there’s a Greenwald connection here somewhere, but I don’t see it)…
Larry Summers will step down as president of Harvard at the end of this academic year; Lubos Motl has more…
The difference between the David Irving case and the NSA controversy is simple: agreement over the facts.
We all agree what happened in the David Irving case. Heck, we’re probably all commenting based on reading exactly the same article in the Guardian.
In the NSA case we can barely agree on what we’re talking about. Critics speculate that we’re talking about wiretapping domestic-to-domestic phone calls without warrants; the President himself says clearly that this isn’t so. Critics assert that there’s absolutely no oversight; supporters point to Senate-confirmed oversight officials within the DoD and NSA as well as the Congressional intelligence committees and the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. Critics characterize the Justice Department’s legal arguments as asserting that the President can simply ignore any law even vaguely related to foreign policy that he doesn’t agree with; supporters don’t agree with that characterization.
I think there’d be fairly uniform agreement on the right conclusion to reach if we just all agreed on what the basic facts were. But, of course, it’s much more fun to scream and shout and call the other guy names. Welcome to the blogosphere.
Yes, Clint, I think that’s true…the Holocaust is also a subject that has been researched at great length by many world-class historians, and of course we have the memiors of the survivors…with the NSA story, we know very little, based on a few speeches, a book, and a leaked newspaper story…contributing to the disagreement over the basics, no doubt…
Larry’s replacement? I have two words for you:
Al Gore.
You heard it here first.
Oh, surely not – you jest, I hope?…
Gosh, I thought that was one word – Algore. Too much Rush, I guess.