Megan Carpentier’s shoddy smear attempt on Glenn Greenwald

Raw Story’s executive editor Megan Carpentier has a column out today calling Glenn Greenwald one of “Ron Paul’s useful idiots” on the left. In the column, she proceeds to wildly misrepresent and inaccurately paraphrase Greenwald’s words, twisting it to make it seem he is endorsing Paul:

Nonetheless, there have been calls by progressives, most notably Glenn Greenwald, to ignore all of that and more, and focus instead on Obama’s policy failings to have “an actual debate on issues of America’s imperialism”. He went on to argue that there are no policy priorities more imperative than those – certainly not abortion, immigration rights, LGBT equality, racial justice or any other aspect of the US’s extensive foreign policy.

Greenwald, for his part, predicted that this kind of attack would happen in the same column Carpentier was referencing:

I’m about to discuss the candidacies of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, and no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite. But since it’s always inadvisable to refrain from expressing ideas in deference to the confusion and deceit of the lowest elements, I’m going to proceed to make a couple of important points about both candidacies even knowing in advance how wildly they will be distorted.

Greenwald, unlike many his fellow progressives, is unafraid to voice important critiques against the Obama administration especially with regards to foreign policy, the national security state, and President Barack Obama’s self-serving shielding of powerful financial elites. Greenwald’s point all along is that Paul’s presence in this campaign is an important one as currently his candidacy is the sole platform voicing opposition to the expensive foreign wars, the domestic war on drugs, and a whole host of awful policies that has since become part of the bipartisan consensus from indefinite detention, torture, NDAA, and SOPA to the bank bailouts and immunity for the financial elites responsible for the recession.

Carpentier refuses to back down, implying that Greenwald is a hypocrite because he lives in Brazil with his gay partner:

And, yes, it is a function of your class privilege that you can live in Brazil with your partner — having interviewed on and off the record several LGBT couples for whom it’s not an option for the American-based partner to move abroad because they don’t have the money and their jobs or skills aren’t transferable, you are by comparison, lucky.

There is this blindness among partisan hacks regarding the great evils this regime has committed against humanity and increasingly against the American people through a variety of liberty-killing policies (the aforementioned SOPA, NDAA, and the relentless expansion of executive powers to include assassination of Americans without trial). Somehow, the short-term need to beat a Republican this election cycle outweighs all other concerns regardless of the long-term harm such myopia will inflict upon this country’s barely functioning Republic. To the full detriment of their liberties and their children’s futures, partisan hacks will rather see someone who has repeatedly failed progressivism win an election for more four more years than allow legitimate discourse to be heard.

The anti-Paul attacks coming from partisan hacks in the left have never been about Paul himself. I wrote about the attacks last year:

Through their anti-Paul invectives, they project their fears and hatred for Paul and the entire movement he represents for it forces them to confront the hollowness and utter pettiness of their partisanship.

Paul makes partisans uncomfortable because it forces them to acknowledge that their party is pro-war, pro-torture, pro-indefinite detention, pro-racist drug war, and pro-death penalty. The truth, it hurts.

UPDATE:

Just to recap, Matt Stoller’s piece regarding Ron Paul and liberals’ hypocrisy (“Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals”) has ignited a fierce debate across the liberal blogosphere with liberal heavyweights Glenn Greenwald, Philip Weiss, Wendy Kaminer of the American Civil Liberties Union weighing in on the side of Paul and partisan hacks like warmonger Kevin Drum, Democratic Party operative David Atkins, and RawStory’s Megan Carpentier calling for Paul’s marginalization.

For Atkins, liberalism is dominance, with liberals holding the dominant position. Mankind’s nature is brutal and exploitative, liberalism restrains it using equally harsh methods. Atkins furthermore equates support for Democrats with policies that benefit the middle class, in a nod to Cold War era liberal anti-communism. This kind of alpha-beta mindset implies that criticism and rejection of Barack Obama, the chief alpha of the Democrats, is a threat to Atkins’ version of liberalism itself.

Out of all of these, as I have noted above, Carpentier’s smear job attempt on Greenwald is the most vicious. Kevin Gozstola of FireDogLake comments on the debate itself, calling Carpentier’s smears as “no different than what someone with a news organization like Fox News might do to form the basis for a news story designed to further transform someone into a person that deserves to be hated and ignored.” Nathan Fuller of the Bradley Manning Support Network goes even further, blasting Carpentier as having “zero credibility.” Journalism professor Jay Rosen condemns Carpentier on his Twitter account, calling her column “ludicrously inept.”

It is worth noting that these are liberals criticizing each other. On one side are principled liberals who are legitimately dissenting against this administration’s atrocious policies. On the other, partisans who denounce any articulation of the massive failings of their favorite peace laureate. I wrote yesterday that “partisan hacks will rather see someone who has repeatedly failed progressivism win an election for more four more years than allow legitimate discourse to be heard.” This latest barrage to silence criticism of President Barack Obama, even liberal criticism, is part of this hollow and petty partisanship that is destroying this country.