http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1449611
You are either a part of the #Resistance or you are the Resisted.
Here, Kirblar smugly posts some article by a Clintonite which poorly tries to take down Gleenwald because he has some minor agreement with libertarians.
I'm five replies in and its exactly what I expected. Because I've known about Greenwald for more than a year.
Considering he has done nothing but slag democrats who fight to defend progressive ideals that this administration threatens, constantly defend Russia, and shit on the media as of late, he does not deserve to be considered a progressive.
He isn't the only supposed leftist that goes on Fox News. TYT's Nomiki Konst has appeared to bash democrats.
Greenwald is not a "progressive" in any social or cultural sense.
Who was supposing Greenwald is a progressive?
The dude is always attacking the Democrats for not being "left" or "progressive" enough. He's written off the Republicans long ago, he's trying to make the Democrats better from his point of view. He only has eight years worth of trashing the Bush administration in his ledger, and he's done the same with Trump.
But he doesn't adhere to the brand, the Democratic Party.
AND, his special crime, at least in this thread, is that he will go on any outlet that will let him get his message out. Yes, of course Fox News or RT or whoever is bringing him on for their reasons, he knows this, he's said it, hell, he's said it on those channels. They're using each other.
And it harms the brand. Which is all you should care about. When you do any kind of reporting or punditry you should only ask one question, how does this help the Democratic Party?
Progressivism is whatever the Party dictates it be. Not what someone ideologically identifies as. Greenwald thinks the military industrial spy state is a problem, end of. BUT he harms the Democratic Party when he talks about this. REPUBLICANS ARE WORSE, SO SHUT UP.
The New Republic piece is arguably the height of the brand delusion. Snowden should be considered a traitor by all good progressives, because he didn't do it for reasons that would help the Democratic Party, he did it because he's a libertarian. Julian Assange should be condemned by progressives because he doesn't care about the fate of the Democratic Party for a country he's not a citizen of, he only cares about his fetishes. Greenwald participates because he believed certain members of the Democratic Party when it warned that Bush was a fascist bringing a dark security state upon us against our liberties and even more so against our law, then Obama declared that all in the past, so all good progressives should have moved on instead of dredging it up when things got worse.
And of course, excelsiorlef and the usual suspects are in their immediately labeling him a Putin shill because he's called out nonsense like the non-retracted claim by GOOD SUBSCRIBE TODAY TO SAVE DEMOCRACY outlets like the Washington Post that Russia had hacked into a nuclear power plant which they ran without contacting the power plant or anyone else. Or how he's pointed out that the massively retweeted MSNBC intelligence star actually has no basis to anything he ever "reports" on twitter.
And he's not the only mainstream progressive to attack the Russia story, and the Democratic Party, for not being progressive enough. Matt Taibbi is far more of a Democratic Party supporter, has wrote books worth attacking Trump and his people, yet he's also attacked the Russia story, and spent eight years blasting the Obama administrations refusal to prosecute anyone criminally for Wall Street's crimes, instead using it as an opportunity to boost the party's standing within Wall Street.
The guy who made the claim about Greenwald not being a progressive in any sense, defended it this way:
How is Greenwald not a progressive? He was a vocal supporter of Bernie during the election.
Many of Bernie's supporters were not socially progressive either, which might be why a number of them voted for Trump.
Noam Chomsky has said the exact same things Greenwald is saying. Is he not a progressive either?
Maybe he isn't anymore.
The thing about being a "progressive" is you need to actually update your views as time goes by or else you become "the status quo." Somebody who was considered socially progressive thirty years ago doesn't get to automatically retain that title for life. You have to work for it.
When it comes to people like Chomsky and Bernie Sanders, I don't personally dislike them or anything, but I feel strongly that the term "progressive" should refer to more than just economics but also the axes of identity that are used to oppress people by race, gender, sexuality, etc. This was the big complaint so many people had about Bernie during the race.
The dirty secret is that neither Clinton nor Bernie are "progressive," but this is too nuanced a view for most people to comprehend, apparently.
Notice, he doesn't defend the claim, instead he shifts it to make "progressive" something literally unobtainable by anyone ever. So Greenwald and Sanders and Chomsky and even Hillary can never be attacking Democrats as progressives or as commonly said "from the left" as he's argued the term into nothingness.
No one held his feet to the fire and made him explain how an open socialist who is not only personally gay, but gay married and has fought all kinds of countries over getting his partner through their borders, including his partner being detained as a terrorist due to Greenwald's reporting, has documented endless cases in other countries of racial discrimination with stringent disapproval, and who is down the line basically in agreement with
Jacobin and
The Nation on every conceivable issue except whether or not Russia matters in the 2016 election is NOT A PROGRESSIVE IN ANY SENSE because he thinks there's holes in the Russia story, a story with nothing that relates to progressivism involved in it UNLESS progressivism = blind support for the Democratic Party = blind support for Hillary Clinton.
Which means there's only one progressive on the entire planet: Peter Daou
