Monday, January 11, 2010

Tempest in a Tea Party

Not to defend Harry Reid who was -- at best -- mind-bendingly impolitic in his remarks about Obama, but Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, describes the source book, Game Change, thusly:

"...the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as 'reporting'."

Now, Glenn Greenwald is no poster-boy for political centrism, so we must await the consensus view of Game Change, but it is not an insignificant fact that its co-author, Mark Halperin, is as far to the right as Greenwald is to the left. The Reid remark is unsourced, in line with the authors' note that all interviews were conducted on "deep background", and the fact that Reid has not disowned his unfortunate remark is telling; but it does not rule out the possibility that he was blind-sided. That the GOP is having a revanchist field-day over the issue was predictable, but their attempt to compare this with the party-engineered political demise of Trent Lott is merely embarrassing.

Read Greenwald's column at: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html

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