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Meanwhile, the GOP establishment from top to bottom spent a decade cheering on torture, disappearances, abductions, chronic presidential lawbreaking and truly sick McCarthyite witch hunts. Both of the Sane Parties conspired to transfer, with little accountability, massive amounts of public wealth to the very Wall Street firms which virtually destroyed the entire world economy, while standing by and doing very little about tragic levels of joblessness; kept us waging war for a full decade in multiple countries (while threatening others) even as we near the precipice of bankruptcy, the hallmarks of under-developed nation status and the disappearance of the social safety net; and are so captive to the corporate interests which own the Government that they viciously compete with one another over who can be a more loyal servant to those interests. While all of that is happening, those whom all Serious, Sane people agree are Crazy — people like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul and Alan Grayson — vehemently oppose most if not all of that and try to find ways to expand the realm of legitimate debate beyond the suffocating stranglehold of those responsible. So who exactly is Crazy? Glenn Greenwald ☀

All of this yet again underscores the prime function of establishment journalism in the U.S.: to uncritically amplify the views of those who wield political power. And it is also perfectly consistent with their first mandate: the U.S. is incapable of acts of evil (and certainly incapable of “Terrorism”), which is reserved only for those foreigners who dislike and “protest” the United States. Glenn Greenwald ☀

To summarize: the NYT Op-Ed Page decided, for whatever reasons, that it wanted to find someone to urge more civilian deaths in Afghanistan. The person it found to do that is someone about whom virtually nothing was known, yet works for one of the largest, most sprawling and influential defense firms in the nation, a virtual arm of the Pentagon, but they decided there was no reason to have its readers know that. Glenn Greenwald ☀

This oft-repeated notion — that prosecuting political officials and high-levels lawyers when they commit crimes in office is the hallmark of the “banana republics” of South and Central America — is exactly the opposite of reality. As leading political scientists have long documented, the actual hallmark of under-developed and backward nations is the immunity which political elites enjoy from the rule of law no matter how serious their crimes (Thomas Carruthers, Foreign Affairs, 1998: “Rule-of-law reform [in the Third World] will succeed only if it gets at the fundamental problem of leaders who refuse to be ruled by the law … . entrenched elites cede their traditional impunity and vested interests only under great pressure”). What makes a backward country backward is the confederation of elites insisting that investigations and prosecutions are only for the dirty people on the street corner, not for them. Glenn Greenwald ☀

This is what Republicans always do. When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm. Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket. The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State. Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their “small government principles.” The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton’s Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers. The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted — both before they were empowered and again now — that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint. Glenn Greenwald ☀

All of this would be an interesting though not terribly important semantic matter if not for the fact that the term Terrorist plays a central role in our political debates. It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S. Government does. Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions, military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance, obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all justified by the claim that it’s only being done to “Terrorists,” who, by definition, have no rights. Even worse, one becomes a “Terrorist” not through any judicial adjudication or other formal process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the Executive Branch. The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and that’s the end of that: uncritical followers of both political parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he’s a Terrorist (by which they actually mean: he’s been accused of being one, though that distinction — between presidential accusations and proof — is not one they recognize). If we’re really going to vest virtually unlimited power in the Government to do anything it wants to people they call “Terrorists,” we ought at least to have a common understanding of what the term means. But there is none. It’s just become a malleable, all-justifying term to allow the U.S. Government carte blanche to do whatever it wants to Muslims it does not like or who do not like it (i.e., The Terrorists). It’s really more of a hypnotic mantra than an actual word: its mere utterance causes the nation blindly to cheer on whatever is done against the Muslims who are so labeled. Glenn Greenwald ☀

What bizarre behavior from the NYT: it publishes an extremist, repellent Op-Ed calling, in essence, for the deaths of more innocent Afghans and accusing the Obama administration of sacrificing the lives of American troops due to excessive concern about civilians, all while providing basically no information about the author and allowing her vaguely to refer to a “defense consulting company” for whom she works while concealing its identity. There’s no way to assess her credentials, her expertise, her employment, her motives, her possible conflicts — nothing. In short, the NYT allows her to spout extremely ugly and inflammatory claims on its Op-Ed page under the cover of alleged expertise, while concealing even the most basic information about her credentials, employment and professional background. What kind of journalistic standards are those? Glenn Greenwald ☀

In general, people who commit felonies avoid publicly confessing to having done so, and they especially avoid mocking the authorities who fail to act. One thing Dick Cheney is not is stupid, and yet he’s doing exactly that. Indeed, he’s gradually escalated his boasting about having done so throughout the year. Why? Because he knows there will never be any repercussions, that he will never be prosecuted no matter how blatantly he admits to these serious crimes. He’s taunting the Obama administration and the DOJ: not only will I not hide or apologize, but I will proudly tout and defend my role in these crimes, because I know you will do absolutely nothing about it, even though the Attorney General and the President themselves said that the act to which I’m confessing is a felony. Does anyone doubt that Cheney’s assessment is right? And isn’t that, rather obviously, a monumental indictment of most everything? Glenn Greenwald ☀

The only thing worse than someone completely indifferent to human rights abuses when committed by their own government is someone whose concern for such matters is dictated by the religion or other demographic attributes of those whose basic rights are being denied. That’s the same mentality that leads our media to treat American journalists held by Evil Foreign Governments for a few weeks under dubious circumstances as screeching headline-making news, while ignoring almost completely those foreign (Muslim) journalists held by the U.S. Government for years without charges. How many Americans know and are outraged about Iran’s detention of Roxana Saberi, all while being completely ignorant of the numerous Muslim journalists held for years by the U.S., including a Reuters photojournalist, Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, finally released last week after being held by the U.S. military for 17 months with no charges and even after an Iraqi court ordered him released? It’s the same mentality that allows the U.S. Government, with a straight face, to issue reports condemning as “torture” the very techniques we used, to protest indefinite detention, extra-judicial killings and lawless eavesdropping when engaged in by other countries, and to demand that other countries prosecute their war criminals and torturers in the name of “the rule of law” (while our own are feted on TV shows and given regular newspaper columns to glorify the torture and other war crimes they implemented). Glenn Greenwald ☀

Ron Paul was denied the ability to speak at the Republican convention in St. Paul, and held his own convention across town. Glenn Greenwald and I were there. While we disagree with the libertarians about more things than we probably agree on, it’s an honest disagreement about the role of government. The GOP establishment, on the other hand, struck a bargain for power with corporate America that is totally at odds with everything the libertarians stand for. I’ve often thought they have more points of honest intersection with progressives on the war, civil liberties, accountability and transparency than with the GOP and the “For Sale” sign they’ve affixed to the taxpayer trough. Ron Paul has been tireless in taking his message to college campuses, and he has tremendous support among younger people who identify themselves as fiscal conservatives but are uncomfortable with the fundies and their gay-bashing. But as the libertarian message is gaining traction, it is being hijacked by the Neocons — and Sarah “bridge to nowhere” Palin leads the parade. Jane Hamsher ☀

The power of myth and propaganda is well-documented. Still, even with that in mind, how could any conservative look at the messages sent from the Post Op-Ed page just in the last few days alone — Palin is awesome!; Europe needs a tea party movement! Confront Iran! Liberals are patronizing losers! — and still go on chattering about The Liberal Media, of which, in their minds (and in the mind of that paper’s “media critic”), the Post is a charter member? And it’s far from unusual for the Post to deliver an almost uniformly right-wing (particularly neoconservative) message; in fact, it happens quite frequently. “Liberal media” has basically come to mean: “anyone who doesn’t sound like Rush Limbaugh,” but even using that definition, the Post Op-Ed page comes very close and often, as today, meets it. That’s not news, but the persistence of the Liberal Media myth — not just among the Right but among media figures themselves — is quite remarkable. Not even the complaint by George Bush’s own Press Secretary that the media was “too deferential” to the Bush administration undermined it at all; if that didn’t, what could? Glenn Greenwald ☀

In sum, Sarah Palin loyally supports virtually every policy that defined the uniquely disastrous Bush/Cheney first term. The “tea party movement” depicts itself as some sort of novel and independent force in American politics, and the establishment media — which patronizingly equates far right extremists with “real Americans” and is petrified of accusations of “liberal bias” — plays along. But exactly the opposite is true. It’s just an appendage of the Republican Party: more dogmatic and boisterous than party leaders would like, but nonetheless devoted to the purest of partisan goals of restoring the same GOP to power that ran the country into the ground over the last decade. All of the GOP leaders whom this movement seeks to empower are the same ones who subserviently supported almost every Bush/Cheney policy for eight straight years. As is true for Palin, Fox News is this movement’s primary sponsor because Fox, which craves a return of the Bush years, knows that the “tea party movement” will promote that goal by re-imaging the destroyed GOP brand into something fresh, pretty and new. Hardened GOP loyalists like Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, National Review and Sean Hannity are perfectly at home in the “tea party movement” because its principal effect is to empower the standard right-wing GOP politicians and policies they’ve long craved. Glenn Greenwald ☀

Persons” and “citizens” have entirely different meanings in the Constitution. There are a handful of instances in which the Constitution applies only to American citizens. When that is the case, the Constitution explicitly uses the word “citizens.” In all other instances, it simply restricts what the Government is permitted to do generally or uses the much broader term “persons” to describe who holds the rights it guarantees. That’s the obvious point the Yick Wo Court made in 1886 in holding “these provisions are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction,” and it ought to prevent the most minimally honest individuals among us from claiming otherwise, as Susan Collins just did. Glenn Greenwald ☀