Those who have Serious Problems with Glenn Greenwald..Is it Him or His Reporting?

[geek tragedy]

24. I linked to a few examples upthread.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2995403

Classic "Ron Paul is tireless champion of constitutional freedom, the only principled candidate running for president, is an exciting phenomenon, and has totally done nothing to indicate he supports racism. Why do you say I support him?"

He was also a Tea Party type on immigration in 2005:

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/gop-fights-itself-on-illegal.html

he parade of evils caused by illegal immigration is widely known, and it gets worse every day. In short, illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone. Few people dispute this, and yet nothing is done.

A substantial part of the GOP base urgently wants Republicans, who now control the entire Federal Government, to take the lead in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. And yet the GOP, despite its unchallenged control, does virtually nothing, infuriating this sector of its party. The White House does worse than nothing; to the extent it acts on this issue at all, it is to introduce legislation designed to sanction and approve of illegal immigration through its “guest worker” program, a first cousin of all-out amnesty for illegal immigrants.

GOP inaction when it comes to illegal immigration is at once mystifying and easily explainable. There is a wing of the party – the Wall St. Journal/multinational corporation wing – which loves illegal immigration because of its use as a source of cheap labor. And while that wing of the party is important because of the financial support it provides, it is a distinct minority when it comes to electoral power.

The real reason Republicans treat the need to address the illegal immigration problem like a trip to the dentist -- as something they want to avoid at all costs -- is because they have been convinced that adopting an aggressive stance on illegal immigration will cost them too many votes among the nation’s ethnic minorities and legal immigrants. And that is what brings us to Sanchez’s Op-Ed, which illustrates just how unconvincing and baseless that alarmist view really is.

With absolutely no hard data or even evidentiary inferences of any kind, Sanchez emphatically announces that the reason GOP candidate Jerry Kilgore lost the election in Virginia is because he was too strident about the evils of illegal immigration. And she warns other GOP candidates that they will face a similar fate unless they modulate their tone and soften their position. Here is the crux of Sanchez's warning:


Republicans nationally should draw a number of lessons from the party's unsuccessful effort to take back the Virginia governor's mansion this month. . .

When it comes to immigration, dropping the word "illegal" into any anti-immigration proposal is not likely to work electoral magic. . . . Republicans embrace anti-immigrant fervor at their peril. The party is perilously close to adopting as its immigration policy the hanging of a "closed" sign on the border. To do so would be a gross mistake that would oversimplify the problem and set back all the efforts of President Bush to build bridges to America's growing population of Hispanics while finding a workable solution to a complex problem, one with far-ranging political consequences for the party over the long run.


The “substance” of this claim is facially ludicrous and easily dismissed. There already is a “closed sign on the border” when it comes to illegal immigration. It’s called the law. The problem is that the “closed sign” isn’t being enforced because the Federal Government, which has its interfering, power-hungry hands in virtually everything else, has abdicated its duty in one of the very few areas where it was actually meant to be: border security.

While her policy argument is easily dismissed, Sanchez’s political analysis is odious in the extreme, as this line of thinking is what has brainwashed countless spineless Republicans to steer clear of illegal immigration, even while the crises intensifies every day. But the political warnings Sanchez issues is without substance, and for years has been misleading Republicans into a self-destructive fear to tackle this problem.

To “support” her warning to Republicans to back away from illegal immigration (is it even possible for most Republicans to go back any further? What is less than zero?), Sanchez asserts, without a shred of evidence, that large numbers of Hispanic and Muslim suburban voters in Virginia were turned off by Kilgore’s use of the term “illegal immigration”:

And of course gets all angry when people point it out.

Dude's been a progressive for less than 8 years, and sees fit to appoint himself as pope of what it means to be a progressive.