Greenwald proves some suckers will believe anything!

[MFrohike]

131. I don't get the outrage

If I take this article at face value, EVERYBODY looks bad.

1. Greenwald, as he tends to do, overhyped the mention of Khorasan by the administration. From his own quotations, there's no direct statement by the administration nor is there an indication that it led the charge on the Khorasan hysteria. Using his own timeline in the article, the administration was late to the party on the Khorasan bandwagon.

It might pass muster if he said they offered it as a supplementary reason or an after-the-fact justification, but his own citations don't support it as a primary reasoning prior to the bombing.

2. The administration comes off looking pretty sleazy in this narrative. No, they don't seem to have manufactured a threat or the hysteria surrounding it, but they clearly jumped on the bandwagon when it running hot. I call it sleazy because it's opportunism in the effort to kill people. I can understand the political calculation that led to it, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a sleazy move.

3. The press, generally, showed themselves to be full of shit, yet again. I really don't get why people attack others based on sources most of the time because the mainstream US press is almost entirely worthless, if not intentionally dishonest (McClatchy is generally the exception to this rule). Assuming the "secret" sources exist, which is quite doubtful from the context*, the press played on their line like they worked for Hearst. They might come off the worst of all because they're clearly trying to profit from death and destruction without having the balls to at least build bombs for the Air Force, much less drop them.

*I've seen at least one poll of reporters done in the last few years that shows an increasing reluctance to rely on confidential sources, recorded conversations, or stolen documents. While I do think Woodward and Bernstein's relevance is vastly overblown, I do recognize they helped keep a big story alive. I have to wonder if their occupationally related descendants would even return Mark Felt's phone call, much less meet him.