alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

July 25, 2008

Greenwald on Sunstein

by AltHippo @ 3:07 pm. Filed under NSA Spying

(Author’s note: it’s very difficult not to type Sunstain, or to type it and make yourself correct it.)

The DemocracyNow debate between Glenn Greenwald and Samantha Power’s husband is illuminating for a number of reasons. For one thing, Greenwald makes a distinction that can’t be stated often enough. Those of us who support Obama still vehemently disagree with his support of the recent FISA bill, and insist vocally that the Bush administration must be held accountable.

The mechanism of the Executive branch makes it difficult to hold Bush accountable during his term. By that I mean that as long as the Attorney General refuses to enforce the law, we’ll have to wait for an Obama administration for an accountability moment. The netroots is uniformly clear that the Bushies must face legal consequences for their actions, however. There is no superior class that separates them from the masses.

Sunstein articulates the worst kind of tepidness on this, and Greenwald calls him on it:

GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they’ll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, “Oh, there’s good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute.” And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it’s important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.

I’ll add that it’s important that Greenwald makes the distinction between supporting the candidacy, and supporting Obama’s views on this policy, as he does in his introduction:

Well, you know, it’s one thing to defend Senator Obama and to support his candidacy, as I do. It’s another thing to just make factually false claims in order to justify or rationalize anything that he does.

This also serves to put a future Obama administration on notice that a Sunstein judicial appointment is not going to fly.

At some point, the anti-establishment gadflies (Lambert and BTD come to mind) somehow got it in their heads that to effect democratic change means to reject anything to do with the netroots and Democratic Party candidates, and identify with screaming banshees like rivermalkin. I take it they believe that by alienating Josh Marshall (WKJM to them), Kos, and Chris Bowers the world will be a better place.

Meanwhile, there are people like Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald who use their visibility to annoy and afflict the Bushies and their enablers. This is an example of right relationship between the progressive blogosphere and progressive action.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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