[Peace-discuss] censored article at the INTERCEPT news magazine that caused Glenn Greenwald to resign.

[J.B. Nicholson]

David Johnson wrote:
[Regarding 
https://theanalysis.news/interviews/biden-is-not-on-the-left-but-there-is-a-difference-that-matters-abby-martin/ 
where Paul Jay interviews Abby Martin]
> I am really surprised and disappointed that Abby Martin has also succumbed to the
> scare tactics of the Democrats and the corporate owned media. She should know
> better.

I think Martin does know better but I'm left wondering if she thinks differently 
because of what came at the top of this interview -- she now has a child. I'm not 
sure what the point of mentioning that was except for us to connect it to something 
else, something they don't clearly state. I'm sure that she sees the enormous amounts 
of money one can get for echoing the establishment line that Joe Biden is 
significantly different or not objecting to evidenceless speculation that things will 
be better for most Americans with a Biden presidency (which, for all we know, could 
turn into a Kamala "Top Cop" Harris presidency). People usually won't turn down 
economic security. I don't offer this as an excuse (like Aaron Maté does and most 
recently did in https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nig6c1WEc-0 to Jimmy Dore's chagrin), I 
offer that as a description of what might motivate someone to do as they do. The cost 
of that choice is a public that has no reason to trust what that person has to say.

The issues you listed are far more likely to be the issues on which Americans (who 
vote for POTUS at all) will base their vote. And therefore it's telling that we don't 
see proper explication of those issues in this Jay/Martin interview. Medicare for 
All, for instance, only came up once in this Jay/Martin interview and only because 
Martin brought it up. If either major party candidate had offered Medicare for All 
they would have won the election and convinced a majority of registered voters to 
vote for them. And it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of the registered voters 
again don't vote for POTUS just like they didn't in 2016 (the majority that those who 
complain about the electoral college and majority voting typically don't talk about).

Getting back to this Jay interview, I'm reminded of why I quit taking The Real News 
seriously under Jay's leadership and today: his analysis is not based in facts. I'll 
explain more below.

On trying to make Biden look better than he is regarding the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq:
> Paul Jay: Honestly, as much as I fully expect Biden to win this election and I
> fully expect to spend the next four years savaging him on so many things, I do
> find myself having to say two or three positive things in terms of foreign policy
> and Biden. Even though, one, he’s fully rooted, as are almost all of the leaders
> of the Democratic Party, rooted in the Cold War mentality. Meaning that America is
> the real civilization, the pillar of democracy. What was Reagan’s line, “the
> beacon on the hill,” or whatever? I think he believes all that. And it’s
> convenient to believe all that because the military industrial complex and
> finance, it fits their strategy of how to make money out of being the global
> policeman.
> 
> But I also think he’s realistic and pragmatic in the way Obama was. And Obama, we
> should remember, was against the Iraq war. And he said very clearly he wasn’t
> against war and he wasn’t against regime change.
> 
> Abby Martin: “Dumb war.”
> 
> Paul Jay: He just thought the Iraq war was stupid. Yeah, it was dumb. And I think
> Biden agrees with him on that now, that that type of intervention is done. It
> doesn’t help the empire. In one of his vice-presidential debates, he said that if
> you didn’t want Iran to be a regional power, then the United States shouldn’t have
> invaded Iraq. Because that’s what Iraq was: the buffer. And he said, It’s over
> now, you did invade Iraq, and you do have to accept Iran as a regional power.
> 
> That’s a very important point of difference because of the foreign-policy-gang
> types around Trump. And I must include Chuck Schumer and, of course, Netanyahu
> from Israel and the Saudis. They don’t want to accept Iran as a regional power.
> They want to try to destroy the place, mostly through economic warfare, but
> possibly more.
> 
> And I think when Obama got elected, I said, I only have one hope that he’s going
> to be anything different than a Clinton or any other centrist Democrat: on Iran,
> he might be rational. And it turned out he was. The rest of his foreign policy was
> just normal, corporate-Democratic, defend-the-empire policy.
> 
> I’m saying I think Biden realized he was wrong about Iraq. He could have taken the
> Obama position. On the other hand, he’s a political opportunist, Biden. He goes
> where the wind blows, where he thinks his political fortunes will be best. So, I
> think it was more about that than anything, why he voted for the resolution that
> wound up enabling the Iraq war.

Biden didn't "realize he was wrong about Iraq". For years after that vote he went on 
the lecture circuit telling people he was right to vote in support of authorizing 
Pres. G.W. Bush to invade Iraq.

Biden only recently changed his tune to another lie[1], now saying something that 
tries to recast his vote to mean something other than authorizing an illegal 
invasion. That's not "realizing he [Biden] was wrong about Iraq". Jay doesn't even 
put proper emphasis on what Jay has tacitly admitted and downplayed in favor of 
constructing another narrative -- Biden was wrong. At the time when it counted, when 
there were millions of people on the streets of the world telling him not to support 
that invasion, Biden voted to authorize the invasion. Even if Biden genuinely had 
changed his mind, as Jay apparently believes, that would mean nothing. It's the vote 
at the time that counts for anything.

[1] Notice how Trump's lying isn't so much a point of contention in this election? 
It's because Biden has a long documented record of lying going back to when he was 
more lucid and he lied about his own educational record and had given speeches which 
he copied from others without attribution. He even dropped out of his 1988 run 
because he got caught in these lies. Trump and Biden's treatment of women is also 
tellingly not a hotly contested point in the 2020 election for similar reasons -- 
both of those candidates are comparably horrible with women.




On casting Glenn Greenwald to have a worse understanding of what just happened to him 
than Greenwald said:
> Paul Jay: But when Glenn goes on Tucker Carlson… He crossed a line there. Not by
> going on Tucker Carlson. I’ll go on Tucker Carlson, but they’d never invite me.
> One, I’m not famous enough. Nobody knows who I am. And, two, they know, if they
> listen to me, I’m not going to do what Glenn did, which is, I’m not going to
> regurgitate Tucker Carlson’s own speaking points back to him and just say what he
> wants to hear. Because when Glenn was on Rising, that Krystal Ball show on The
> Hill, he didn’t say what he said on Tucker Carlson. He spoke completely
> differently. He spoke to a leftwing audience. And to his left audience, all he did
> was defend his right to have journalistic independence and integrity and so on.
> But when he goes on Tucker Carlson, he says more or less the following words, that
> there’s an alliance between the CIA and the Deep State and the Democratic Party
> and most of the media to undermine the first four years of the Trump presidency.
> Well, that’s a Fox News, rightwing Trump speaking point. More importantly, it’s
> just not true.

If what Greenwald said to Tucker Carlson was so horrible, quote what Greenwald said 
and explain precisely what was wrong with it. Even self-described "nightclub jagoff 
comedian" Jimmy Dore does this amount of legwork in his pieces. Don't do as The 
Intercept's Editor in Chief Betsy Reed recently did in 
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-the-intercept/ -- her 5 
paragraph response to Greenwald's resignation. There she offered no quotes from 
Greenwald. Reed would have us believe that Greenwald's response is "designed to make 
him appear as a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum. It would take 
too long to point them all out here, but we intend to correct the record in time.". 
Reed has had plenty of time to explain precisely what happened with the Reality 
Winner case and it's clear that she won't do it no matter what she says later (if 
anything). The truth is that Reed is throwing the tantrum and Greenwald gave us the 
substance-filled arguments to back his case. We don't need to take Greenwald's word 
for it. We can read the quotes Greenwald provided and see the evidence for ourselves 
(all quotes from Greenwald, by the way, are not disputed anywhere by The Intercept). 
Jay (above) and Reed in her Intercept response to Greenwald's resignation offer 
nothing but their own respective opinions.




On whether the Democrats want to win the presidency in 2020 at all:
> Paul Jay: Yes, the Democratic Party obviously has been fighting against Trump.

I'm not convinced of that. One doesn't run an issue-free campaign headed by someone 
with obvious mental problems if they want to win an election. If one wants to lower 
the expectations to the point where most don't vote and most understand that neither 
major party will help you, and both parties work together, one does precisely what 
the Democrats & Republicans are doing now (see David Johnson's list of important 
issues where these two parties agree). I think Greenwald has it right: party bosses 
might rather have Biden (who has a longer track record of being neocon and neolib) 
but they'll be okay with 4 more years of Trump who has been (to borrow a phrase) 
brought to heel. Russiagate has helped with bringing Trump into line and making up 
for making the establishment nervous with some of the things Trump said when he ran 
in 2016 like sharply critiquing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.





On Russiagate:
> Paul Jay: I mean, in some ways, the Democrats’ bullshit created this situation,
> because, one, the Russia stuff. I’ve been saying from the very beginning — and I
> didn’t get into the weeds of it as some journalists did because I kept saying, I
> don’t care if it’s all true.

The Obama/Biden presidency is why we have Trump today. Voters did not elect Hillary 
Clinton because they didn't want 4 or 8 more years of what Obama/Biden had given them 
for the past 8 years.

As for Paul Jay on Russiagate: he had echoed Russiagate bullshit, said that he didn't 
care if Russiagate was true (which itself is ridiculous, he should be in the job of 
identifying what is true and what is false and debunking the falsehoods), and The 
Real News put Russigators like Marc Jacobs on their shows rendering that network 
indistinguishable from what I can get anywhere in establishment media.

Russiagate started as a baseless excuse to try and get Hillary Clinton out of taking 
responsibility for her poorly-run 2nd attempt at becoming POTUS. Russiagate has 
become much more than that since, including a basis for economic sanctions against 
Russia and that is a form of war. If even now Jay repeats that tired line of not 
caring if Russiagate is true or not, he's not a responsible journalist or commentator.