Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Neither Shorter Nor Longer

The Odyssey of Larry Summers:

Glenn Greenwald once lashed out at me for asking an "ignorant" question on a topic I admitted I didn't understand. A petty person would point out that his post on Larry Summers displays not only ignorance, but a total lack of awareness of any gaps in his understanding. And there, I guess I just did.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh my.
Let's begin with the phrase "lashing out", shall we?
Glenn Greenwald presents a thoroughly incoherent response in which he professes not to understand why Dan Drezner and I might be offended by his saying:
What really underlies the mentality of people like McArdle and Drezner are two pervasive though toxic afflictions — a drooling, self-loving American exceptionalism, along with a self-interested refusal to acknowledge that there is anything truly wrong with our political and media establishment because they both support and are part of that establishment.
I certainly hope for the same forbearance when I argue that Glenn Greenwald is a self-serving media hound with a size-twelve ego squeezed into a size-four soul, and that the root of his rage is less a profound moral grievance than a narcissistic belief that his ideas are of such transcendant clarity, his concerns of such monumental importance, that any failure to obey his dicta can only stem from the most base of motives.
I mean, I'm not saying that or anything. I'm just saying that I'm glad to know that if I did utter the above, Greenwald wouldn't take it the wrong way.
Clearly, Megan knows what it is to lash out. What she's forgotten is GG is pretty much done with her, and there will be no Bloggingheads to follow this particular cry for attention, probably not even any notice.
The rest is such a weak attempt to distort GG's post I have to wonder whether Megan even finished reading it before gettin on her horse. Ignoring GG's actual gist that a revolving door between Wall Street and Treasury is arguably a bad thing in and of itself allows Megan to act all mystified. The only ones who will be able to truly understand how Wall St and the Treasury Dept interact will be those alien archeologists from the end of AI. Megan isn't getting paid to acknowledge the realities of crony capitalism, so some things are just unknowable.

1 comment:

Chad said...

So on top of apparently not knowing much about the field she allegedly specializes in or anything about journalistic ethics or professionalism as a paid writer for a major publication, we can add that Megan doesn't know or care when she's clearly out of her league.