Glenn Greenwald, Thomas Ellers, and Rick Ellensburg: The Three Most Hypocritical Men on the Planet
A suicide bomber apparently tried to kill Dick Cheney, and many commenters at the Huffington Post lamented his lack of success. The offending comments have been removed from the post in question, but you can read some of them here. Some examples include:
If at first you don’t succeed . . .
and:
Better luck next time!
and:
Dr. Evil escapes again . . . damn.
Glenn Greenwald is irate that conservative bloggers dared to take notice. Greenwald (also known as Thomas Ellers and Rick Ellensburg, among others) complains bitterly that conservative bloggers
went digging deep into the comment sections of various liberal blogs, found inappropriate and hateful comments, and then began insisting that these isolated comments proved something.
To the contrary, Greenwald insists, anonymous comments by hateful leftists prove nothing about the left generally. Nothing!
[T]he ideas and comments expressed by anonymous commenters at blogs prove nothing other than what those individuals think — particularly in the absence of an attempt to show that the commenters are representative of the blog itself. Is that really that difficult a concept to comprehend? To know what the views are of a particular blogger or “bloggers” generally, one can read those bloggers’ words.
But stray, anonymous comments prove nothing. And those who rely on them to make an argument — especially without bothering to make any effort to prove that they are reflective of anything — should be presumed to have no argument at all. That is why they are relying upon such transparently flimsy and misleading methods to make a point.
If your mouth is agape at the shameless hypocrisy of this, then you must be familiar with Greenwald.
These comments are staggeringly hypocritical, viewed in the light of Greenwald’s extensive history of spotlighting anonymous comments at conservative blogs to reach broad-brush conclusions about the entire conservative movement. Greenwald is a prime practitioner of this “transparently flimsy and misleading method” of tarring the other side. And, in marked contrast to Greenwald’s tender concern today for whether ugly leftist comments “are representative of the blog itself,” Greenwald is famous in conservative circles for highlighting extreme comments on conservative blogs — comments that in no way represent the views of the posts to which they are responding, or of the bloggers generally.