Unfinished CBS Greenwald Post

I’m not even sure what my original point was, but I had only meant to write a short little post.  It was Sunday morning and Glenn Greenwald (once again) wrote something that I needed to comment on.  Well I never got around to writing that, but wrote a bunch more about something else in the post, and now it’s late Sunday night (technically, Monday morning) and I figure this is the last shot I’ve really got at posting this material.  It’s not finished.  I’m not even sure if I like it.  It needed a bunch more to be done, but I quit writing when I realized how much more it would be and how the payoff was so little.  So I quit.  But here it is anyway, another unfinished post.


And on another point regarding his stuff on the CBS-Bush National Guard documents, is that the wingnuts weren’t even really right about that one.  Because they didn’t just leave it with the idea that the documents were forged (a theory that is still unproven).  No, they pressed-on ahead and were not only certain that CBS and Dan Rather knew the documents were forgeries, but that they were responsible for creating them themselves.  And that the reason why they did all this was because they’re flaming liberals involved in a giant plot to screw Bush.  This wasn’t just a story about a news crew getting suckered into a false story; this was a conspiracy.  They were convinced of this.  CBS was trying to rig a presidential election, and the wingnuts needed to save democracy from this all too obvious attack.  How heroic.

And that’s what they always do.  Their idea of “investigation” involves an intricate game of leapfrog, where each wingnut takes turns straining the truth out of the previous wingnut’s speculation.  And when all the dust settles and the truth is known, they look back through their mental archives and try to match the truth with some earlier statement they had made, so they can continue to claim victory over the truth.  And even still, they never really get a good look at the truth anyway.  I’m not sure if they still think CBS was trying to throw the election to Kerry, but they have long since declared victory on this one and refuse to look back.

And the problem is that conservatives are usually Big Picture analyst type people, and not detail-oriented fact diggers.  That’s how they got suckered into being conservatives in the first place: It has a great storyline and many of the facts can be known to fit.  The only problem is that they’re craptacularly bad at uncovering facts and are entirely dependent on whomever they trust to give them those facts.  And so garbage in, garbage out.  They’re fed crap, digest it for awhile, and pump out even worse crap; which is then fed to someone else for further treatment.  

I went on to write about how many liberal bloggers (myself included, as well as Digby, Publius, and Greenwald) are also analyst-types who don’t specialize in new information, but rather put perspective on what’s already known.  But then it got complicated.  But I betcha that most of these types were once conservatives or Republicans (including myself), before we finally were overwhelmed by truths that didn’t fit into the Republican/conservative picture, and were forced to switch sides to a model of the universe that works much better.  But again, this part got really complicated and speculative, and so I just quit writing.  So I’ll just end it now.