Michael O'Hanlon "Responds" to the Unserious Glenn Greenwald
By SilentPatriot Monday Aug 13, 2007 6:30pmOn Tom Ashbrook's radio program today, Brookings Institute "scholar" and "fierce war opponent" Michael O'Hanlon responds to a caller's question about Glenn Greenwald's column exposing his fraud of a trip to Iraq, organized and supervised entirely by the US Military.
OHanlon: "Well, I don't have high regard for the kind of journalism that Mr. Greenwald has carried out here.
"I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time rebutting Mr. Greenwald because he's had frankly more time and more readership than he deserves."
These people just don't get it. If you ride the US Military "dog and pony show," of course there is going to be a semblance of "progress": You're traveling only to places pre-approved by the Pentagon -- with John McCain-esque military protection -- and meeting with commanders; not the Iraqi people. Try embedding yourself outside the Green Zone (ya know, 99.9% of Iraq) and tell me how well things are going.
Not too well, I see.
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Hello.
They really are losing their grip on reality, aren't they?
Dear Michael O'Hacklon,
Armstrong Williams wants his job back, the one that you are currently occupying.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-20-williams_x.htm
Also, Maggie Gallagher is kind of a little steamed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_Gallagher
Anyway, there never seems to be a shortage of your special brand of treasonous frauds running around.
Enjoy the ride while it lasts.
O'Hanlon's credibility = 0
Glen Greenwald's credibility = priceless
I'm going to watch Idiocracy again tonight. It is one of my favorite movies of all time.
It accurately describes what we are going through right now,
the idification of America.
Good bye to language and thought processes as you know them.
Of course O'Hanlon refuses to address Greenwald's criticism. He can't refute it, so why should he bother.
(message to O'Hanlon:)
Oh my goodness Mr. O'Hanlon, so sorry the caviar was not up to your supreme standards. We'll have the beluga beaten immediately.
G2 referenced O'Hanlon's QUOTES to make his case. Back on Planet Earth it's called 'journalism'. O'Hanlon could aquaint himself with it if he can spare the time.
Incredible.
Translation:
"Everything you say is right. I have no respect for your kind of journalism."
Greenwald has always been meticulous in putting together and supporting his arguments. Sometimes he even gets a little too detailed for the typical daily column, but that's what makes him one of the best.
He also doesn't ignore or disparage facts or data just because it doesn't fit his preconceived ideas. That's the mark of a
O'Hanlonhack.He disrespects Glenn Grunwald because he has no answers for his criticisms. When you can't win on ideas, attack the person presenting them.
That's Greenwald not Grunwald. Grunwald GMed the Raptors. Whoopsies! :P
Oh, who made Mr. O’Hanlon god's gift to journalism??
I didn't even know who the fuck O’Hanlon was before his bullshit circus. I knew Greenwald and O'Handjob didn't even refute his argument...just like a wingnut. I guess he's learning from his newly found wingnut friends.
a lot like pharmica's "experts" and think tank people supposedly clearing up the autism-vaccine issue toeing the dog and pony show from the FDA
autism - coming to a kid near you
Snowball @ 6:
Yeah, but he will say that he's too "serious" to deal with Greenwald and his "type of journalism". What the hell did that mean? Greenwald linked in his article to the transcript of the entire interview. How was he possibly less than fair to O'Hanlon?
Note, in Greenwald's article, O'Hanlon admits that he was never a vocal critic of the war and that Dick Cheney and others were being disingenuous when they said he was.
two words for you o'hanlon: fuck you (sorry for the language C&L)
glenn greenwald is a true patriot, working to ensure the continued viability of our ever-so fragile democracy. and, ohanlon? nothing but a blowhard caught in inaccuracies and, like armstrong williams and gannon/guckert, a tool of the administration. the question i have for o'hanlon is just how much money it took for you to sacrifice your integrity.
good job mikey, you have done serious damage to the brookings institute. from now on any 'finding' or opinion stemming from this now-compromised "think" tank will be followed by an asterisk, saying: beware, some brookings fellows spew govt propaganda and try to pass it off as independent conclusions.
brookings, lose this charlatan, he is dead weight.
AEI, looky! a shiny nickel!!
People with rational arguments get too much press. It's time to let the other side have a platform for their irrational ideas.
Be nice to see where Bill Kristol was during his 8 day trip. I'm sure he was on the front lines talking/embedding with random squads and getting the feel of things...without being a parrot for some neocon captain america stooge.
Of course he's not going to respond. As C&L's earlier post said so well. He's been exposed as nothing but a shill and so he'll go with the std Repuke talking point. Attack your adversary by accusing him of the behavior YOU are most guilty of. He won't respond to the caller because he HAS no response.
Another thing about O'Hanlon, is he seems to base his whole assessment of Bush's escalation (not "Surge") on a one month slight dip in US and Iraqi casualties that still outpaced pre-escalation numbers. As we can see just a few threads down, those Iraqi deaths are back up again. Where's the progress?
"I'm not the interesting story here. Whether or not I pimp myself to every propaganda forum under the guise of a "war critic" in hopes of lending credibility to an op-ed that has been used a myriad of times to justify prolonging this clusterfuck is completely insignificant and it's a waste of time talking about it. Let's talk about policy."
cg @ 20:
sweet.
and his employer: the pimping institute
Just when we thought it was dead, journalism saves the day via glenn greenwald. the other guys, what a putz, go enlist if you think it's so important. but those suits won't be the standard issue, and don't forget to buy some body armour, that's not included in the army of one
BTW, Brookings is not a Liberal think tank, it claims to be non-partisan and has often been run by Republicans. That doesn't stop its numerous fellows from filling in the rigidly enforced gap left by the absence of Liberal and Left opinion from the corporate controlled broadcast spectrum. It's all about limiting the terms of the debate to a narrow spectrum from right to hard right.
Well it’s good to see he cleared that up in a way that makes sense and is understandable and convincing. And he’s a journalist? I guess he will be sticking to O’Reilly and Johnny boy Gibson.
His 15 minutes is up. Bye.
Any time you dismiss someone out of hand there's a problem. Glenn destroyed Mike's gravy train. Either he had to admit that the whole permis of his article was a fraud or try to discredit Glenn.
Glenn has proven himself with 2 books and over 400 posts.
I heard the interview, and I almost gasped re: O'Hanlon's comments on Greenwald. They were very unprofessional.
On the whole, I have found Mr. Greenwald's analyses on Iraq very insightful and I make a point to read him often. As a result of O'Hanlon's comments, Mr. O'Hanlon has damaged his own credibility. If he is wrong about Greenwald, who can trust him regarding Iraq?
O'Hanlon: "Who are you gonna believe, me or that lying piece of shit Michael O'Hanlon?"
Well, he was telling the truth, wasn't he? He *doesn't * have much regard for REAL journalism!
O'Hanlon has has his ass O'Handed to him by Glenn. He is so screwed, of course he doesn't what to rebut Glenn's today take down. There is not way to rebut it. What a total a$$wad.
On the Daily Show, Kristol was trying to do a little soft-shoe tap dance by playing up O’Hanlon’s article to Jon Stewart. I think that was the strategy all along — send Kristol to guide a couple of lap dog reporters whom they could portray as critical of the war. Kristol again failed to disclose that he was there the same time O'Hanlon was there and whether or not they were travelling together.
Attack the messenger. You just lost your case, O'Hanlon, right on the heels of your *cough* credibility.
Right.Berate and insult Greenwald rather than address his thoughtful and intelligent criticism of your phony trip to Iraq.
What you lack in substance O'Hanlon,you more than make up for in chutzpah.Get over yourself.
O'Hanlon must be feeling a little bit guilty, he now realizes that he may have been co-opted,
not a comfortable place to be.
Biggus Diggus @ 31:
I just saw that too from last night's program that I TiVo'd. Kristol stated that O'Hanlon was a "war critic". Jon Stewart, unlike our mind-numbingly ill-informed press, responded right away that these guys were not critics, and that they were war hawks. He mentioned that Pollack had actually advocated bombing Iran, and Kristol backed down from saying that they were war critics.
Do we really only have two people on national TV, Jon Stewart, and Keith Olbermann, that do their homework and understand the issues when confronting the lies from these neo-conservatives? The people like Kristol get away with their propaganda totally unchallenged by the main-stream media, because of MSM ignorance and/or laziness.
"Mark in Ashton, Massachusetts" is obviously a much better journalist than Tom Ashbrook. They should hire him and fire Ashbrook!
"I'm not going to respond" = a non-denial something. The truth is hard to respond to, when you're lying through your ass. That's alright. We all know how republicans hate the truth. It is anethema to them. Like garlic to a vampire or a holy cross that would expose their evil by burning them, it exposes their evil black hearts to the world and they cannot hide their hideous, horrible existence. The suck the life blood out of our democracy with their lies.
"War critics", right. If they were any further up Bush's ass, the doctors wouldn't have needed camera's to find his pollips. They could've just asked these two sh*t heads.
Snowball @ 19:
I wish I could give credit to the person that pointed this out, but U.S. and Iraqi casualties always go down in July and August due to the heat and the lack of activity on the streets. This person showed how this past July's death total was down compared to earlier months this year. That might indicate that the surge was working. However, he also showed that when you compare July from year-to-year, July 2007 had more deaths than July of 2006, July of 2005, and July of 2004.
It's funny, when Republicans want to see the real trend of a corporation's earnings, they compare the same month in previous years. When it is the death toll in Iraq, they see fit to compare one month to earlier months in the year, and are happy to draw the wrong conclusions.
O'Hanlon isn't even worthy of lifting Greenwald's pen. Some "scholar" he is! When Bill Kristol tried to raise O'Hanlon and Pollack's dog-and-pony-show report with Jon Stewart, Stewart brushed it aside with remarks clearly gleaned from Greenwald's expose and Kristol immediately dropped their mention. Greenwald, by doing what the mainstream media should have done, provided ammunition to deflate this attempt by the neo-cons to manage the news.
"Do we really only have two people on national TV, Jon Stewart, and Keith Olbermann, that do their homework and understand the issues when confronting the lies from these neo-conservatives?"
It sure looks that way. The print mainstream media is hardly any better. They too swallowed the disinformation without any question or probing. How pathetic!
The reaction by O'Hanlon on NPR at the mention of Greenwald's name was anger and agitation. As we say down here, "the bit dog hollers."
The fact that O'Hanlon refuses to respond to the questions and launches an ad hominem attack on Greenwald says it all. What a turd.
Mr. O'Hanlon: Greenwald merely reviewed what you wrote. Greenwalk didn't make anything up. He quoted you. You skewered you.
wmholt @ 35:
The MSM is not ignorant or lazy. They are bought and paid for. What we are seeing in American "journalism" today, if you can call what you see and read on TV news, cable news, and a significant number of papers journalism, is why the consolidation of media is so incredibly dangerous. The fourth estate was given tremendous leeway in this country at its founding to allow it to be free, and also, more importantly, confrontational with politicians and other public figures while remaining protected during such confrontations.
Right now, our journalists must toe the company line, or face getting fired.
Right now, a small group of individuals own the vast majority of our media outlets, outside of this wonderful refuge called in internet. Murdoch is contemplating additional media consolidation, after somehow skirting anti-trust laws and oversight to acquire the WSJ.
Right now, even when it is verifiably the truth, if a stance is remotely liberal, progressive, sympathetic to the plight of the poor, or legitimately confronts one of the "big" businesses (Big Food, Big Pharma, Insurance, the Media Giants themselves, etc), the lede is often buried at the end of the story, while the bulk of the story presents a quite different picture from the very facts presented in the self-same article. You've seen such articles before, "Oh, yes, the great and helpful pharmaceutical industry has done all of this awesome stuff for us. . Unfortunately, our great and glorious drug dealers have a lot on their plates, and sometimes miss stuff. Occasionally, they have to recall drugs previously forced through the FDA due to "unforeseen" side-effects. Aren't they great for recalling this pill, and replacing it with a new one? Oh yeah, one more thing (and this sentence would normally be the lede), this drug was the direct cause of death of 84,500 people last year alone. Thanks for reading." That, or it is surrounded by wave after wave of "human interest stories", or celebrity gossip. In other words, real news is surrounded by fluff rather than more news.
It is vile, and it is disgusting. If you've ever wondered, this is what it looks like when the press has been compromised. This is what it looks like when information is being controlled by a handful of individuals with ulterior motives.
No, the press are not incompetent or lazy. They are afraid of losing their jobs because they are doing their jobs. You should never, ever be afraid to lose your job for being too competent at it.
If the MSM starting telling the truth, no one would believe them. Everything is getting better in Iraq, if we leave now . . . . . . wait a minute . . . . the boner pill band commercial "viva viagra" is on . . . I'll be right back . . . .what were we talking about?
I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time rebutting Mr. O'Hanlon because he’s had frankly more time and more readership than he deserves.
[...] had frankly more time and more readership than he deserves.” Crooks and Liars has the audio. 11:00 pm | [...]
So who bought the Bushist fascist framing of these dudes as "fierce war critics"?
Say, would that be the Bushist fascist pseudo-librul media whore media organ, The New York Times?
The same New York Times that bought and spread around Judy Judy Judy's Rovewellian pre-Iraq debacle disinformation?
Hmm. Makes one think.
tell me something: why do americans call themselves "experts" of countries they've never lived in for more than a few months and for countries where they do not even speak the local dialect (pollack, the self-described middle east expert, has never lived in that part of the world and does not speak arabic!)
READING BOOKS IN A LIBRARY WILL NOT TURN YOU INTO AN EXPERT OF ANY KIND. YOU NEED REAL WORLD, HANDS ON EXPERIENCE!
academics need to stop overrating themselves. if they were that good, they wouldnt be stuck teaching AND DOING OTHER SILLY NON-PRACTICAL THINGS
What is wrong with you people? Don't you realize that the reputation of a "serious" beltway pundit is much more important then either the truth or a terrible war?
Glenn destroyed O'Hanlon. He should never be seen or heard in public again
it is like oreilly saying I dont have respect for greenwald journalism. the man asks some serious questions . it only shows ohanlon doesnt have guts to face or his op ed was ghost written.
Cudos to Mark in Mass. What a great call. People like Mark expose these Lying bastards for what they are. (liars) They can't answer a real question. Sad but true.
Funny moments-- he talked about Serious discussion. Twice.
Second, he advocates a "debate".
But not with Glenn. Who is not Serious.
I don't think I would claim to be "liberal" if I couldn't get a few generally recognized liberals, like Howard Dean, Al Franken, Kos, Digby, Huffington, Greenwald, Hamsher, etc, to agree with that self-assessment. Can O'Hanlon get any of these people to vouch for him?
Didn't think so. In fact, I think most of these people would agree with me that O'Hanlon and such as him are actually planted by the right wing as a false flag strategy to confuse the American public. There are no liberal think tanks, because liberals don't fund them. That scam used to work pretty well, but not so well anymore, now that the blogs keep busting their bogus act over and over and over. Hi, Harold Ford. Hi, Joe Biden. Hi, Chuck Schumer.
That's why so many fake Democrats are in the middle of their last terms. Some of them don't appear to realize it, but the jig is up. We see through the act. The mask is removed, and what's underneath is pretty damned ugly. A few may still sneak by, but all the Blue Dogs are kaput, and the DLC types are exposed as just a bunch of Republicans.
jimbo92107 @ 55:
Institute for Policy Studies
Economic Policy Institute
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Urban Institute
Center for Public Integrity
All progressive or centrist/left. They just aren't quote in the MSM like Heritage (Reich) or Brookings (centrist)
In totally dismissing the callers question, O'Hanlon basically deemed the way he gathered his information to be irrelevant to the information he presented. I have a feeling Greenwald will have something to say about that.
Kristol was on the daily show LAST NIGHT touting this asshole's crap. Tell me again how we go from 30% fewer civilian casualties as progress to "the surge is working"? They got you now and now you are too ashamed to admit they FOOLED you.
STOOGE.
Yeah, who has time for the truth? What a tool. He's completely wrong, and a fraud, so he makes a personal attack. Just another neocon, albeit a slightly more liberal one.
so, just so i can grasp what's going on here-- every single inch of iraq is in complete and utter chaos, and you want people to see it from the iraq people's point of view. yet you want the troops out of the country so they can endure it alone. go figure.
academics need to stop overrating themselves. if they were that good, they wouldnt be stuck teaching AND DOING OTHER SILLY NON-PRACTICAL THINGS
You're an idiot who clearly has no idea of what real academics do, and how the academy works. Most real academics do have true expertise in a particular subject area - it's kind of a prerequisite for tenure at most institutions. And if you knew anything at all about the history of science, you'd understand that the results of so-called "non-practical" research often proves to be critical in unpredictable ways later on, as a base for more applied (or "practical") research and development.
The mistake you are making is conflating shills like O'Hanlon - and anyone who works at a think tank - with real academics. It could be argued that O'Hanlon and his ilk are "scholars," under a broad and watered-down definition of the word; the key difference is that think-tank "scholars" are far more likely to conduct their "scholarship" in the service of a predetermined conclusion than are the vast majority of working academics in this country (and no, I'm not one of them).
To call people like O'Hanlon or the AEI or Brookings crowds "scholars" or "academics" is a slap in the face to real scholars and academics around the world.
As for your assertion that teaching is a "silly non-practical thing" . . . well, it seems to have been exactly that was when it was applied to you.
O'Hanlon's a pouty little fuck, isn't he?
Actually civilian death counts are up. Only because their corpses aren't found with the wrists bound, are they saying sectarian killings are down.
The most damning things in Greenwald's excellent piece were O'Hanlon's own answers to questions. How can that be a problem with journalism. O'Hanlon simply doesn't like journalism that does what journalism is supposed to do: ask tough questions and demand real answers.
OHanlon: “Well, I don’t have high regard for the kind of journalism that Mr. Greenwald has carried out here.
WE DO!!!!! And it's gonna crush your bullshit, two days of fawn is all you got this time dude, this would have lasted two weeks 3 years ago!!!
MSM, you better wake up!!!
Come on. They get it. They're paid to get it, in just this particular manner. What he didn't apparently get is what Greenwald is all about. Now he does and so must deploy the standard response when a propagandist runs into a journalist--"This guy is f-ing nuts! LOL! Next question!"
Michael O’Hanlon “Responds” to the Unserious Glenn Greenwald
I dunno, sounds kind of sexual to me.
His response is simply the cowards version of "I don't have a response for how he skewered me using nothing more than the truth"
Wow. He actually played the "serious" card (twice). Gosh, I love it when war supporters talk about "opportunity costs" -- it's so warm and inviting.
What's more "serious" than accurately representing what's going on, and in this case, honestly describing their lack of access and that this was all planned out by the military?
O'Hanlon got some points from me for agreeing to an interview with Greenwald and 'fessing up. He lost them all, and then some, here.
I rarely miss - even if sometimes only a quick read - Glenn Greenwald's posts. They are piercing, devastating and disturbingly documented. He will be viewed historically as a major source of dissonance in the blanket propaganda Americans are now subjected to. The internet is the major tool that democracy here has left. I truly believe that Greenwald will be seen as one of America's greatest heroes; that is if it's still standing when the dust settles. For me, he's an example of the type of humanity we can hope to be at our best and regardless of what happens, his courage will always inspire me.
I feel sorry for O'Hanlon. If you read the whole text of his interview with Greenwald, you realize a) he's probably a fundamentally decent human being, if not the sharpest knife in the drawer, b) he is internally conflicted, and having a lot of trouble accepting the increasingly clear evidence that this lying administration, and even long-time friends in the Pentagon, have played him for a sucker. What he does clearly realize is c) that Greenwald, armed only with the facts and without any ad hominem malice, has in fact destroyed his credibility utterly and forever.
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