In 2005, Greenwald defended Tancredo against those calling him out for his racist views.
The interesting thing is that in the preface to his book, Greenwald explained why he dropped support of the Iraq war (http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023362984) and turned against Bush. Here he mentions launching his blog.
http://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm?fuseaction=printable&book_number=1812
The following two months he posted his views on "illegal" immigration and his defense of Tancredo.
The GOP fights itself on Illegal Immigration
<...>
The parade of evils caused by illegal immigration is widely known, and it gets worse every day. In short, illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone. Few people dispute this, and yet nothing is done.
A substantial part of the GOP base urgently wants Republicans, who now control the entire Federal Government, to take the lead in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. And yet the GOP, despite its unchallenged control, does virtually nothing, infuriating this sector of its party. The White House does worse than nothing; to the extent it acts on this issue at all, it is to introduce legislation designed to sanction and approve of illegal immigration through its “guest worker” program, a first cousin of all-out amnesty for illegal immigrants.
GOP inaction when it comes to illegal immigration is at once mystifying and easily explainable. There is a wing of the party – the Wall St. Journal/multinational corporation wing – which loves illegal immigration because of its use as a source of cheap labor. And while that wing of the party is important because of the financial support it provides, it is a distinct minority when it comes to electoral power.
<...>
But one of the most disturbing and destructive aspects of illegal immigration is that it is illegal. Indeed, that is the precise attribute which separates good immigration from bad immigration. Why should Republicans, or anyone, shy away from pointing out that illegal immigration, among its many evils, is “illegal”? That is just absurd. Moreover, it is precisely the fact that illegal immigrants enter the country illegally that spawns justifiable resentment, not only among large clusters of middle-of-the-road voters, but also among the very legal immigrant population about which Sanchez is so concerned. Emphasizing the "illegal" part of this problem is what Republicans need to do more of, not less.
- more -
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/gop-fights-itself-on-illegal.html
Yelling "racist" as an "argument" in the immigration debate
All in a single one-line post, Oliver Willis manages to perfectly illustrate the cheapest, most intellectually dishonest -- and, for those who wield it in the immigration debate, the most self-destructive -- form of argumentation.
Willis references a post by Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly, which quotes a letter from anti-illegal-immigration Congressman Tom Tancredo to his supporters in which Rep. Tancredo asks for help in what Tancredo calls the "struggle to preserve our national identity against the tide of illegal immigrants flooding the United States." In response to Tancredo’s letter, Willis snidely writes:
Hey, Tom Tancredo . . . Just say "white power" and get it off your chest.
So, there’s Willis' self-satisfied decree, in its vapid entirety. According to Willis (and many of Drum's commentators, if not Drum himself), anyone who believes that it’s important for a nation to be comprised of citizens who have at least some joint national allegiance and a minimal common foundation -- never mind a common language in which they can communicate with one another -- is a White Supremacist bigot.
Leave aside the political stupidity of labeling as bigots and racists a huge portion of the electorate which is becoming increasingly concerned about illegal immigration and which agrees with Tancredo’s sentiments. More important than the political self-destruction, Willis’ cheap name-calling -- a crude tactic wielded by many like him -- is substantively vacuous.
- more -
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/yelling-racist-as-argument-in.html
Tancredo was and still is a racist.
Former Congressman Tancredo to Address White Supremacists
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2012/06/19/former-congressman-tancredo-to-address-white-supremacists/
= new reply since forum marked as read
"Have You No Sense of Decency?"
Support free speech.
You should be tombstoned for that Van Damme video!
How could you do that to us?
OMG
Rather than face the domestic surveillance issue
Person A makes claim, X
Person B attacks person A
Therefore X is false
You said it not me.
I meant hypocrisy.
It's about your attitude and the point of your comment. Self-righteous, condescending and hypocritical (accusing someone else of "pretending to have moral values or principles"
My point was that it has nothing to do with it, just as Republicans being obstructionists and controlling congress has nothing to do with a lot of other failings of Obama yet it's always used as the excuse. Now smearing Greenwald is being used as an "excuse".
I should really stop posting after midnight.
and what is someone's real opinion. Sad but true.
Now go to bed.
And somehow your opinions manage to coincide with the interests of the CoC as you do it.... 
It's a great example of how certain threads appear to be focused on supporting the goals of the Chamber of Commerce, NSA contractors and other right wing operations.
And you thought you were exposing Greenwald with these smear tactics. Ironic, isn't it?
In fact they pay people to post exactly the kind of thing your posting.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/02/spy/all/
I know that you certainly aren't one of their paid disrupters and I would never accuse you of being one. It's still a very interesting coincidence that you and a few others manage to post several of these smear threads per day, though, isn't it?
Thankfully I have your threads to read.
And I've been reading your posts for awhile. Are you claiming that a lack of ignorance as to what the other side supports is a bad thing? That's downright incredible. Congratulations on coming up with that very novel argument.
But I believe you both know and care. I think you care very much. After all, we're all here because we care - for one purpose or another....
I read things that provide me with information. I search this information out from many sources instead of having it delivered to me in my email.
Anyway, you can have the last word for awhile since I have some other things to do. I'll kick your very useful thread later.
bless your heart, you keep trying.
RL
You really slipped in unnoticed.
Enjoy your stay.
Do you think it's normal to spend so much time coming up with a scheme to justify your obsession with my posts?
Yikes!
"Logical fallacy bingo!"
What the hell?
The end.
But you know that.
And that wasn't even the question, was it?
Can't win an argument honestly, hunh?
I never voted for George W. Bush — or for any of his political opponents. I believed that voting was not particularly important. Our country, it seemed to me, was essentially on the right track. Whether Democrats or Republicans held the White House or the majorities in Congress made only the most marginal difference. . . .
I firmly believed that our democratic system of government was sufficiently insulated from any real abuse, by our Constitution and by the checks and balances afforded by having three separate but equal branches of government. My primary political belief was that both parties were plagued by extremists who were equally dangerous and destructive, but that as long as neither extreme acquired real political power, our system would function smoothly and more or less tolerably. For that reason, although I always paid attention to political debates, I was never sufficiently moved to become engaged in the electoral process. I had great faith in the stability and resilience of the constitutional republic that the founders created.
When the Iraq War was debated and then commenced, I was not a writer. I was not a journalist. I was not politically engaged or active. I never played any role in political debates or controversies. Unlike the countless beloved Democrats who actually did support the war - including Obama's Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - I had no platform or role in politics of any kind.
I never once wrote in favor of the Iraq War or argued for it in any way, shape or form. Ask anyone who claims that I "supported" the Iraq War to point to a single instance where I ever supported or defended it in any way. There is no such instance. It's a pure fabrication.
At the time, I was basically a standard passive consumer of political news: I read The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic: the journals that I thought high-end consumers of news would read and which I assumed were generally reliable for getting the basic truth. What I explained in the Preface was that I had major objections to the Iraq war when it was being debated:
During the lead-up to the invasion, I was concerned that the hell-bent focus on invading Iraq was being driven by agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks. The overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak, particularly given that it would lead to an open-ended, incalculably costly, and intensely risky preemptive war. Around the same time, it was revealed that an invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein had been high on the agenda of various senior administration officials long before September 11.
Nonetheless, because of the general faith I had in political and media institutions, I assumed - since both political parties and media outlets and journalists from across the ideological spectrum were united in support of the war - that there must be some valid basis to the claim that Saddam posed a threat. My basic trust in these institutions neutralized the objections I had and led me to passively acquiesce to what was being done ("I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country."
.
Like many people, I became radicalized by those early years of the Bush administration. The Preface recounts that it was the 2002 due-process-free imprisonment of US citizen Jose Padilla and the 2003 Iraq War that caused me to realize the full extent of the government's radicalism and the media's malfeasance: "I developed, for the first time in my life, a sense of urgency about the need to take a stand for our country and its defining principles."
As I recount in the Preface, I stopped practicing law and pursued political writing precisely because those people who had an obligation to act as adversarial checks on the Bush administration during the start of the war on civil liberties and the run-up to the Iraq War - namely, Congress, courts, and the media - were profoundly failing to fulfill that obligation.
I wasn't a journalist or government official during these radical power abuses and the run-up to the Iraq War, and wasn't working in a profession supposedly devoted to serving as watchdog over government claims and abuses. I relied on those people to learn what was going on and to prevent extremism. But I quickly concluded that those who held those positions in politics and journalism were failing in their duties. Read the last six paragraphs of the Preface: I started writing about politics to bring light to these issues and to try to contribute to a real adversarial force against the Bush administration and its blind followers.
It is true that, like 90% of Americans, I did support the war in Afghanistan and, living in New York, believed the rhetoric about the threat of Islamic extremism: those were obvious mistakes. It's also true that one can legitimately criticize me for not having actively opposed the Iraq War at a time when many people were doing so. Martin Luther King, in his 1967 speech explaining why his activism against the Vietnam War was indispensable to his civil rights work, acknowledged that he had been too slow to pay attention to or oppose the war and that he thus felt obligated to work with particular vigor against it once he realized the need ("Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam"
.
- snip -
But anyone using this Preface to claim I was a "supporter" of the Iraq War is simply fabricating. At worst, I was guilty of apathy and passivity. I did nothing for or against it because I assumed that those in positions to exercise adversarial scrutiny - in journalism and politics - were doing that. It's precisely my realization of how profoundly deceitful and failed are American political and media institutions that motivated me to begin working on politics, and it's those realizations which continue to motivate me now.
"It's what people do when they cannot defend their positions. They attempt to change the subject."
...especially in a thread where the majority of the comments have nothing to do with the point in the OP. Most are attempts to shift the focus to me.
That repeating what someone says right after they say it is condescending and arrogant.
You aren't fooling anybody.
Oh, and NSA domestic surveillance still sucks.
I was too young to realize what I was doing.
Domestic NSA surveillance is STILL wrong, especially under a 'Democratic' president.
