In which Glenn Greenwald mercilessly destroys Jay Nordlinger

Yes yes, I know I should do something Russia-related, and I will soon, but this is just too good to pass up. My favorite blogger of the whole wide interwebs, Glenn Greenwald, just totally ruined the witless Jay Nordlinger. Greenwald, whose acid sarcasm, deep cynicism, and apparently limitless bile I truly admire and aspire to,  really made old Jay look like an idiot, revealing the fact-free puerility that is 99% of contemporary movement conservatism.

As I’ve written  before, Jay Nordlinger is one of the very worst “journalists” (if that’s even the right word) in America today. A rank propagandist, he is obsessed with victimology, with arguing that everyone has it out for those friendly, decent, honest, and goodhearted conservatives who want nothing more than to bring univerrsal peace and happiness to all mankind. It’s still unclear to me whether he is deliberately myopic or just really dumb, but the end result is exactly the same: without fail, he omits giant gaping chunks of the world that contradict his personal “beliefs.”*

 In this particular case Nordlinger was engaging in a moralized hissy fit about the treatment of Gilad Shalit, suggesting that if a citizen of any other nation besides Israel was being held prisoner without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) there would be immediate worldwide condemnation. Nordlinger forgot the very small and inconvenient detail that the United States has detained, and continues to detain, hundreds of “terrorists” in various black sites without any access whatsoever to the ICRC.

This little episodes demonstrates clearly that, even as propaganda, National Review Online is just one big pile of fail. I mean how could someone who is paid to write professionally about US politics and foreign relations not know about its detainee policies? How could someone completely and totally ignore evidence which explicitly contradicts the exact point they are trying to make?

I could understand if Nordlinger tried to hackishly insist that when democratic governments detain people without access to the ICRC (and even without any charges at all!)  it’s pro-freedom, but when authoritarian governments detain people without access to the ICRC it’s anti-freedom and even ”evil.” Such as argument at least acknowledges real-world evidence, even if it does badly distort it. But that’s not what’s happening here and, by and large, what’s happening in the conservative movement as a whole. What Nordlinger did here was create a fantasy world that does not exist and then make a series of outraged claims based on it. Nordlinger, then, is not describing that boring little planet known as “earth” but a strange and unrecognizable world in which Gilad Shalit is literally the only human being held captive without access to the ICRC.

 This is sort of “thinking” is, of course, a normal human trait, and I’m sure the left has engaged in plenty of magical thinking all on its own. But at the present time it’s pretty clear that the conservative movement has just gone totally crackers, losing even the most elementary and basic grasp of reality.

* As best I can tell Nordlinger’s belief system is: “America can do whatever the f*** it wants and anyone who disagrees with this is Stalin.”