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Chuck Todd vs. Glenn Greenwald tonight: place your bets
Chuck Todd, White House correspondent for NBC, has agreed to a debate with Glenn Greenwald, prompted by Todd's opinion that investigating torture is "dangerous" and amounts to no more than "cable catnip" that should be ignored and would get in the way of health care reform and economic efforts.
Listened the confrontation this evening in Greenwald's website:http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/15/todd/index.html
UPDATE: The debate has been postponted until tomorrow by 9 a.m.
Listened the confrontation this evening in Greenwald's website:http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/15/todd/index.html
UPDATE: The debate has been postponted until tomorrow by 9 a.m.
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Great. Shrill certainty vs. disdainful Villager CW. Certain to be a thoughtful, productive and respectful exchange of viewpoints.
July 15, 2009 2:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
In other words, you're gonna watch it, right? ;-)
July 15, 2009 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ummm, er, yes, dang it, I'll be watching it.
If nothing else, Todd is going to be so vastly outmatched in the brains and reasoning ability department, and is so certain to be smugly certain he's coming in with the upper hand, it ought to be entertaining in a ghoulish spectator at the gladitorial arena kind of way.
July 15, 2009 3:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
hahahahaha!!! Completely agree and thank you for the best laugh I've had today! "...ghoulish spectator at the gladitorial arena kind of way." Brilliant!
July 15, 2009 3:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Problem is, Todd isn't really smart enough to realize how overmatched he is, won't realize that he has lost, and will probably do a victory lap after his overwhelming defeat.
The man is an embarrassment to himself and MSNBC. I cringe every time Keith has him on.
July 15, 2009 10:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is hilarious. I remember during the primaries, TPMers would quote Chuck Todd constantly.
In other words, when he was saying something pro-Obama, he was The Oracle around here.
Remember that, truthseeker?
July 15, 2009 11:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
And another. They're everywhere.
Of course, Todd occasionally veered off-script. Bad Chuck.
July 15, 2009 11:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, ready. I remember that. Even Peggy Noonan was kind of cool back then for the same reason.
July 15, 2009 11:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, it was Noonan morning, noon, and night in the reader blogs because of her thrillingly sexist comments about Hillary. Noonan never hesitated to stoop to the level Obama supporters wanted to go themselves.
I'd offer links to the wayback machine, but I got sick to my stomach rereading those Noonan threads. Makes me wonder why Noonan hates women so much.
Going to take a shower now.
July 16, 2009 12:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're mostly full of shit on this. what most people were praising Todd for was his rational crunching of the electoral numbers in face of all the pro-Clinton shrieking that was going on once it was clear she was going to lose, and yet insisted on going forward because all those "hard-working, white Americans" needed representation too.
Oh, and you never know, Obama might get shot or something, like Robert Kennedy did.
But, can we all agree, that now he's gone from electoral vote-counter to White House correspondent, he's just as reliant on the twice (or is it thrice) chewed, Republican-slanted conventional wisdom as the man he replaced, the utterly vapid David Gregory?
July 16, 2009 10:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Greenwald is not shrill at all. He is as calm and reasoned and rational a voice as there is on the net or anywhere else. He is certainly far more rational and logical than almost everyone in the corporate media.
July 15, 2009 11:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
oleeb, although I rarely find myself in disagreement with Greenwald, I usually have to lie down after reading (or slogging through) one of his posts. "Calm" does not describe his writing style. He's appropriately outraged much of the time, but I think there's a way to communicate the outrage without the overheated rhetoric. Digby does a great job of this, for example, substituting snark for the "outrage on boil over" setting. But she and her colleagues do manage to get the point across.
I also frequently think that Greenwald could get his points across, and more effectively, with, shall we say, fewer words.
July 16, 2009 1:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Completely agree. Like other lawyers I've known, Greenwald treats every communication like a legal brief (a misnamed document type, since they're usually anything but brief!), and while I admire his thoroughness, it doesn't make for compelling reading. His posts are often too long-winded to even skim, which means that though I very often agree with him, I rarely actually read him.
July 16, 2009 11:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
IMO having Chuck Todd, Chris Mathews and their ilk drawn like moths to the flame of torture prosecutions and spending 24/7 on that for months is better than having them put Republicans on teevee to whine or whining themselves about the lack of bipartisanship. While I don't always agree with Greenwald he serves a useful purpose, letting the villagers know in no uncertain terms just how out of touch they are.
July 15, 2009 3:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Honestly, my only rap on Greenwald is that he suffers from more than a touch of Krugman Syndrome--he's been right so often about so many things that he has come to believe with great certainty that he's always right about everything.
As opposed to me and most of the rest us here in TPM Commentland who believe with great certainty that we're always right about everything without much regard to whether we've ever been right about anything in the past.
July 15, 2009 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right. Don't let it go to your head.
July 15, 2009 3:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Remind me to quote you on that. Probably in response to, oh, I don't know, a post sort of like this one, or maybe this one.
July 16, 2009 12:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Have you noticed that Greenwald critics all sounds the same? "He thinks he's always right," they say, without providing examples other than a vague accusation.
How many times has Greenwald denied being wrong despite being proved wrong?
They don't say.
July 15, 2009 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, how about this for a slightly different criticism. Even when he's basically, at least some level, right, he can be a shrill, drama queen whose point gets lost in the glare of his own incandescent self-rightousness. He never seems to acknowledge that, most of the time, governing is not about choosing between good and evil but, rather, about making a judgment call--usually with insufficient information--about which evil will ultimately be the lesser.
But granted its a matter of perspective. If you think he's already right, you're not likely to be pursuaded by any examples I might point to as times when he was wrong.
July 15, 2009 9:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Translation of what NCSteve really means:
He(Greenwald) criticizes Obama when he thinks he is wrong and doesn't make excuses for his political flip flops and hypocrisy therefore " hecan be a shrill, drama queen whose point gets lost in the glare of his own incandescent self-rightousness."
Or is it the unwelcome, harsh light of reality and truth Greenwald introduces into the debate? I wonder...
July 15, 2009 11:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed on the shrill and the drama queen. Not to mention Greenwald's terminal case Too Many Words Syndrome. See my reply to oleeb upthread.
You, on the other hand, have also shown not a few instances of smug certainty whose factual basis is, shall we say, a bit lacking. And I can't seem to recall an instance of your actually admitting being wrong either.
Your present comment is a case in point. You've just somehow magically read the minds of several people on this board, and, with your magical powers, discovered that we are so convinced of Greenwald's perpetual correctness, so blinded by Greenwaldesque ideology, so completely in his thrall, that we couldn't possibly be persuaded by any contrary evidence. that, of course, conveniently spares you the messy problem of having to, you know, produce any.
July 16, 2009 1:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Todd deserves a smackdown, Greenwald is far more erudite, and "smackdown" is one of his specialities. I can't wait!
July 15, 2009 4:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Todd is usually fairly levelheaded but on this he is off base for sure.
July 15, 2009 5:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dang it! Postponed 'till morning. I had my popcorn ready and everything...
July 15, 2009 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well then its time for JELLO SHOTS
July 15, 2009 9:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
In defense of Chuck Todd, I would say that it IS a slippery slope for Obama to take these prosecutions. I would posit that it is terribly naive to believe that consume DC with prosecutions would adversely impact reforms in health care, energy, foreign policy, etc. It is difficult enough getting the Dems to be centerists on these issues, let alone progressive, that to have a soft-on-terror drumbeat being leveled through the cable would just about kill any chance at what little we might achieve otherwise.
Obama realizes that there is a cost of doing the right thing, and inside the beltway, in his first year no less, there are just so many right things one can do. He has made a choice. Chuck Todd might be taking a side in judging that what Obama has chosen to go for, and what he has chosen to leave alone, is right, but if he was to criticize Obama he would be taking a side as well.
The only criticism of Todd that I see is that he doesn't fully spell out what is being left alone, ie the deaths that resulted from the torture. That in and of itself seems to say it all. And there were those that criticized Mandala for letting murderers go in the interest of moving SA forward. Nothing in this world, nothing that matters, is cut and dry.
July 16, 2009 12:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is there an opening line in Vegas?
July 16, 2009 3:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
We will never get this nation back on track unless we examine the irregularities that have occurred.
In times of calm when we are able to examine things in a rational way and develop rational processes to address emergencies, we cannot deviate from those rational processes when the inevitable emergency arises.
If we do we violate all manner of well understood ideas that we know with a high degree of certainty will introduce the very irrational conduct we sought to avoid.
July 16, 2009 7:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Chuck Todd possess more moxey than brains. He's not afraid to take on a subject that he clearly knows nothing about and has demonstrated this on numerous ocassions, since becoming White House correspondent. In fact, getting the gig was suppose to be an excerise in increasing his knowledge and experience level. Greenwald will make mints meat out of Todd, regardless of the subject.
July 16, 2009 10:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
OK I just listened to Chuck's blather. He clearly supports the rule of political expediency over the rule of law. Greenwald makes him sound silly and uninformed. Then again I think most of us could make Chuck Todd sound silly and uninformed at least on this topic...
July 16, 2009 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink