General Discussion

Greenwald on his old positions(and there's a link to this in the blog post, so people omitting it are being intentionally deceptive):

That was a 6 yrs ago: 3 weeks after I began blogging, when I had zero readers. I've discussed many times before how there were many uninformed things I believed back then, before I focused on politics full-time - due to uncritically ingesting conventional wisdom, propaganda, etc. I've written many times since then about how immigrants are exploited by the Right for fear-mongering purposes. I'm 100% in favor of amnesty, think defeat of the DREAM Act was an act of evil, etc. That said, I do think illegal immigration is a serious problem: having millions of people live without legal rights; having a legal scheme that is so pervasively disregarded breeds contempt for the rule of law; virtually every country - not just the U.S. insists on border control because having a manageable immigration process is vital on multiple levels. But that post is something I wrote literally a few weeks after I began blogging when nobody was reading my blog; it was anything but thoughtful, contemplative, and informed, and - like so many things I thought were true then - has nothing to do with what I believe now.

(And I thought Greenwald was awful because he always thinks he’s right and never admits mistakes…)

The funny thing is, I went back and looked at DU threads mentioned Greenwald between ’04 and ’08 (went through the first two pages of results). I didn’t find anyone criticizing him or calling him a libertarian at the time, most of the comments about him were praising him. It’s funny that he’s gotten more criticism for these positions after he stopped believing in them then he did when he believed in them.

Oh, the truncation you made here is also quite telling:

I'm also in favor of reeling in the painfully overbroad Commerce Clause, which more than anything else has enabled the Federal Government to stick its claws in things which were clearly intended to be reserved for the states

Full quote:

I'm also in favor of reeling in the painfully overbroad Commerce Clause, which more than anything else has enabled the Federal Government to stick its claws in things which were clearly intended to be reserved for the states (nobody speaks on that issue more powerfully, by the way, than former Vt. Governor and fervent States Rights proponent Howard Dean).

Huh, why would anyone cut off the very end of that sentence?