Subsequently, Andrew published several of his readers’ favorable reactions to the renegade lefty. Glenn Greenwald decided to chastise those Sullivan readers — and then the readers (predictably) punched back.
I’m highlighting this back-and-forth because it’s much more than a petty squabble; there’s substance to it. And yes, I’m scoring this one for Sullivan’s readers, for two reasons: First, I happen to agree with them. Second, I’ve long been inclined to root for the (perceived) underdogs.
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UPDATE: The consensus among the early commenters to this post seems to be that, as one of them wrote, the post’s headline is “completely backwards”, i.e., it was Glenn Greenwald who schooled the amateur pundits, not the other way around.
In making that claim, these commenters seem to focus, in whole or in part, on the following aspects of Glenn’s argument:
What’s most striking about these valiant defenses of Obama is how utterly devoid they are of any substantive points and how, instead, suffuse with weird, even inappropriate, emotional attachments [to Obama] they are … These outbursts include everything other than arguments addressed to the only question that matters: are the criticisms that have been voiced about Obama valid?
To an extent, Glenn’s right. Looking back at the first batch of Andrew Sullivan’s readers’ comments, there are ample (implicit and explicit) remarks in the vein of “Obama’s a good guy; I really admire him; so stop yelling at him.”
If that’s all there were to those remarks, I’d concede the point.
But I don’t think Glenn or any of us do justice to Andrew’s readers’ remarks (either the first or second batch) if we don’t consider them in the context of the post that started all this, the one from the disenchanted lefty, or DL for short. In that original post, the DL makes clear up front that criticism of the President was not “the straw that broke this camel’s back,” rather it was a certain type or tenor of criticism, to wit:
“Like Lyndon Johnson who escalated in Vietnam, Obama lives in mortal fear of being called a wimp by Republicans. To look strong in front of swing voters he will sacrifice the lives of hundreds of US soldiers; allow many more to be horribly maimed; waste a minimum of $30 billion in public money; and in the process kill many thousands of Afghan civilians. It is political theater nothing else. The real purpose of these 300,000 [sic] soldiers is to make Obama look tough as he heads toward the next US presidential election. In short, he used Afghanistan to show that we [sic] was not the soft, meek, scared, pussified, little Democrat portrayed in GOP spin. There is nothing else to Obama’s Afghan strategy. Victory in Afghanistan is reelection in 2012. Whatever the outcome, Obama has made it clear: he is willing to kill to get reelected.”
To me, and apparently to the DL, that is not so much criticism of an Obama policy at it is an attack on the man’s character. Granted, this argument is similar to the argument made by some of President Bush’s defenders, and even a few of his detractors, namely: disagree with his policies all you want, but leave his character out of it.
Of course, with any president or elected official — or untitled human being, for that matter — the distinction between policy and character is sometimes difficult to make because policy often (if not always) flows from character. However, while the dividing lines — between attacks on policy v. character; and between justified v. unjustified attacks on character — while those lines may not be precisely determinable, I think many (most?) people would agree that examples like the one cited by DL (above) do not just stick a timid toe across one or both of these indefinite lines, they long-jump over them.
And that seems to be the point of Sullivan’s readers. From the first batch:
This is not about following lockstep with an agenda or sitting on the fence. It is about a willingness to solve critical problems with an acknowledgment that all people at the table cannot possibly agree on everything.
…
The loud-mouths on the Left are becoming nearly as hysterical and vicious as those on the right.
And from the second batch:
Greenwald is in error when he states that people like me … want no criticism of Obama. By all means, dissent and dialogue on every issue. That is what brings a deeper understanding to all. What I object to is the nutty dogmatism, the “Obama is a liar!,” “Obama is Bush/Cheney,” “Obama is… whatever.”
So, yes, I’ll concede this much: Glenn schooled the amateur pundits for expressing too much adoration for the current, fallible person sitting in the Oval Office. But I hope my skeptical readers will likewise concede that a least some of the amateur pundits schooled Glenn for glossing over the multiple, inter-related points of the original DL post, namely: (1) there’s a way to passionately debate issues while remaining civil; (2) there’s merit to civil debate; (3) its opposite — uncivil, venom-laced debate — understandably prompts many people to stop listening to the debaters who employ such tactics, no matter how meritorious (or not) their underlying arguments might be.