GETTING IT BACKWARDS, AS USUAL: I don’t pay much attention, generally, but I’m stuck in a car with nothing but Technorati for company, and noticed that in one of his typically verbose efforts, Glenn Greenwald gets around, eventually, to making two points, One is that I’m a geek, whose interest in Western culture’s retreat from traditional ideas of masculinity is thus silly:
Glenn Reynolds — who, by his own daily admission, devotes his life to attending convention center conferences on space and playing around with new, cool gadgets in the fun room in his house, like a sheltered adolescent in his secret treehouse club — to fret: “Are we turning into a nation of wimps?”
But, see, that’s the point. I’m a geek. If I notice it, it’s probably real. It would be like Greenwald complaining that the country was going overboard in hatred of Bush.
He also accuses me of favoring a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to foreign policy. He offers no link because it’s such a stretch that even Greenwald’s readers might notice. Here’s what I actually said, once, after a lengthy discussion of the situation with Iraq:
On the other hand, it’s also true that if democracy can’t work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab country can’t make it as a democratic republic, then what hope is there for places that are less wealthy, or less secular?
I’ve made clear, in that post and elsewhere, that I think democracy can work in Iraq — this comment was aimed at advocates (like Greenwald) of giving up. Though Greenwald has shown trouble understanding conditional statements in the past, I’ll note that his failure to link probably indicates that this is, even for him, a stretch in terms of misrepresenting my positions.
Greenwald also shows his instinct for the capillary here, as the real weak point in that post is the suggestion that Rumsfeld wasn’t likely to go. Well, if Bush had known what he was doing, he would have let him go before the election or not at all. But there’s that damn conditional again . . . .
UPDATE: Greenwald’s acolytes are mocking this picture as insufficiently manly. But hey, who but a man secure in his masculinity would pose in that hat?
MORE: And he gets more attention than he deserves, here: But then, that’s usually his goal, and any attention fills that bill. But there’s this: “Let’s translate that last paragraph from Glennwaldese to plain English: No, you guys are wimps. . . . Do women not exist in Glenn G’s world?”