…when he asked for my take on the NSA story, pretty much the first words out of my mouth were, “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?” The story quotes practically everything I said to Grim except that remark, even though I returned to the point a couple of times and emphasized that it summed up my view.
I don’t think HuffPo cut the quote because they ran out of electrons. (…)
Nor because my remark was inaccurate. It turns out that Glenn Greenwald has written an entire book devoted to exposing the contradiction between Republicans’ ideology and their private lives. (…)
Grim and Greenwald very likely cut the quote because it would have undermined the narrative of the piece, which combines solicitude for the poor Islamists whose sexual and financial hypocrisy might be exposed with outrage at the NSA for even considering such a tactic. The quote would have made them look like, well, hypocrites.
The incident makes me wonder what else Greenwald leaves out of his stories.
And why we should continue to trust snippets of documents selected by someone who thinks that the difference between Islamist extremists and Republicans is that one is an enemy that deserves no quarter and the other is sort of like Martin Luther King, except for the part about wanting to kill us.
