Glenn Greenwald, very easily upset but so often very right, goes off on an internal discussion of Newsweek dudes and dudettes about who is and who is not a terrorist, a conversation prompted, naturally, by the terrorist attack on the IRS office in Austin, Texas by murderer/terrorist Joseph Stack. Glenn calls the efforts of these highly paid journalists to avoid calling a murderer/terrorist a murderer/terrorist “one of the most stunningly revealing things I’ve read in quite some time.”
Particularly stunning is this exegesis by reporter Dan Stone, a rule that I suggest in the future could be called “Stone’s razor”: “Yep, comes down to ID. This guy was a regular guy-next-door Joe Schmo. Terrorists have beards in live in caves. He was also an American, so targeting the IRS seems more a political statement—albeit a crazy one—whereas Abdulmutallab was an attack on our freedom. Kind of the idea that an American can talk smack about America, but when it comes from someone foreign, we rally together.”
I confess that I’m baffled by Stone’s conclusion that murdering an innocent man, Vernon Hunter, a tax service employee and two-tour veteran of the War in Vietnam, is a “political statement”—kind of a red, white, and blue thing—while murdering people to protest U.S. engagement in the Middle East is “an attack on our freedom” and somehow not a political statement. And I kind of wonder how Vern and Joe can “rally together” when Vern is dead, because Joe killed him.
Afterwords
Perhaps most annoying—and I stress the “perhaps”—is Stone’s internalization of a pseudo-regular guy dialogue—“talk smack”—as if this is the way regular Americans actually talk. He’s so used to sucking up to the lowest common denominator audience that all those Manhattan lads and lassies deem the rest of the United States to be that he actually thinks that way himself. His whole intellect consists of a battery of ready-made clichés—a form of fraudulently “authentic” speech found only on the lips of poseurs.
