re: #46 Rev_Arthur_Belling

It matters because there are important issues at stake beyond just GG’s persecution complex. Sometimes you do things because it’s the thing that needs to be done, despite the “optics” and how it plays into the image of a single individual.

Great. Please then give us a pragmatic explanation for why this needs to be done? What big picture fundamental principle do we sacrifice by choosing not to drag Glenn Greenwald before some toothless congressional committee, grand jury or kangaroo court? What law has he broken, what would realistically ever be gained by this sacrifice of our conviction to uphold the freedom of the press?

I haven’t made an argument based on image or optics. I’m saying that what’s been proposed is counter-productive, abjectly and obviously so. Not because it looks bad but because in any realistic analysis it can’t possibly result in anything good for the country. Yes, okay, we’d look like panicked little bullies lashing out at a journalist for publishing facts we couldn’t keep secret, but more importantly than that, that’s who we’d actually be. Press freedoms actually matter, not simply for the sake of appearances, but intrinsically. They are very much part of who we are as a nation.

Except for the absence of actual violence it’s exactly the kind of solution someone in Putin’s government would propose, the abuse of government power to try and impose one’s will upon an inconvenient journalist. And yes, even a shitty, self aggrandizing, manipulative little prick like Greenwald is still a journalist as far as the law is concerned.