It won’t come as a shock to anyone who reads LGF that I have zero respect for Glenn Greenwald; the man is a raving egomaniac with no ethics or honesty who poses as the most ethical and honest person in the world, and a vicious smear artist who specializes in character assassination of anyone who criticizes him. And he’s been this way for as long as I’ve been aware of him.

And yet, the US media almost universally continues giving him a pass on his sleazy tactics, and almost never calls him out when he trips over his own feet — which isn’t really that rare.

I’d like to draw your attention to two examples of this egregiously dishonest behavior today.

First, as most people know by now, Edward Snowden’s claim that he sent numerous emails to the NSA reporting abuse and “whistleblowing” has now exploded. It turns out that the only email he sent to the NSA General Counsel has absolutely nothing to do with whistleblowing; it was an innocuous question about a legal point that was already publicly answered on the NSA’s website. Furthermore, Snowden sent the email in April 2013; at that point, according to his own accounts, he was already stealing as much top secret material as he could, was already committed to fleeing the country, and was already in touch with Greenwald — which renders absurd any claim that he was “whistleblowing” or trying to go through channels.

On the night of Edward Snowden’s interview with Brian Williams, NBC News claimed to have “confirmed” that Snowden sent emails reporting abuse, causing Glenn Greenwald to exclaim triumphantly:

Biggest news from NBC/Snowden interview: NBC confirmed Snowden filed written concerns with NSA - something USG has vehemently denied.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 29, 2014

The “biggest news!” But unfortunately for the Mighty Greenwald, this turned out to be completely false. So how did he respond when it became clear the email didn’t “confirm” his (and Snowden’s) claims at all? Well, now it suddenly becomes “irrelevant.”

As @benwizner says, whether Snowden first invoked the “proper” (deliberately impotent) channels is also irrelevant http://t.co/tPSjMkD5vV

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 30, 2014

From “biggest news” to “irrelevant” in a single day. I think Greenwald has set a new world record for speed of hypocrisy.

Our second example of Greenwaldian sleaze: remember when he got into a huge, very public fight with Julian Assange of Wikileaks about redacting the name of a country from one of his reports? Greenwald said he was completely convinced that revealing the name of the country would “cause deaths.” And since Greenwald’s default position is to assume everything the US government says is a lie, the argument they made for redacting the country must have been very compelling indeed.

Then, Wikileaks carried out their threat to reveal the country. Since Greenwald said he was utterly convinced that doing this would cause people to die, you’d think he would condemn Assange for being so incredibly cavalier with human lives.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong; Greenwald has not said a single word about this subject since Wikileaks revealed the country. No condemnation, not even mild protest. Nothing.

This has been your public service announcement for today, trying to blow the whistle on a destructive, malignant libertarian extremist masquerading as a journalist.