Glenn Greenwald visits UW-Madison

YAL UW-Madison had the privilege of co-sponsoring columnist Glenn Greenwald in a visit to campus last Wednesday.  For those unfamiliar, Greenwald is a contributor at Salon.com and has gained a nationwide following for his fierce defense of civil liberties.  Greenwald spoke for an hour on the subject of "Civil Liberties in the Age of Obama" and then took an hour for a lively Q&A.  His conclusion?  Our liberties are still as threatened as they were during the Bush Administration...and now even more with Obama's new host of executive powers, including the right to assassinate American citizens.

The speech was stellar with too many good points to touch on in a single blog post.  I would like to point out that in the Q&A at 38:00 Greenwald specifically addresses a possible alliance between progressives and Ron Paul libertarians.  He also mentions Gary Johnson as a unique candidate with possibly the best chance of bringing this coalition together in a 2012 run for president.  The entire speech and Q&A is certainly worth watching.  Read a local media report here.

Liberal Hypocrisy on Free Speech?

Glenn Greenwald reports that Ann Coulter was threatened to be prosecuted by the Canadian for "hate speech" prior to her cancelling a lecture at the University of Ottawa. As disgusting as this is, even more disconcerting is the fact that -- if Greenwald's comments section and my personal experience are any indication -- some liberals are applauding this. Just as they're not really oppose war, but Republican wars, these lefties appear to not really oppose censorship, but only Republican censorship.

Greenwald, of course, is no partisan hack but a man of principle and courage. Here is an excerpt from his great article on the matter, in which he defends Coulter's rights to say things he despises:

Personally, I think threatening someone with criminal prosecution for the political views they might express is quite "hateful."  So, too, is anointing oneself the arbiter of what is and is not sufficiently "civilized discussion" to the point of using the force of criminal law to enforce it.  If I were administering Canada's intrinsically subjective "hate speech" laws (and I never would), I'd consider prosecuting Provost Houle for this letter.  The hubris required to believe that you can declare certain views so objectively hateful that they should be criminalized is astronomical; in so many eras, views that were most scorned by majorities ended up emerging as truth.

GOP Riding the Wave of Libertarian Enthusiasm

Glenn Greenwald is definitely one of the most indispensable commentators around when it comes to exposing horrible atrocities carried out by the United States government. I have always been impressed by his ability to see through partisan politics and call out Democrats and Republicans alike in areas dealing with the most important of civil liberties. However, I was even more impressed with his insight in one of his more recent articles, The GOP’s “Small Government” Tea-Party Fraud.

In it, Greenwald, once again, exposes the GOP for its latest attempt at deception in order to gain power. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider Greenwald was the man who saw through every national security lie that sprang forth from the GOP’s mouth during the Bush years.  However, Greenwald expresses a clear understanding of what the GOP is up to:

There’s a major political fraud underway:  the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the ”tea party” movement.  The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views.

Bipartisan Warmongering

Glenn Greenwald, with a stroke of genius, writes how Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech has solidified Bush-Cheney era foreign policy by making it bipartisan:

Yesterday's speech and the odd, extremely bipartisan reaction to it underscored one of the real dangers of the Obama presidency:  taking what had been ideas previously discredited as Republican or right-wing dogma and transforming them into bipartisan consensus.  It's not just Republicans but Democrats that are now vested in -- and eager to justify -- the virtues of war, claims of Grave Danger posed by Islamic radicals and the need to use massive military force to combat them, indefinite detention, military commissions, extreme secrecy, full-scale immunity for government lawbreaking, and so many other doctrines once purportedly despised by Democrats but now defended by them because their leader has embraced them.

Read the whole article here.