Double G Has To Regulate

You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the ol' Lone Ranger and you don't go on NPR and make stuff up about Glenn Greenwald, because he will call you out at high noon.

This is really quite strange.  Yesterday, my inbox began filling up with email telling me that Jeffrey Goldberg had gone on NPR and, when asked about my critiques of his Atlantic article on bombing Iran, claimed I had "retracted" part of what I had written.  When I read the first couple emails, I assumed the emailers had heard it incorrectly or were mischaracterizing Goldberg's remarks, because not only had I never issued any retraction of those criticisms, but I never wrote anything remotely close to what could possibly be misconstrued that way:  I never even hinted that anything I had written was inaccurate, because it wasn't.  I was reasonably sure that even Jeffrey Goldberg wouldn't simply fabricate such an event of that significance and announce it as fact on NPR as a way of discrediting a critic.  But sure enough, once the audio was posted by NPR and I listened to it, I found -- genuinely, perhaps naïvely, to my amazement -- that what the emailers described is exactly what happened.

I'm not sure why Jeffrey Goldberg would want to pick a fact-checking fight with one of the most exhaustively thorough legal and constitutional policy wonk journalists out there, (there are times when I think Greenwald goes over the line on the rhetoric but never, ever cross the guy on the substance) but Goldberg just walked into a world of pain on this one, and it turns out this morning Goldberg just made things a lot worse for himself.

Goldberg responds, playing the victim role.  He falsely accused me on NPR of issuing a retraction and now he's the wronged party, claiming he merely "confused me with someone else," presumably "someone else" who issued a retraction last week (who?).  Feel free to read his response and form your own judgment.  He also complains that I "posted our private e-mail exchange, without asking [him] if that would be okay."  There was nothing "private" about our email exchange; my whole point in emailing him, as I made explicitly clear, was that I intended to write about this episode and wanted to include his response in what I wrote.  The whole exchange was entirely on the record.  It's just amazing how devoted to the Cult of Secrecy so many self-proclaimed journalists are.

The point of course is Jeffrey Goldberg was one of the many Villagers who failed upwards into the higher echelons of Serious Credibility by drumming up our war in Iraq.   The guy is Bucket O' Fail anyway, but the fallout from going after Greenwald is not something I'd even wish on on a Village Idiot like Goldberg.