I was on ‘The Big Picture’ with Thom Hartmann last night, getting into it with Tea Party activist Kris Ullman and Libertarian Patrick Hedger of ‘Freedomworks’. We discussed the Benghazi conspiracy theories, Nancy Pelosi, the Republican’s disastrous immigrant outreach strategy, and the causes of the global economic crisis.

It’s incredibly frustrating arguing with people living in a completely different reality, and while I usually try to be respectful, this time I got pretty angry.

Ullman and Hedger wanted to make up their own facts, and Thom and I called them out on it over and over again.

Let’s just say it got a little heated in there…

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Glenn Greenwald: Always right. At least in his mind

By Ben Cohen: I’ve received quite a few emails and comments about my piece on Glenn Greenwald’s rant on the progressive media last week. Some readers took exception to my position that Greenwald’s rhetoric is unhelpful and counter productive, claiming my attack on him was pointless and without substance. The most concise criticism came reader Steve Rice who wrote:

The progressive blogosphere is already bursting at the seams with people who do nothing but rant about Republicans all day. Greenwald has different priorities. Yes, his focus is somewhat narrow, but that’s always been the case. If you read him, you know what you’re getting into. Given that, I fail to see the point of this article, aside from getting easy page-views from the anti-Greenwald brigade. It’s the same vague pseudo-criticism you’ve leveled at him before and you admit yourself that it has little to do with the substance of his work. So why write about Glenn Greenwald?

I’m unsure how my piece on Monday consists of ‘vague pseudo-criticism’ given I was quite explicit about what I was attacking Greenwald on. As the reader says, I don’t have a problem with the substance of Greenwald’s work, I have a problem with the tone of it and his relentless attacks on other media outlets and writers who do not follow Greenwald’s specific editorial agenda. Perhaps Bob Cesca does a better job of what I was trying to articulate. He wrote about Greenwald’s attack on MSNBC and other progressive outlets:

This new Greenwald rant is a continuation of his ongoing crusade to badger progressives who don’t make it part of their daily routine to screech at the president regarding Greenwald’s preordained three or four pet issues. Greenwald operates under the mandate that because drones are his primary concern and the prism through which he evaluates the president, so it should be with everyone else. The slightest deviation from that narrative in lieu of delivering news of a presidential success is a punishment-worthy trespass.

Greenwald has a long and storied history of extreme pettiness when it comes to dealing with other progressives, going as far as claiming Obama supporters would stand by him if he raped a nun on live television. When a blogger named “DrDawg” tweeted about Imani Gandy: “Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you’d say we weren’t seeing what we were seeing,” Greenwald felt the need to add: “No – she’d say it was justified and noble – that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape.” (pic of the exchange below):

Greenwald was probably being sarcastic (and trying to be funny), but the exchange was spiteful and unnecessary – particularly given it was directed towards a woman. Rape isn’t exactly a topic you make jokes about. And instead of apologize when lambasted by much of the blogosphere, Greenwald tweeted that Obama supporters would defend him in the face of “ANY evil: assassinations, child-killings: EVEN rape violent crime like rape.” Of course in Greenwald’s world, he can never be wrong, so an apology was completely out of the question.

This type of rhetoric is extremely counterproductive for a number of reasons. Firstly, you can be a supporter of any political figure, Republican or Democrat, without explicitly endorsing everything they do. I have many Republican friends who voted for both George Bush and Mitt Romney and I would never level that type of hostility towards them. Yes, I think Bush and Romney are backwards thinking dinosaurs who have spent their entire careers lining the pockets of the wealthy and cheer leading wars in the Middle East, but I don’t hold my friends accountable for their actions. Going after political leaders is one thing, but relentlessly attacking their supporters is something completely different. You can have a civilized debate with those who disagree with you without insinuating they support rape and child murder.

Secondly, Greenwald’s vindictiveness and tone detracts from the often excellent points he makes. I wrote about this in my article on Monday, but it’s worth repeating: Greenwald is a very good journalist and he does important work. He’s just limiting himself by behaving like a smug spelling bee champion.

I wrote a story on Greenwald’s excessive smugness and pettiness a few months back on these pages, and I’m guessing as a result, I have been blocked from following Glenn on Twitter (and I’m sure if he reads this, he’ll respond with something even smugger like “I don’t know who Ben Cohen is….”). My twitter account is open for anyone to follow, and as long as they are not abusive towards me, I don’t mind debating them. Greenwald apparently sees the twittersphere as a playground where he gets to pick on people he doesn’t like and block those who politely disagree with him.

Going after Glenn Greenwald isn’t an ‘easy-page views’ endeavor either. As the reader rightly points out, ranting about Republicans is quite the rage these days and people do tend to tune into scathing pieces about the latest Republican insanity more than debates between left wing political commentators. I’m going after Greenwald because he’s behaving like a spoiled child and should stop hurling bombs at people who don’t believe he is the be all and end all of progressive politics.

And just to show you this is nothing personal, I’m going to end this piece with a link to Greenwald’s excellent piece on massive US and Israeli hypocrisy in the Middle East. It’s well worth a read, regardless of what you might think of him.

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Megan McArdle: Not a great writer or economist

By Ben Cohen: The Daily Beast’s Megan McArdle is not a very good economist – or writer for that matter. Despite her impressive resume (she was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a writer for the Economist), if you try to draw logical conclusions from her confusing articles, you’d come out believing mankind had no other alternative than deregulated, trickle down capitalism. I noticed McArdle’s writing several years back, mostly because I could never understand exactly what she was trying to say, and when I did, it was abundantly clear she had no idea what she was talking about.

McArdle has a long and well documented history of Libertarian PR – so much so that it is impossible to take her seriously as a journalist. Yasha Levine and Mark Ames over at The Exiled ran a devastating piece as part of their S.H.A.M.E media transparency project detailing McArdle’s extremely murky links to the Koch brothers and her persistent defense of Wall St throughout the financial crisis. It’s worth reading in full as it uncovers a worrying trend in the US media – the promotion of PR hacks to prominent positions within respected media institutions.

A few days back, McArdle predictably waded in to the Walmart union protest debate, making a subtle defense of the corporate perspective, arguing that by paying workers more money, they would be unable to compete when it comes to offering low cost products.  She wrote:

Recessions are also a time when employers don’t necessarily have a lot of profits to give up.  Walmart’s $446 billion of revenue last year was eye-popping, but its profit margins are far from fat–between 3% to 3.5%.  If they cut that down by a percentage point–about what retailers like Costco and Macy’s have been bringing in–that would give each Walmart employee about $2850 a year, which is substantial but far from life-changing.  Further wage improvements would have to come out of the pockets of Walmart’s extremely price conscious shoppers.  Which might be difficult, given how many product categories Amazon is pushing into.

Firstly, McArdle’s assertion that $2850 is ‘far from life-changing’ is completely ridiculous. When you’re talking about workers who earn under or around $20,000 a year, $2850 is a lot of money. The extra $240 per month would make a significant contribution to groceries, childcare costs, transportation and health care costs – all expenses that the working poor struggle to balance.

Secondly, McArdle’s argument that wage improvements would have to come out of consumer’s pockets makes literally no sense given she already accepts that Walmart would still be profitable if it cut its profit margin by a percentage point. Let’s do the math with McArdle’s own figures – if Walmart is bringing in $446 billion in revenue and let’s say 3.25% of that is profit, it is still netting around $14.5 billion. I’m not sure whether McArdle is trying to say that wage increases on top of the hypothetical extra percentage point would have to come out of consumer’s pockets, but given the company would still be bringing in billions of dollars of profit, it could certainly afford to do so without hitting customers.

Of course McArdle omits mention of the corporate pay structure in Walmart – in her world the notion that management would incur modest cuts is completely unthinkable. CEO Mike Duke earns $18.1 million a year, making over 900 times what an average employee does.

What McArdle is really saying here is that workers should be grateful to be existing on wages that barely scrape past federal poverty lines (and in some cases don’t if families only have one parent working) and should understand that Walmart does not exist for their benefit, but the benefit of its CEO and shareholders. Of course this is technically correct – Walmart is legally bound to deliver maximum profit to its shareholders, making the needs of employees close to irrelevant. But then that is why unions are so important; they protect workers rights and ensure employees make enough money to feed their families.

For McArdle, these rights are frivolous luxuries that corporations can ill afford when their profit margins are at stake – even if they are still massively profitable.

I wouldn’t mind McArdle’s writing if she was honest about her motivations – to promote libertarian ideology and further the efforts to erode what is left of the labor movement in the US. But she isn’t. Her writing is deceptively masked in a light hearted, chatty style that betrays her far more cynical objectives. I’m not saying McArdle doesn’t believe what she is saying, but it’s worth noting that what she is saying has propelled her career far beyond her abilities as an economist and a writer.

McArdle can’t even be bothered to make her own numbers add up, so why she is regarded as an authority on business and economics is anyone’s guess. The truth is that there is an entire industry built around promoting an economic ideology that is mathematically impossible, and McArdle has carved a very nice niche for herself inside of it.

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