This is why I love Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald is a well-known progressive blogger over at Salon who made a name for himself analyzing the legal implications of the Bush administration’s illegal domestic spying, among other things, including the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. He has become a huge thorn in the side of the lazy, sycophantic media and also many Democrats, whom he calls out for supporting Obama administration policies which are carbon copies of the policies they opposed under Bush.

On Twitter today he took on Ann Marie Slaughter, a prominent international relations expert and former director of Policy Planning at the State Dept. under Secretary Clinton. I certainly don’t have anything against Slaughter, other than that she is yet another mainstream, hawkish interventionist that takes no responsibility when the policies (and wars) she and others champion turn out to have been based on politically expedient lies. But really, she’s in good company because that really describes just about the entire Congress and foreign policy establishment, so don’t think I’m just singling her out for special treatment.

Anyway, I like Greenwald because he doesn’t let people off the hook, unlike the media. People like Greenwald are essential in a democracy irrespective of whether one agrees with his politics. The same goes for right-wingers who attempt to hold policy-makers accountable. Although I have to say, what makes Greenwald stand out is that he is willing to take on his fellow progressives and Democrats whereas most on the right are blindly loyal to whichever Republican president is in office.

Here are two of his tweets to Ms. Slaughter today in response to something she tweeted about needing to disentangle ourselves from Libya:

She didn’t answer the questions.

Again, I don’t mean to seem like I am picking on Slaughter- I’m just trying to make a larger point and it just so happens that she was the one Glenn was speaking to when I was on Twitter. But really, as I said, the same goes for almost our entire foreign policy establishment. What bothers me is that so many of the women and men who work in the field of U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy adopt the very hawkish, neoconservative policies that seem to undermine the very diplomacy they are trying to promote.