
Michael Grunwald and the Assange Precedent Problem - wikiburner
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/michael-grunwald-and-the-assange-precedent-problem.html
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cup
On the same day the New York Times labels Djamila Bouhired a "terrorist wife"
in their obituary for Jacques Verges, one of the most influential and
intellectual lawyers in French history.

The medias enthusiasm to coddle up to the government and military is a
dangerous development.

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fnordfnordfnord
Grunwald's bio from Time. - _" Michael Grunwald is TIME's senior national
correspondent. Before coming to TIME, he spent nearly a decade at the
Washington Post, where he served as a congressional correspondent, New York
bureau chief, essayist and national investigative reporter. Grunwald has also
written for the Boston Globe, The New Republic and Slate among many other
publications, and is the recipient of the George Polk Award for national
reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting and the Society
of Environmental Journalists award for in-depth reporting. Raised in
Greenvale, N.Y., Grunwald holds a B.A. from Harvard College. He lives in
Miami."_

This guy belongs on Drudge or Fox, or better yet, AM radio.

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wikiburner
Hardly. He belongs on MSNBC or The Huffington Post. He's a very far left guy,
and since Obama has come into office, Grunwald now describes himself as an
unabashed "statist".

It honestly shocks me that people as smart as HNers can't see that Fox News
and MSNBC are two sides of the same ridiculous coin.

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sfjailbird
I have noticed that in many countries, the big 'left wing' newspaper and the
big 'right wing' newspaper is owned by the same company.

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madaxe
One of the things that repeatedly bothers me about this entire situation is
the continuous use of the words "foreign" and "foreigner", from all camps
discussing this.

Since when did it become acceptable to be so outright xenophobic? I mean, it's
tantamount to the way that "Ausländer" ended up being used.

This "us and them" balkanisation of the entire American mindset is dangerous.
It is _wrong_ to think of America as "all of the world that matters", and
everything outside of America as simply "foreign", and therefore unimportant
and to be treated as America sees fit.

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kevingadd
Xenophobia seems like a deeply seated part of the American culture. We started
out in an 'us versus them' scenario against our british rulers, then went on
to subjugate and oppress various minority cultures that were supposed to be
welcomed here. Not to mention the natives who lived on this continent in the
first place...

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timje1
I suspect that many countries have 'us vs them' struggles in their past.
Surely the US is not unique in this regard?

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kevingadd
Sure, but we have them right now, not just in our past, which is the real
problem. Look at Arizona's behavior towards minorities, for example, or stop-
and-frisk in NY, or the severe disadvantages African American children grow up
under in places like Oakland.

Xenophobia is still a very real part of american culture, just like sexism -
even if things are better than they were a hundred years ago. It's a long,
difficult uphill climb.

