October 22, 2006

Can someone who puts up with Glenn Greenwald's prose explain something to me?

How can people bear to read Glenn Greenwald? He posts endless massive blocks of overlong, tedious, unedited sentences. Here are two typical Greenwaldian sentences. Two:
Yesteryday [sic], I wrote a post pointing out that the hordes of right-wing pundits condemning the Larry Craig outing have no standing to voice such complaints, since the very tactic that they were purporting to condemn (publicizing innuendo about private sexual behavior and exploiting sexual morality for political gain) is one which their political movement has used repeatedly, over and over, as one of its central weapons. I cited countless examples -- including some from this week, along with others throughout the last 15 years -- which demonstrate that the right-wing of the Republican Party centrally relies upon tactics indistinguishable from the Craig outing, and that unlike the Craig outing (engineered by a single, obscure individual), the entire right-wing political movement traffics continuously in those tactics.
That's atrocious writing. Edit, you idiot. Absurdly, his next line begins "As was painfully clear to anyone who can read..." Well, Glenn, it is painful to read your prose, and anyone who can read and has any taste at all will turn away in disgust at writing like that. (Really, why is his blog popular?) This post, which he titles "Introduction to Logical Reasoning 101," as if it's going to be to the point, is almost 2000 words long -- twice as long as a newspaper op-ed.

Let's skip ahead to the last sentence:
And since responding to these types of Bush followers is usually a waste of time and energy more than anything else, I thought it would at least be fruitful to try to illustrate some points about how Bush followers reason, just as a way to have this exercise be something other than a complete waste of time.
Speaking of "waste of time"... do you think you could waste some of your own time paying a little bit of attention to your ridiculous writing, like maybe by not writing the phrase "waste of time" twice in that laughably verbose sentence?

Someone throw a copy of Strunk and White at that man!

Anyway, why am I bothering with this mindnumbingly bad blogger? Well, I saw in my Site Meter records that I was linked somewhere on his page and went over to see what was up.

Oh, here it is:
Right-wing pundits this week spent several days expressing such intense outrage over the outing by Mike Rogers, claiming that the conduct of this single, obscure blogger somehow shows how depraved and evil The Democratic Party itself is.
This post of mine is linked at the word "pundits." I can't tell if he means to be saying anything about me or is just linking to me because I linked to two "right-wing pundits" in my post. Am I one of the "right-wing pundits" he's railing about? Quite aside from the question of whether I'm right-wing, I didn't spend several days, express intense outrage, or even mention the Democratic Party. All I did was write one post speculating about the strategic thinking of "aggressive characters like our 'lefty blogger'" and opine that the strategy would probably backfire.

Maybe someone who's actually taken the time to slog through Greenwald's execrable writing and understands his approach to "Logical Reasoning" can explain in a few crisp sentences what he means by linking to me like that. I get the impression that he is insinuating that I support right-wing efforts at gay-bashing. If so -- and I'm not going to put up with reading his crap to find out -- that is utterly despicable and false.

187 comments: