Glenn Greenwald Is Crabby Today

From his Column in Salon:

That's really the only relevant question: how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable -- as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still? How long can this be sustained, where more and more money is poured into Endless War, a military that almost spends more than the rest of the world combined, where close to 50% of all U.S. tax revenue goes to military and intelligence spending, where the rich-poor gap grows seemingly without end, and the very people who virtually destroyed the world economy wallow in greater rewards than ever, all while the public infrastructure (both figuratively and literally) crumbles and the ruling class is openly collaborating on a bipartisan, public-private basis even to cut Social Security benefits?

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The answer, unfortunately, is probably this: a lot longer. And one primary reason is that our media-shaped political discourse is so alternatively distracted and distorted that even shining light on all of this matters little. The New York Times' Peter Baker had a good article this weekend on how totally inconsequential squabbles dominate the news more or less continuously: last week's riveting drama was the bickering between the White House and Nancy Pelosi over Robert Gibbs' warning that Democratic control of the House was endangered. Baker quotes Democratic strategist Chris Lehane as follows: "Politics in D.C. have become Seinfeldesque. Fights about nothing."