The warped platitude of DC "centrism"

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

(updated below)

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank dresses up in idiotic costumes, and the overriding attribute of his commentary is adolescent, above-it-all snideness, and he's thus deemed a wild, unpredictable, creative "contrarian" in Beltway media circles. In reality, he's one of the most cliché-ridden purveyors of conventional Washington widsom one can find, as he demonstrates yet again in his column today, where he venerates Lindsey Graham and his quest to statutorily implement a system of military commissions and indefinite detention:

But Graham's latest offer should still be taken seriously by Obama's White House, which needs a way to recover from its self-inflicted wounds over Gitmo. Obama goofed twice, missing his deadline for closing the prison and then making the ruinous choice to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a criminal trial in New York.

This took an eight-year-old dispute to a new level of rage. On one side, there's now Liz Cheney's absurd accusation that Justice Department lawyers are al-Qaeda sympathizers. On the other side is the ACLU, which, in demanding civilian trials for 9/11 conspirators, ran an ad morphing Obama's face into George W. Bush's. . . . [T]the ideological purists on both sides need to compromise.

Liz Cheney advocates torture and indefinite detention with no charges, and just launched a repulsive McCarthyite smear campaign equating all detainee lawyers with Al Qaeda. The ACLU has steadfastly opposed Bush's torture policies as early as anyone, advocates due process for all, and ran a newspaper advertisement pointing out the indisputable fact that military commissions and indefinite detention were the crux of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism template and urging Obama not to embrace it. But they're on opposite sides of these issues and thus are equivalent: they're the extremists and purists who need to be rejected by those in the Glorious Middle (embodied by Lindsey Graham). As long both of them are against what you're doing, it means you're right. Could a false equivalency be any more trite or vapid than that?

(More here.)