Glenn Greenwald On the Right Side But No Props for Ron Paul
I don’t mean to be a complainer, but look at the people Glenn Greenwald credits with getting the Fed audit passed by the House Financial Services committee:
One can count on one hand the number of times that establishment attacks like this fail, but this time — at least for now — it did. And it reveals a winning formula: where there is a strong and principled leader in Congress willing to defy the Party’s leadership and the Washington establishment (Grayson), combined with leading experts lending their name to the effort (economists Dean Baker and James Galbraith), organizations standing behind it (labor groups), and a shrewd and driven organizer putting it all together (FDL’s Jane Hamsher), even the most powerful forces and opinion-enforcers can be defeated, as they were here. Those progressive advocates’ refusal to be distracted by trite partisan considerations, and their reliance on substantial GOP support to pass the bill (as hypocritical as the GOP’s position might have been), was particularly crucial — and smart.
Again, I don’t want to be the guy complaining about his tax bill right after he wins the lottery, but still… Would progressives have even known what the Fed was up to were it not for Ron Paul? I’m being quite serious. Nobody talked about the Fed before Ron Paul’s last presidential run.
I understand that Greenwald is arguing–correctly I think–that Ron Paul alone wasn’t enough, that he needed the help of the other factors Greenwald lists. But c’mon, how do you talk about this without citing the principled Congressman willing to buck party leadership etc.?
