Yesterday morning, WNYC’s “The Take Away” had a whole segment about whether you/we are proud to be Americans… based on something Tim Geithner said last week: that the way to be patriotic is to pay your taxes.

I listened for a half hour to a far right immigrant and a centerish think tank dude talk about how great it is to be an American. I totally agreed with them for the most part but there were barely any caveats. Of course it’s great for a number of reasons I don’t have to get into. I had to turn it off because of what was not being acknowledged in a very direct manner: Of all the [Western] countries that we helped after World War II, the good ol’ U.S.A. ranks LAST in all sorts of categories. My point is that if you’re really patriotic, you need to stop cheerleading for the U.S. and work to make it better. At the very least, point it out so the public is aware this all could be better.

Occupy Wall Street and other forums are sure to raise these issues as soon as Spring starts and/or the movie comes out. If NPR wants to live up to the liberal windbag status that Andrew Breitbart gave it, instead of fawning over his legacy with little criticism, they should be covering Tim Geithner’s ties to Wall Street and the free pass he usually gets from the press. They could also do a story about why Reporters Without Borders ranks the U.S. 47th in its “freedom of the press” index.

These are complex issues and I’m sure 2012 will be great year for the movies.

Glenn Greenwald compares his canonization with that of Ronald Reagan’s. Greenwald wrote a similar essay when Tim Russert died as a journalist celebrated for softballing any and all propaganda the White House dished out.

Katha Pollitt talks about his drinking and sexism.

Stories of Hitchens’ drinking bouts sometimes landed on the gossip pages and other anecdotes occasionally reached my ears. In the 2000s, he had written enough for me to disagree with him on most points so I accepted his essential schtick — the smart, drunk, party guy from the left who flipped out after 9/11 — but I was surprised anyone of the left or libertarian bent took him seriously anymore, especially his pity party at Vanity Fair. As Pollitt says, he will be missed because he was larger than life. After that, it’s the booze talking.

If you’ve been following Glenn Greenwald, you don’t need to read this, but if you haven’t, it’s a must-read. Beginning with Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex to the Bush Administration’s admittance to phone-tapping (when Greenwald started blogging) to the current anti-Wikileaks campaign, through the present-day campaigns against Wikileaks, Glennzilla traces frightening trends that I’m disappointed more people aren’t talking about. I would like to highlight a few points that Glenn made:

• Last year, the Washington Post ran a series of articles and set up a whole interactive website called Top Secret America. I have mentioned before that it’s bad for the economy when you have a large portion of the population doing nothing but spying and participating in the new security industrial complex. These people are just consuming and are not really producing anything. As Dana Priest and William Arkin point out, it is dubious that these expenditures are keeping us any safer (producing actual security).
• Political rhetoric is focused now on cutting government spending but not only are military cuts off the table, so are security cuts. Most of the cuts proposed are aimed at furthering the divide between rich and poor as reinstating taxes on the wealthy are also off the table.
• This myopic collective amnesia about where our money really goes leads to things like bombing Libya with no congressional debate. (Each Tomahawk missile costs between $500k and $1 million so our little weekend adventure cost a billion dollars — leaving out whether it was the right or wrong thing to do.)
• We have potential Presidential candidates getting away with criticizing the sitting President for being “nuanced” and accused by others of apologizing too much for the United States. Give me a break.
• If anything, Obama should be criticized by both the left and the right more for not following through on many of his campaign promises — especially as Greenwald pointed out — where he said his administration would be the most transparent and supportive of whistle-blowers.

Where are the priorities, America?

It’s hard not to think that the goal is to stay until everyone who wants us to leave is dead, at which point we can finally leave.

Scared by how completely insane the right is (read the comments too) and also scared by the left being completely blind.

• The Corporation – The beginning of “too big to fail” which is anathema to capitalism. It starts out sounding heavily left and critical but gives a fairly balanced view. The film was made by Canadians.
• Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky’s voice is usually censored from mainstream media which is anathema to free speech. Interestingly, also largely made by Canadians.

You have to put up with ads but that’s free TV. Feel free to discuss anything in these documentaries here or on hulu.