Greenwald: Rahm Emanuel Lied? Duh!

by Mark Adams

It's rare that I disagree with Glenn Greenwald, who concludes Did Rahm Emanuel lie about his knowledge of Mark Foley? Yes.: "

Certainly Emanuel attempted to create a false impression while staying, repeatedly, on point -- clinging to the technically accurate, yet misleading, "Never saw them [the Foley E-Mails]."

Now it's being reported that, in fact, Emanuel had indeed heard of, but not seen the salacious propositions of Congressional Pages by the disgraced Congressman, the finger pointing towards a democratic party "dirty trick" releasing this to the press has more credibility.

Glenn asks us to look to the video of Emanuel on ABC where he's asked point-blank, several times, whether he was "aware" of the e-mails, to which he repeats that he "never saw them."

Independent of the question of whether Emaneul "technically lied" -- and far more important -- is the fact that Emanuel was clearly and deliberately misleading. Any reasonable person would have come away from that interview (as I know I did) with the strong impression that Emanuel was completely unaware of any e-mails sent by Foley to the pages, and that he had no reason to know anything was amiss with Foley until ABC broke the story.

Glenn, really? I'm astonished that a wise watcher of all things political couldn't instantly spot that this was weaseling behavior by the head of the DCCC from the get-go. Emanuel was obviously too Clintonesque in this interview.

That's what I took out of it when I saw it. But I also admired the lawyerly way Bill Clinton himself split the hair on the word "is" back in the day. What's not to admire about dexterous word-smiting.

It was quite obvious that Rahm Emanuel was being less than completely candid, and if you missed that, and are now indignant, start paying more attention. He may not have seen any evil, but he was certainly speaking a lot of evil, and now we know it was because he heard some evil.