Rockefeller, Verizon, Telco Cash, Greenwald, Wired & Immunity: Newly Flush with Innuendo

[image:Huntington News]
by Mondoreb

This is rich. Wired's Threat Level is trying to beat a few facts into a creamy froth. Here's the few facts, complete with an official graph:

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is reportedly steering the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee to give retroactive immunity to telecoms that helped the government secretly spy on Americans.

He has also recently benefited from some interesting political contributions.
Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).

Well, okay, there's some froth there too. But to see some furious froth-beating at work, you have to go to Glenn Greenwald attacking a more reasoned view of Michael Goldfarb in the Weekly Standard:

UPDATE: Wired's Ryan Singel provides an excellent analysis of the tidal wave of cash from telecoms that has suddenly poured into Jay Rockefeller's coffers over the last year. At exactly the time when telecoms need amnesty from Jay Rockefeller, unusually large amounts of cash flow from telecoms to Rockefeller, and lawbreaking amnesty then flows back from Rockefeller to the cash-providing telecoms. While there may be theoretical deniability as to causation, it is just factually true that this is what happened.

My, my. Rockefeller better spend some of that money on water wings because there's a "tidal wave of cash" coming at him. Wired is implying and Greenwald is amplifying that Rockefeller is on the take.

Rockefeller (you've heard that name before somewhere?) is worth millions and millions and millions and...well, you get the idea. But Greenwald wants you to believe that some campaign contributions which amount to nothing in the Rockefeller wealth scheme of things is sinister. It is sinister: it's a view contrary to what Glenn Greenwald believes. That's what makes it so sinister. Greenwald doesn't have a neat graph, like Wired, but he throws around words like "deniability" to set the right mood.

It's not often that one is placed into the position of defending Rockefeller, my home state senator, but Wired and Greenwald's not-so-careful casting of aspersions has accomplished that trick. Having never voted for Rockefeller, I'm now forced to defend him from a--smear? One is loathe to utter the word that comes so easily to liberal lips. It's not a smear; more of a "snear".

That Rockefeller has more to consider than some chump change campaign contributions he may not be aware of seems not to have occurred to Wired or Greenwald. National security concerns? No way--"Tool of Verizon" is the cry here. Rockefeller may be many things, but Verizon's stooge isn't one of them.

Think for just a bit about Rockefeller's wealth and then what is not-so-subtly being implied. As mentioned before, it's a rich creamy froth.

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