Snowden

The excerpts below are from Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt email, which I highly recommend, BTW. He first links to John Yoo's piece on NRO's The Corner which begins "Edward Snowden should go to jail, as quickly and for as long as possible," a statement with which I agree. But I'm in more emphatic agreement with Geraghty's subject line: "Don't Come Crying to Us, NSA; You Guys Are the Ones Who Hired This Goofball."

Yoo also points out that Snowden's claim to noble motives is muddied quite a bit by his decision to run to Hong Kong. (By the way, the last guy to run to Hong Kong, certain that he was beyond the reach of American law enforcement and extradition treaties, was Mr. Lau, the money-keeper for the Gotham City mob. And we all remember how that turned out.) When Snowden declares, "Hong Kong has a reputation for freedom in spite of the People's Republic of China. It has a strong tradition of free speech," we have to wonder if A) he's already working for the Chinese or B) he's an imbecile.

This may be a story with no heroes. A government system designed to protect the citizens starts collecting all kinds of information on people who have done nothing wrong; it gets exposed, in violation of oaths and laws, by a young man who doesn't recognize the full ramifications of his actions. The same government that will insist he's the villain will glide right past the question of how they came to trust a guy like him with our most sensitive secrets. Who within our national-security apparatus made the epic mistake of looking him over -- completing his background check and/or psychological evaluation -- and concluding, "Yup, looks like a nice kid?"

Watching the interview with Snowden, the first thing that is quite clear is that his mild-mannered demeanor inadequately masks a huge ego -- one of the big motivations of spies. (Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego; others throw in nationalism and sex)

My position on this is no doubt driven by my being a security hawk before I'm any type of civil libertarian. And what frustrates me most by this story is how it is taking time away from the IRS scandal.

I'm perplexed that Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh have spoken favorably about this character. To me, he's a typical paranoid, head-in-the-sand Paulistinian who—like Geraghty points out—obviously has an enormous ego. What on God's green earth he was ever doing working in National Security is completely beyond me.

Well, it's not really beyond me. He is handsome, and there are a lot of middle-aged women working in human resources departments. That's how I'm guessing one otherwise unemployable friend of mine keeps getting good jobs. Now it is revealed that he is dating a pole-dancer. Say "bye-bye" to everything, Prince Charming; prison will not be fun.



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