His enemies have the full force of the machine -- every e-mail he's written and every phone call he's made -- to use against him. This won't be pretty. But before we decide that Snowden was smiling too much in his videotaped interview with The Guardian, earned too much money or somehow betrayed his lovely girlfriend in Hawaii in a personal vendetta against his former bosses at the intelligence agencies, let's take just a moment to consider his particularly human act of heroism.In that light, I propose a contest: Let's predict the top ten ways our "independent" journalists will smear Ed Snowden. My list:
10. Two words: Dog sex!
9. When he was seven, he broke mom's favorite vase and said a bad word. And now the Los Angeles Times plans to devote a five-part series to "vase-gate."
8. Why is Snowden hiding his birth certificate?
7. He's growing a beard, which signifies a conversion to Islam -- just like Grover Norquist!
6. He has a family connection to (shudder!)...BALTIMORE! (He really does!)
5. He once called in to Whitley Strieber's radio show, claiming to be the result of a human/alien hybridization experiment.
4. "Edward Snowden" is an anagram for "Do News: RED DAWN" -- proof that he's a communist sleeper agent.
3. His girlfriend planned to dump him due to pimple-sized penis.
2. He was recruited by HUI (Higher United Intelligence), the same little-known Hawaiian Secret Society that gave us Barack Obama.
1. His great-grandmother was the secret offspring of...ALEISTER CROWLEY!
(See the post below for the more important implications of the Snowden story.)
17 comments:
OT sort of - Interesting that the "Troll the NSA" media stunt is thought up by BuzzFeed isn't it?
Something's up with that site.
Also Joe did you see this gem -
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/skinner-marketing-were-the-rats-and-facebook-likes-are-the-reward/276613/
You ought to take this posting down immediately Joseph. While the satire is way below your usual witty standards, it unfortunately does reveal way too much about your deepest obsessions and fears. Try again or move on.
(not dot org)
Yes, the smearing was actually the first I'd heard of the guy. I realized right away he was Greenwalds leaker, but it's no surprise that the first I heard of him was a piece about why he was a traitor and villain (you know, just like Assange and Manning).
People like Snowden make me a little less cynical. Of course, now he's "disappeared". I imagine we'll hear about how he was droned in some arab nation, proving that he was really working for the evil doers all along.
The establishment media is going to have a hissy fit about this because they can't just stuff him into the "he's a liberal" or "he's a conservative" box and nullify his character that way. He's a guy who donated to Ron Paul's campaign (odd, if you ask me) and acted in a decidedly liberal fashion by exposing government secrecy and intrusion into our privacy, both of which are not known bugaboos of the conservative right.
Along those lines, however, it seems like it was just last week that conservatives were up in arms about supposed IRS slow-walking of their tax exempt applications. Where's the same conservative outrage over the NSA's intrusion into literally everyone's business?
Who knows where this story will take us, but it ties in nicely to the piece you put up back when the FBI agent said the government had the ability to go back in time and listen to phone calls made in the past. I wonder if there's any connection between that revelation and Mr. Snowden's decision to leak these documents?
Either way, I can only hope it at least opens some people's eyes to what kinds of abuses our deep state intelligence apparatus is committing against us, using our own tax dollars, in the interest of "national security."
I hope, but I'm not optimistic.
This 10 is good. My favorite is #10
http://rixstep.com/1/1/1/20130610,00.shtml
Doesn't have a high school diploma. You have one of the most highly regarded gurus from Booz working at the NSA. So the recruiters at Booz must be complete dodos, is that it?
Donated to Ron Paul. OK. That's it. The creep is obviously a traitor. Demand HK return him, and if they refuse, bomb the shit out of them.
Wasn't a friendly neighbour. He didn't trim his hedges. Lock him away.
His laptop stickers reveal his beliefs. Ruh-roh! What did those stickers say? This sounds like a good scoop! The stickers supported Tor and the EFF.
Served in the Army for only five months. He intentionally broke both his legs so he'd be discharged and smuggled secret documents out in his casts with the help of his doctor. Right.
First job with NSA was as a security guard. He totally fits the profile.
Used the codename 'Verax', Latin for 'truth-teller'. Anyone espousing truth is an enemy of Obama. Hunt him down.
Not on social media. Good citizens let their lives be plucked to bits by the NSA. Snowden's the enemy.
Whereabouts are currently unknown. That clinches it. He's too smart. He's miles ahead of the bad guys. Use every possible method of force to get him and neutralise him. A bad egg.
Lived comfortably. Oh the outrage.
Ben
I love your blog, Joe, and agree with a great many things you say, but I happen to agree with Toobin in this case. I might come around, but as of right now, Snowden strikes me as a typical self-indulgent far-right Ron Paul following ideological zealot who substituted his own personal judgement for the law and his obligations to his employer and his country. And, honestly, the whole story is for the low information voter. Everyone else knew this was happening a long time ago. I wore out my throat bitching about it back when Chimpy was president.
Joseph; You fan the paranoia when you leave comments in limbo for 6-9 hours. Do you have some proxy or moderator to assist? Maybe you should.
Ben
@Jack,
It apparently escapes you, the idea that the 'law' does not jive with personal morality.
There are countless tyrannical laws in the United States, and more tyrannical laws are adopted and enacted as time passes.
The laws you accuse Snowden of breaking are tyrannical laws. People should support him for rebelling against tyrannical laws, and in this case, his personal judgement to leak information about PRISM, was the right way to go. By your logic, William Binney should be prosecuted and persecuted for leaking information about Stellar Wind. And jointly, Stellar Wind and PRISM, represent the death of privacy in an increasingly inverted totalitarianism where extreme fervent nationalism (combined with Christianity dogmatically supportive of Free Markets) and pride are the religion of the day.
Jack is a fool,like any member of the anti-Elite Tea Party who disdained working with Occupy against common enemies in the ruling class.
You know, Jay, libertarians, Paulbots, Randroids, tea partiers, that whole far right coalition, loves to talk about their reverence for the US Constitution and "the rule of law." They love talking about how "we're a republic, not a democracy."
Do they have the first idea what any of that stuff means? Those aren't just platitudes to be spewed by the far right on the 4th of July. They actually mean something.
If Snowden respected the Constitution or the rule of law, he would understand that in a Constitutional Republic, people operate within a legally-defined framework to resolve disagreements and settle disputes; they don't simply ignore the law because of their own personal feelings or wishes.
The problem with ideological zealots is they don't care about the law; Snowden and the Paulbots feel entitled to ignore the law whenever they feel like it.
That's fine. Let them. But if this really is a constitutional republic and we really do believe in the rule of law, they will be arrested and put in prison.
You talk about "tyranny." Tyranny is the unaccountable abuse of power -- whether government power, private power, or individual power. Iran's government, for example, is tyrannical because it cannot be held to account by its citizens. It's unaccountable.
The US government is not unaccountable; we still have free elections, despite every last effort of the Republicans to restrict voting to white conservatives.
LOL. Over at Matt Stoller's joint, they're quoting Glenn Beck's The Blaze favorably, including a wingnut lunatic who says of Snowden:
“As for me, this dude is a freedom fighter for humanity and against tyranny.”
Tyranny. There's that word again. It's almost like they've been programmed to repeat a few simplistic lines. I guess that's one useful purpose for the hoi polloi.
By the way, there's a really, really good Cannonfire post about Ron Paul and the type of person who follows him from January 2012 that seems appropriate to this discussion.
Joe makes this critical point about Ron Paul followers (of which Snowden is one):
"[T]he tea partiers proclaim their loyalty to the founding fathers even as they continually threaten to take up arms against an elected government, should that government do things unapproved by the libertarians. Sometimes the baggers make that threat in a sly and subtle fashion; sometimes (as in the case of Sharron Angle), they can be overt. But the threat remains, always there, lingering in the air."
"Let's give this threat its proper name: Fascism."
Just as the far right has decided (in defiance of the rule of law and the Constitution) that they can ovethrow the US government because it offends them personally, Snowden and his enabler Greenwald have decided that they can violate the law and harm America because they personally don't approve of the work Snowden was doing.
Snowden doesn't respect the rule of law; he despises it, and he despises the constitution and the country which give life to it.
This is what I'm seeing on the right Joseph. The blog administrators (Althouse, AceofSpades, Hot Air as examples) are saying that Snowden risked national security and should be punished, but their wiser commenters are taking them to task, and saying spying on Americans, without cause is wrong, always wrong.
AND those terrible libertarians over at Reason had a post similar to yours here!
I find it really disconcerting that so many law professors that have blogs are calling for Snowden's hanging (metaphorically). They can't even grasp the simplistic idea that security does not trump freedom.
Kitty
How can Jack claim that the government of the United Stasi of Fubarica is still accountable to Us The Peasants, when there is no way to be sure the elections are honest, in this age of unaccountable, computerized voting systems?
Peter is right, Joseph~~my gawd, quick, remove this. What might someone nefarious do with the revelations of your deepest obsessions and fears such as you have about Baltimore!!!??
@Jack,
You keep talking about the law, the rule of law, and this principle of yours that the law must be obeyed no matter what. I want to point out, you get sick of hearing the word tyrannical, don't read the letters or other writings of the 'Founding Fathers' because their writings are littered with repeated use of the word tyranny. If you asked them what it was they were fighting the Revolutionary War for they would reply, we are fighting against tyranny. So yeah, it is over-used, but so what?
Now, about this whole rule of law. Law changes, it is not static and it is not any one thing. By your logic, we should condemn anyone who broke the law of Nazi Germany (Germany from 1933-1945) in attempting to rebel against the state. I don't think you are pro-Nazi Germany or anything like that and I don't mean to insinuate you are. I just want you to understand the point I am trying to make. Nazi Germany had their laws and they made many, many things illegal (abortion, homosexuality, political parties other than the NSDAP, failure to be loyal enough to the state, etc.). You are saying that if I, and I am German by the way, had been a German living in Germany in 1933 or from then until 1945 that if I broke the law then I should be condemned, no matter how tyrannical that law may be.
I mean, under Mosaic law, if there were a State or Nation under Mosaic law, I would be justified in murdering someone, even my own family member, if they attempted to worship a deity other than YHWH or get me to worship a deity other than YHWH.
I wonder what happens when the law is intrinsically immoral to you? Does the law supersede your own conscience? Here's a question I have for you, Jack. And again, I'm not fighting with you, I'm talking to you.
There's book you might like called 'Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America'
The book documents "how children—both normal and those termed "feebleminded"—from infants to teenagers, became human research subjects in terrifying experiments. They were drafted as "volunteers" to test vaccines, doused with ringworm, subjected to electric shock, and given lobotomies. They were also fed radioactive isotopes and exposed to chemical warfare agents."
My question for you is this, if you were one of the doctors commissioned by the US government to conduct medical experimentation on children, would you break the law and expose this activity so that the American public and the people of the world would know what really goes on?
The same question is something I could ask you if you were a doctor working in some capacity with the CIA's MKULTRA program.
Whatever Edward Snowden's political views are, and it is sickening that he would vocally and financially back a crypto-fascist like Ron Paul (who seeks to replace our present authoritarian government with a government that is more psychotically authoritarian), but the point is not his personal politics. The point is that I do want to know about NSA spying on me and everyone in the world and I want everyone else to know about it too. Because that is power and privaledge which States like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia could have only ever dreamed about having.
Thanks for not immediately resorting to name calling and personal attacks (such as calling me a piece of shit because you either don't understand what I'm trying to tell you or you disagree with me anyway).
@Jack,
Also, I dispute the fact that we are a purely, unadulterated democracy or elected representational government. You should watch the less than 7 minutes video at this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW5iM7Pmhow
Guys, don't fight. It hurts my feelings when people come here and express hatred toward someone other than me.
Post a Comment