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One twit’s fight for fame

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For God's sake, can we get a new picture of this guy?

For God’s sake, can we get a new picture of this guy?

I've kept my own counsel on this Edward Snowden case. I didn’t want to judge him too quickly. My first impulse was to dismiss him as a self-aggrandizing little twit, who surely can’t really believe that the security apparatus of his own country is more pernicious than those maintained by his new friends in China, Russia, Cuba and Ecuador.

But now I have sufficient facts to render a judgment. And my judgment is this: Edward Snowden is a self-aggrandizing little twit. I hope he has a hard time ahead of him, because I think he richly deserves it.

Yeah, it’s terrible that the NSA is collecting almost as much personal data as Facebook. But what kind of a horse’s ass complains about intrusive surveillance and then accepts the generosity of Beijing? What kind of idiot whines about the erosion of privacy and then heads straight to Moscow, where full-court domestic surveillance was invented? Next stop, apparently, is Havana. Then on to Quito, where Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa Delgado isn’t exactly revered as a champion of free speech. At this rate, Snowden will soon be sipping Cristal with Kim Jong Un.

Look. Edward. You want to betray a professional oath and leak stuff you swore to keep secret, fine. But don’t anoint yourself as the giver of truth. Not when the chief beneficiaries of your actions are nations with far worse human-rights records than America. Just admit what has now become clear: It’s all about you, and a sweet book deal that will sell itself.

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Comments

  4. We disagree completely on this, and now we know to what depths the country’s leaders will stoop, and use any artifice, legal and not so (but they get to define legal, too) to get their man. Les Miz, anyone?

  5. The Times Record in Fort Smith, Ar, had a thoughtful editorial about this today. They pointed out that Snowden seems to think he is committing civil disobedience, yet is caught by surprise that there are consequences.

    The real heroes of civil disobedience are people like Ghandi or King, who believed so strongly in a cause that they were willing to risk the punishment and were prepared to take it. They didn’t commit an act, then start running from the punishment.
    As they so rightly pointed out, there would have been no Letter From the Birmingham Jail if King had been hiding in a Moscow airport looking for a way to avoid punishment.

    Even in my own activist days, people were instructed to have legal custody provisions for their children in writing, and have all their affairs in order, in case worse came to worst and they were arrested.