Electronic surveillance
attribution: Terrance Emerson/Dreamstime.com
I have it on no authority that Edward Snowden is in cahoots with evil space aliens, or maybe orcs and trolls, or maybe even ... Satan itself! I'm sure this is bad, although to be honest, I'm not sure what exactly cahoots might be, or how one gets into them or out of them. But the important thing is that I can put the word "Snowden" into a sentence with something that the target audience generally considers Very Bad, because if you can't actually assassinatesomeone, character assassination will have to suffice!
Now, I am offering no evidence for my allegation, unless you count my fevered imagination, but that at least puts me in the exalted company of Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), who last weekend alleged that Snowden is Up To No Good with Russia! Which was particularly insightful of Rogers, given that he last summer was hinting that Snowden was Up To No Good with China, which makes perfectly logical sense, if your sense of logic includes the hallucination that China would send an invaluable espionage asset to Russia.
The real point for Rogers was, of course, once again to distract attention from Snowden's actual revelations, from President Obama's ineffectual response to those revelations, or the possibility that if those revelations forced even the president of the United States to go through the motions of reviewing them, assessing them and responding to them by at least pretending to change the policies revealed by those revelations, then maybe the person who brought the revelations to the public isn't a treasonous traitor, after all. Maybe he's actually a whistleblower. And maybe when a whistleblower brings to public knowledge abuses that even his own critics at least feel the need to pretend to need to reform and/or end, said whistleblower has served a major public service. In a rationally coherent universe, anyway.
Also playing the demonize Snowden game, last weekend, was Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who at least had the grace to play coy, not openly hinting that Snowden is in cahoots with Russia, but instead responding to a question by saying that we don't know whether or not he is. We also don't know whether or not Snowden is in cahoots with evil space aliens, or maybe orcs and trolls, or maybe even Satan itself! See how that works? Because it's always fun to put the burden on proving a negative. If Feinstein had wanted to give an honest but less inflammatory answer, she could have said that there's no evidence to support the allegation.
But if Rogers and Feinstein and their media enablers would rather that people not focus on the abuses revealed by Snowden, or the ineffectuality of the proposed pretend reforms of those abuses, it seems that's exactly what we should do. Over the fold.