Wesley Pruden writes that the spectacle of a 29-year-old computer geek (Snowden) armed with a laptop and a credit card racing across the hemispheres, eluding the FBI, the CIA, the TSA, the IRS and the rest of the alphabet soup available to Obama, taunting the entire U.S. Government to catch him if it can, has much of the rest of the world applauding, cheering and laughing. This is the entertainment nobody has seen since Bonnie and Clyde redefined the job of bank examiner on the front pages 80 years ago.
This is something new in our history, the world laughing at the ineptitude of the U.S. and only Obama, who set out years ago to cut America down to a size to suit the third world, can be pleased.
A national hero Edward Snowden is clearly not, but Obama and his goons have earned every guffaw, even if the rest of us haven’t. Almost nobody, not even Obama’s media acolytes, any longer cuts him slack or even grants him a B-minus for effort. He can blame Bush but no one is any longer listening.
The manhunt for Snowden led, with a whimper, to the international transit lounge at the Moscow airport, with Obama begging the Russians for help, like the help it ignored when Moscow tried to warn Washington about the radicalization of one of the brothers plotting to bomb the Boston marathon.
Time magazine quotes an unnamed U.S. official complaining that Snowden, running for his freedom and maybe his life, had chosen unpleasant protectors – China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador. “His failure to criticize these regimes suggests that his true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the U.S., not to advance Internet freedom and free speech.”
Snowden’s pursuers were expecting a lot from a man on the run, to stop in mid-flight to critique the regimes giving him a hand. You don’t have to admire Snowden or what he did to be outraged by his revelations that Obama is running a secret surveillance system that would have been the envy of the old Soviet Union.
Obama’s critics are loud enough and persistent enough, but maybe we’ve been baying at the wrong moon. It’s not his ideology, his arrogance, his attention-deficit disorder, his endless deference to alien religious faith and his contempt for the faith of those close to home that’s wrong with the man in charge. It’s the sheer incompetence of the leader and his gang.
This is the government that couldn’t – or wouldn’t – protect its diplomats in Benghazi, and then lied about it. This is the government that either instructed the IRS or enabled the IRS to abuse taxpayers with the “wrong” political views. This is the government that set the Justice Department hounds after journalists who were getting too close to information the government didn’t want anyone to know about.
Obama reassures us that everybody means well – it was all about mistakes, with no intent to do bad, just the honest incompetence of careless people.
Some reassurance!
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of the Washington Times
