The Cult of Ed's insistence that the recently announced toothless NSA reforms vindicates glorified garden variety traitor-spy Ed Snowden as he cozies up to homophobic, totalitarian regimes is -- as one commentor on another site put it -- as insulting as saying the Amber Alert system vindicates Amber Hagman's murderer. Not to directly draw parallels between Snowden’s selfish and thoughtless behavior to the cold-blooded murder of a child, but to highlight the ridiculousness of 'ends justify means' arguments in general.
And that's even though Snowden’s crimes can actually also result in despair, destruction, and loss of life — on an even larger long term scale.
The "if it weren't for Ed Snowden..." lie/oversimplification needs to die now. Eddy Boy didn’t “expose” anything necessary that was not already known to rollback these programs. Senate Democrats were already working on gutting Bush's Section 215 policies for reasons that surely included they accomplished little except giving liberal-tarian grifters like Glenn Greenwald something to whine about for profit. President Obama had long explored options in rolling back 215's excesses while fulfilling his duty to protect America, and the Executive Branch was convinced by Sens. Udall and Wyden -- among others -- to end the email part of the data collection in 2011, before Snowden ever began his cheap and narcissistic pilfering of state secrets, bartering American lives for personal celebrity. It is likely the ineffective phone data collection would have followed with additional lobbying, especially since it missed four-fifths of the target data -- gathering only twenty percent of call logs.
What Eddy Boy's megaomania did accomplish was exposing Americans and allies worldwide to increased security risks by making available to bad guys sensitive information unrelated to the relatively benign data collection programs in question — all the while colluding with gay-bahsing tyrants instead of manning up and facing the heat at home like civil liberties champions with impact (see Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail).
It is not surprising that racism-apologist Glenn Greenwald, infamous for his shocking defenses of Ron Paul's support of Stormfront supremacists, cannot tell the difference between a real hero like King and a dangerous hack like Snowden, the Putin whisperer. Griftwald and rest of the Cult of Ed's insufferable privileged white kids can't buy a seriously negative vowel when it comes to Putin's Hitler act invasion of Crimea nor his government's codified hatred of gays as it would expose the hypocrisy of their pathological Obama blaming and America shaming. When Snowden's egocentric carelessness inevitably results in tragedy, his "don't tase me with facts, bro" online buddies will be blaming Obama and Democrats right on cue.
So it was inevitable that thinking people have tired of the left's neo-Paultards and the Insufferable Privileged Liberaltarian Kid Syndrome running rampant in Ed Snowden's personality cult. There is no excuse for popping a boner at the immature screeds of right-wing conservanuts like Rand Paul and for trashing a progressive President because the government found out about their midget watersports porn searches. Even when you tell them the benign nature of the data collected, even when you point out that the President was already in process of re-examining the necessity of Section 215, all these know-it-all know-nothing Philistines can come up with is “Because Big Brother!” The Cult of Ed is as irritating as the “Because Bible!” folks on the right. Their purer-than-thou fainting couch outrageous outrage has descended into self-parody; their imperviousness to facts has reached Tea Party levels.
It's not news that every time one of these "lalaland libertarian anarchists" signs onto Facebook, turns on his iPhones, or logs-in to Reddit to bash the President they are freely giving up more personal data than the NSA has ever culled about them and for less good a reason. Would that the arrested development gang would spare the adults in the room their Johnny-come-lately phony outrage because the Magic Negro they worshiped in 2008 turned out not to be their Slaveboy Messiah, just like the Hillary b*#%h onto whom they heaped their dudebro misogyny said he would.
They wanted a savior to do their bidding – they got a President. It time for fringe lunatic liberal-tarians to grow up and deal with it. But the Cult of Ed would rather heap scorn on Democrats and applaud Republicans who want to rollback freedom and equality for anyone but straight rich white men. You know, because drones and all.
by Dude Kembro
