STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Another Pundit Bites the Dust
By Staff News & Analysis - June 14, 2013

Give Edward Snowden what he deserves … I depart America for two blissful weeks in Italy and return to find that my country has been transformed, rather rudely, into a totalitarian state on the order of Iran, possibly even North Korea. My telephone is directly plugged into something called PRISM. Big Brother hounds my email, even when I am only viewing the weather. Soon I shall be wearing a Mao jacket – or perhaps not. Possibly my fears are overheated. Yet President Barack Obama got us into this mess, and it is unlikely that he will get us out. He seems smugly unconcerned about the fears of almost 50 percent of the American people who, I adjudge, are almost as worried as I am. – R. Emmett Tyrrell/Washington Examiner

Dominant Social Theme: So much fuss and bother for nothing.

Free-Market Analysis: The Internet does us the favor of occasionally freezing people's beliefs in a kind of intellectual amber. Even top pundits are revealed this way.

R. Emmet Tyrrell, an eminent conservative commentator and longtime editor of The American Spectator, a droll and witty conservative publication, has now been appropriately frozen.

We used to enjoy his wit and elegant writing style. Now we are better educated as to what lurks behind it.

Savor this. Or don't. It is how Tyrrell ends the column excerpted above:

Edward J. Snowden … is trying to pass himself off as a modern-day Daniel Ellsberg. I say of him as I said years ago of Ellsberg. Throw the book at him. He has endangered the security of the country.

Do you believe that, dear reader?

"The security of the country?"

Funny, we figured Congress and President Barack Obama were probably greater threats in some ways than Snowden. Congress is gradually bankrupting the US and Obama is socializing it. The Constitution is dead; the republic, too. But Tyrrell is worried about the "security of the country."

You know, we examine The American Spectator and find plenty of good articles there about the over-reaching of the IRS and of Fedgov in general.

But somehow, none of that matters when it comes to "national security." Anybody who is courageous enough to reveal what is actually going on with the vast spying apparatus spinning with the maw of Leviathan is to be labeled a traitor, according to Tyrrell.

And yet … When you first enter The American Spectator website, a note greets you from Tyrrell himself, explaining that the Obama administration has visited the website tens of thousands of times and is engaged in a campaign of intimidation against it.

Tyrrell asks for donations to stand up against such presidential intimidation. But it never occurs to him, apparently, that these sorts of tactics are predictable once government has grown too large.

Thus, he is willing to turn the legal-intel-military apparatus against Edward Snowden who is for one reason or another engaged in a campaign to remind us of what we already know (but may have forgotten) … that the US Fedgov and to a greater or lesser extent the entire leadership of the West is engaged in a great battle against its own middle classes and looks on them as a kind of enemy.

Not to Tyrrell. Snowden ought to be caught and punished for revealing the military-industrial complex has been lying to the American public for decades. Snowden, for whatever reason, has provided proof.

And now he should be punished.

This is how a civilization dies, when those who should be providing its literary conscience turn out to be nothing more than members of the royal court, more concerned with the continuation of its privileges than the principles of a free society.

From a congressional and legislative point of view, Snowden is a criminal. That's Tyrrell's point of view. But from a larger constitutional point of view and from the perspective of natural law on which the US Constitution is based, Snowden is no such thing.

Too bad Tyrrell could not spend time writing about natural law and how the US and the West generally have departed from the Truths that could save it. Instead, he writes a nasty little article about his vacation and the necessity of punishing those who pull the curtain back on the workings of the most massive intel operation ever emplaced by any single empire anywhere at any time.

After Thoughts

Thank God for the Internet.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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