How the Left's Blind Obama Hatred Got them Played by a Far-Right Nutjob

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It seems that Edward Snowden is not the hero that everybody thinks that he is…

Some outlets reported last week that NSA leaker and fugitive Edward Snowden was caught into a bit of hypocrisy: public chat records indicate that back in the ancient times of 2009, he wanted leakers “shot in the balls.” Yeah, he said that. But that’s not all he said. Oh, no. The Technology site Ars Technica posted extensive public chat logs from Snowden, then using the monkier TheTrueHOOHA, that confirms what I had suspected since finding his campaign contributions to Glenn Greenwald’s straight crush Ron Paul.

The transcripts released by Ars Technica are about a lot more than Snowden’s previous contempt for leakers. He hated social security, loved Ron Paul and his ideas, and peddled the NRA’s garbage about fighting the government with guns. He suggested punishing both leakers and publications that publish the leaks. All in all, Edward Snowden is a right wing, anti-government nutjob who has managed to become the hero of so many on the reactionary Left.

Ars Technica reports that Ed Snowden is not much more than your typical, teabagging, cookie-cutter right wing nutjob who hates Obama. He complained about everything from the president’s appointment to the CIA to gun control to how Social Security has turned old people into lazy moochers.

Once Obama took office, Snowden groaned about his policies with increasing frequency. Fears that Obama might revive an assault weapons ban didn’t sit well with him as a defender of the Second Amendment. Another sticking point was social security. Snowden was an individualist, even when it was unpopular; he saw little need for a safety net.

Gun-nut:
User: the restrictions were made to appease the conservatives to get another bill passed. fucking cons.

SNOWDEN: See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment. Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.

Choice words for Social Security and the New Deal:

SNOWDEN: save money? cut this social security bullshit

User11: hahahayes

User18: Yeah! Fuck old people!

User11: social security is bullshit

User11: let’s just toss old people out in the street

User18: Old people could move in with [User11].

User11: NOOO

User11: they smell funny

SNOWDEN: Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine

SNOWDEN: you fucking retards

SNOWDEN: Magically the world changed after the new deal, and old people became made of glass

SNOWDEN: yeah, that makes sense

User11: wow

User11: you are just so fucking stupid

SNOWDEN: yeah, [User11]. and you’re quite a gem

User19: and magically, life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years.funny how that works.

SNOWDEN: [User19], you don’t think modern medicine has something to do with that? no? it’s social security? wow. I guess I missed that.

User11: hurr wait a second, life expectancy has shot up in recent times along with the dissolution of the communal family unit in exchange for the nuclear family

User11: gee i guess we might need to create a safety net for the sudden glut of helpless elderly???

SNOWDEN: they wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day

User11: you are so goddamned stupd*pid

User11: PUT OLD PEOPLE TO WORK IN THE FIELDS

SNOWDEN: my grandmother is eighty fucking three this year, and you know what? she still supports herself working as a goddamned hairdresser

What Snowden thinks about the 2009 leak by the New York Times regarding outgoing president Bush’s rejecting of bunker-buster bombs by Israel to hit Iran’s nuclear facility:

SNOWDEN: HOLY SHIT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/washington/11iran.html?_r=1&hp

SNOWDEN: WTF NYTIMES

SNOWDEN: Are they TRYING to start a war?
Jesus christ
they’re like wikileaks

User19: they’re just reporting, dude.

SNOWDEN: They’re reporting classified shit

User19: shrugs

SNOWDEN:

User19: meh

SNOWDEN: moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this?

SNOWDEN: those people should be shot in the balls.

He lashed out at the New York Times for “blowing” the illegal Bush administration program to warrantlessly wiretap Americans, referring to the Times reporting on the matter in 2006:

SNOWDEN: these are the same people who blew the whole “we could listen to osama’s cell phone” thing the same people who screwed us on wiretapping over and over and over again [sic] Thank god they’re going out of business.

User19: the NYT?

SNOWDEN: Hopefully they’ll finally go bankrupt this year.

yeah.

How the Left’s Blind Obama Hatred Got them Played by a Far-Right Nutjob

If this is true, then we’re all suckers, and we’ve been had royally.

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Person A believes a lot of things that Person B finds objectionable.
Person A also does something that Person B finds to be important and laudable.
Please explain to me how Person B has been “had” and is a “sucker”?

I’m honestly rather lost on this.

Your thesis seems to rest on the idea that, if somebody isn’t on “my team” in absolutely every way then I can’t possibly appreciate anything they do or agree with them on anything at all. I’m not sure it’s terribly healthy to classify people as “ideologically pure and thus always doing good things” and “ideologically unpure and thus always out to get me”.

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What I’ve posted is simple: Edward Snowden’s an opportunistic dunce who likes to cause shit, then runs away instead of facing up to the consequences, and is not really what he makes himself out to be. You can either agree with this, or not believe it. I’ll admit, I shouldn’t have said the last thing, but I do believe what I’ve posted.

Back to you and anybody else; please explain how president Obama wold have been a great man if everything people wanted him to do should have been a Executive Order, yet when he can’t carry these things out (or he’s blocked from carrying them out by members of his own party and by the GOP), he’s now a ‘do-nothing’ pariah?

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So, what should people do with this information?

a) Hold somebody so accountable for something they said four years ago that they’re unable to learn or change their minds? (I’ve changed more than that in four years, and he’s a pup by comparison)

b) Start supporting these programs, despite what they are, because there are things we don’t like about a source of information?

c) Support Obama’s efforts to have Snowden held for crimes of some sort, as we can see our “Justice Department” is quite fair and open. (Also, have we forgotten Bradley Manning already?)

I’m seeing a lot of emotion here, but not much that indicates a suggested path.

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False dichotomies are only fun when they’re funny.

There is at minimum a third option: believe Snowden is opportunistic and not at all a great guy but that what he did in leaking was right and he shouldn’t be punished for that in and of itself.

At any rate, Snowden’s past ROO RAH nationalistic brand of patriotism is old news and didn’t surprise me back when it was new news.

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Here are the important questions:

Is the information that Snowden revealed about the scope and nature of the NSA’s spying accurate?
Is the information that Snowden revealed something that merits concern?

Here are things that are irrelevant:

Does Snowden have political views I disagree with?
Does Snowden have religious views I disagree with?
Does Snowden have good taste in music?
Is Snowden a snappy dresser?

Those latter four are all equally irrelevant.

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  • How about admitting that statecraft’s not a perfect thing, for one, and that this mess that Dubya left Obama to clean up won’t be easy, this NSA thing being one of the messes?

  • How about thinking before one accepts said job that one now finds so crappy? It wasn’t as if Snowden was subject to the poverty draft like most young men his age; he had options.

  • How about taking his punishment like a mature adult and not fleeing to authoritarian countries? That’s how a lot of famous men did it before Snowden, and how Manning’s doing it now.

No emotion on my part, just reporting something that others have missed in their rush to canonize this man as being somebody ‘progressive’ and a hero when he most likely isn’t that, and wasn’t progressive at all.

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Some of us are upset with Obama because he violated a pre-election commitment, and I for one don’t think the moment one gets elected they should get to switch gears like that. We voted based on statements made, and he’s behaving in the opposite manner. They even scrubbed his earlier comments from the WH website.

Not saying that this problem isn’t decades in the making, nor that GWB wasn’t a huge part of the problem, but currently Obama is president, and that does put things on his shoulders.

See, that sounds like emotion again. People are complicated, and I’ve taken jobs myself that I’ve realized were very different from what was advertised or (once or twice) a vision I’d made up in my head.

Meanwhile, let’s be realistic . . . after seeing what they did to Manning, I would be ANYWHERE but America if I was going to take any kind of whistleblower risk. Not just because of ‘punishment’, but because it’s quite clear that our government is not above propaganda, deceit,and outright torment in order to save face.

So yeah. Still no action items. You’ve got moxie though, I’ll give you that :wink:

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Here’s mine:

  • Is Snowden doing this because he cares about America, or just because he’s bored/disgruntled?

  • Is Snowden really a ‘progressive’ or just a false-flag right-winger out to make things worse for progressive Americans?

  • Is Snowden concerned about his nation’s security, or looking to corrupt it for kicks?

  • Does Snowden like and respect government and believes that it can help people, or is he the kind of extremist (right or left) that believes government should be destroyed, but without providing an alternative?

These are questions that progressive people everywhere should be asking about rather than just believe one side of the story (as I used to) but it seems that they’re not doing it.

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Apropos of that: Freefall 02386 August 16, 2013

Outside of that: The subject line for this thread seems to be semantically null. I’m not sure that the rant has much more to it.

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Ha! That was worth the giggle.

And isn’t that awful about us? We’re trained to hide from mistakes, to deny them, that changing our positions in the face of new information is a sign of weakness.

NO! It’s a strength! Seek out your mistakes! Hunt them down wherever they hide, and when you find one you should jump with joy inside, because that way you get to learn something new and get better!

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Let Snowden recant his first and make a clean break. Oh wait, he can’t do that, because he’s such a big chicken…

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But what are WE to do with this? To suddenly change our opinions about these programs? To not want every bit of information we can get about our own government lying to us that we can get?

To despise Snowden and reject what he says and to forgive Obama for following through on these programs?

(He lost me when negotiated with the AMA to ditch the Public Option, so it’s not like these revelations were much of a surprise)

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I don’t know, dear sir, what do you do? Me? I’m not going to automatically believe everything I hear as being gospel from the progressive side next time (especially when it involves a possible fame whoring man-child), but think it over more.

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His motives are irrelevant to the facts he’s disclosed. Those facts would remain if his motives were pure or impure.

The story isn’t about Snowden, it’s about the NSA.

Making the story about Snowden is a distraction from the story which is about the NSA. Criticizing Snowden is just shooting the messenger.

Snowden is a fairly deluded libertarian who found something really bad happening, delivered the news through a journalist after his peers were shot down trying to deliver it through formal channels, and then had a crappy exit plan.

The NSA is a massive government security agency that is spying on all of us. The NSA is a massive government security agency that is spying on all of us, and belligerently violating the spirit of the 4th Amendment, if not the letter.

Which matters more, that the messenger is a screwy libertarian, or that a major governmental agency has been and continues to belligerently trounce the 4th amendment?

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I remember when the Left used to be smeared as blindly loving Obama for reasons that must be skin color, instead of blindly hating him for reasons that must be skin color. How times change, huh? I guess the smearing is a constant we can hold on to.

And you know, in theory libertarians are supposed to be against things like government spying, same as liberals. I know in practice people like Ron Paul don’t care much about civil liberties, but when one finally does notice that part of their ideology, it should be taken as a refreshing change not a way to dismiss them.

Expecting dissidents to “take punishment like mature adults” continues to be idiocy. Regardless of his motives, nobody should have to submit to unfair and punitive courts. How can so many people not understand why political asylum exists in the first place?

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His motives should be examined, especially if they paint him as a hypocrite trying to provoke chaos for no good reason other than he can be a part of the zeitgeist.

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Funny, I never needed that step. I tend to dig a bit deeper and rarely get worked up, I never even disregard the opinions of those I disagree with but instead prefer to give ideas their own chance, after all. . . even a stopped watch is right twice a day, right?

So yeah, I was always good.

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The truth of what the NSA is doing persists even if you don’t like the person who told you the truth or think he told you the truth for a reason you don’t like. There was no chaos created by his revelation, he didn’t suggest that was a motive, nor do his history or past comments. Why add the imaginary narrative of Snowden trying to cause harm? Real harm has been and continues to be done by the NSA.

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True, but the goal is to reform it, not just get rid of it, which is unrealistic in any sense. As for Eddie Baby, I think that the questions must be asked, especially if he is a fame whore.