Why Are We Such Suckers For Con Men Like These?

Face it, the kewl kids, the hot, trendy would-be left, the hotshots of would be-hipness are conceited snobs who love, just love to believe they are and insist on being taken as absolutely brilliant.  But they aren't any smarter than anyone else, me included.  It didn't occur to me, immediately, that what such icons of kewlness among them as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were con men who were not heroes of democracy and freedom and personal dignity.   They are people who traded in stolen information for their own attempted and obtained personal gain.

Consider the cinema lauded Edward Snowden, a man who worked for one of the contractors of the NSA who, before doing exactly what he gained fame for doing said that people who hacked and stole information as he did should be hung by their balls.  Then he stole massive amounts of the very information that we are told we should be upset that the NSA gathered, distributed some of it to such people of debatable credibility as Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and who knows who else in a rather vague chain of distribution and then took the entire massive hoards of millions of pages of that information with him to China and, when the Chinese intelligence services who arrested him got whatever deal he could make for them to not extradite him to the United States, he, then, took it to Putin's Russia - perhaps the two most effective large governments accomplished in invading the privacy of their own citizens, effectively crushing any possible opposition or even challenge by the press, including by means of imprisonment and even murder, at home and abroad.   And don't for a second be so stupid as to believe he didn't trade them the information he had with him for not being shipped back to the United States.  It was the only thing he had to keep them from making a bargain with the U.S. government to ship him back.  And he would have known that.  The places he chose to bring that information with him tells that story, that deduction, though not even hard to make is, apparently, beyond the capacity of the kewl kids.

A question that I've never seen asked about Snowden was why he stole so much information when a tiny fraction of what he stole could have made the point that the NSA collects information about us. He stole and took out of the country  so much that he couldn't possibly have known the contents of more than a small fraction of it.  The only reason I have ever been able to fathom for that is that he intended to sell some of it.  Only he was so stupid that he brought it to one of the premier dictatorships in the world.  The first crack in his insta-myth for me was to wonder if that huge hoard of intelligence couldn't have contained important information about dissidents in China and Russia which would more effectively allow those governments to suppress any opposition to them.  Then I realized that it almost certainly contained information that would make their espionage of the United States, the government AND PRIVATE CITIZENS more effective.   If you don't like the NSA having a record of your e-mail or phone calls, just who called who, how would you like the Russian kleptocrats to have whatever information Snowden stole, perhaps including that information and not unlikely clues as to how the NSA got it?

And that's not to mention what I said yesterday, that the what-passes-for-heroes in the lefty mythos of the American "left" Julian Assange and Wikileaks are actively engaged in using stolen contents of e-mails, likely stolen by the very Russian government that Snowden handed so much information to, and publishing it to damage John Podesta, Sidney Bluementhal, and, ultimately Hillary Clinton in order to put Putin's buddy and the reported massive debtor to the Russian oligarchs, Donald Trump in the American presidency.   Now, what purpose do you suppose that could serve?

If Julian Assange were exposed as being that kind of operative for the CIA in Greece in the 1960s or Venezuela in the 2000s, he would have exactly the kind of (deserved) condemnation and loathing on the left that he doesn't get for doing that for the Putin dictatorship in the United States, today.   He and his Wikileaks are the tool of a foreign despot which does exactly what the most paranoid and fevered fiction of would-be lefty Hollywood imagines but only imagines could happen here.  What is it about this situation that doesn't impeach the credibility of them and the pseudo-journalists like Glenn Greenwald who have attached themselves like limpets and barnacles to the garbage scows that the big boys in this game are?  

The United States government, like all governments,  has the capability of doing bad things but, unlike the Russian or Chinese governments, it has some measure of democratic control, some limits on what it can get away with.   I'm not saying that we should give the U.S. government a carte blanche and a blank check to do whatever the unsavory characters who we entrust with being spies dream up.  But I am saying if we shouldn't trust the NSA, we sure as hell shouldn't trust the unsavory characters it hires who then do what Snowden and Assange have done and we shouldn't turn them into two-dimensional Hollywood heroes in the manner of thriller movies.  Those don't even get the depth of the second-rate novels they're based on.  We certainly shouldn't trust those like Assange who have proven themselves to be sleazes working for and at the service of governments as anti-democratic and corrupt as Putin's.   We shouldn't trust the phony, play journalists like Glenn Greenwald who need to lie about the status of the sleazy game they use to become famous and wealthy.

The damage that the Marxists and anarchists did to the credibility of the American left lives on in this kind of bull shit.   The reflexive assumption that what American democracy produces does worse than what others, even the most anti-democratic governments do, is one of the stupidest habits of the left.  Yes, our government is certainly capable of doing bad things and it does bad things, all governments can and do.  Democracy, even the best of imaginable democracies is only as good as The People who govern themselves through it.  It can fail to do what's right but, unlike autocratic and dictatorial government, democracy has the capacity to try to correct some, ideally many of those things and to prevent some of the worst of them.   The reflex that those like Greenwald are depending on is that the ability to see through that in the context of the Trump-fascist bid for the presidency, as supported by the Putin regime will be swamped by reflexive paranoia about our own government.  That the likes of Greenwald and Assange are on the side of the kleptocrats of the Putin regime should certainly discredit them.  If we don't take them as discredited, we also deserve to be discredited.

Either you really believe in the potential of democracy or not.   No one who demonstrates that they lack that belief should ever be mistaken for someone who should be allowed to pass themselves off as superior.   Why are we such suckers for con men who obviously don't?