Tag Archives: Snowden

Snowden: Case Against Him Grows Stronger

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

There are those who believe that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden is a patriot. I think not.

It is just too vast a leap of faith to believe that his thievery and treachery were of noble intent, done to protect the Republic and my privacy, and that he exhausted all other avenues to his end before decimating our national security and running off to Russia.

So it was with some satisfaction that I listened last weekend to Sunday talk show guests House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Diane Feinstein and former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who made these observations: Continue reading →

Cynical

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I am crumbling beneath the heavy gravity of our national cynicism. I am being washed away by the flood of ill will between and among Americans. I am blinded by the whirling police light on Drudge and by the “Breaking News” scroll at the bottom of my TV screen. I have been rendered deaf by the non-stop shouting on cable chat shows.

I know this sounds like I’m signing off. I am not. But I feel like I need to go to Good Citizenship Re-hab along with about 317 million others, and get back to some semblance of a shared national direction. Continue reading →

Whew! 2013 is Over

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I thought that the best thing – maybe the only good thing – about 2013 is that it is a prime number. But it’s not. There are three prime number factors of 2013: 3, 11, and 61. So, it didn’t even have that.

So many people, groups, organizations, and institutions have failed this year that it is difficult to find one that is held by Americans in anything other than what Winston Churchill called “minimum high regard.”

In a Gallup poll taken mid-year only three institutions – the military (76%), small business (65%), and the police (57%) – got marks higher than 50% on the question: How much confidence to you have in the following institutions? Continue reading →

Oh for 20

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

America’s Traitor, Edward Snowden has allegedly applied for asylum in 20 countries.

None have granted it.

But late yesterday afternoon, there was suspicion that Snowden had boarded the aircraft carrying the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, from Moscow to Bolivia. Those suspicions were so strong that, according to the International Herald Tribune: “Bolivia’s foreign minister told news outlets that France and Portugal had both blocked airspace access to the Bolivian presidential plane on suspicion that Mr. Snowden might been on board.” Continue reading →

The United States of…France

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

It’s now official. America is the France of the 21st century.

France was a big power in the 18th and 19th centuries. The French were pretty much in a constant state of war what with everything from the Seven Years’ War, to the French and Indian Wars, to the American Revolution, to the Napoleonic Wars.

Then came the 20th Century when World War I was mostly fought on French soil leading to their preemptive surrender in World War II. Since then the French still pretend to be a full-fledged member of the Planetary Cool Kids Table, but they have to sit on the end and fetch extra pints of milk for the real members. Continue reading →

When Spies Were Spies, and Skunks, Skunks

BY JAY BRYANT

Back in the Stone Age, when I was a kid, even a pre-teen in the backwoods of Maine was aware of a man named Allen Dulles, who had spent the War (you know, the War) in Switzerland spying on the Nazis, and then was chosen to head up our new American espionage agency, the CIA. Dulles, whose brother, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State at the time, was the very template for the caricature of the tweedy, pipe-smoking superspy.

Even little kids like me knew that he knew stuff nobody else knew, and we knew we were glad he did. We felt safer knowing there were real, live spies fighting the Cold War with the USSR and making sure it didn’t become a Hot War.  Continue reading →