Once again, multimillionaire New York Times columnist Tom Friedman weighs in with wisdom that could only come from the confines of a spectacular private estate:
To make a second impression, Snowden would need to come home, make his case and face his accusers. It would mean risking a lengthy jail term, but also trusting the fair-mindedness of the American people, who, I believe, will not allow an authentic whistle-blower to be unfairly punished.
Which reminds us — again — just how colossally dumb Friedman is.
“The American people” don’t decide criminal cases. Judges and juries do. And they’re not allowed to let people off the hook for illegal actions because they think those actions were morally right. Snowden committed a number of illegal acts, any number of which carry long prison terms. If he faces trial in the U.S., he will be found guilty and sentenced to significant prison term. This isn’t a movie. And I’m not even going to get into the fact that the U.S. government wants to get even with him for embarrassing them, and send a message to future whistleblowers.
Besides, it’s far from clear that “the American people” support Snowden. A July 24th ABC poll found that 53% of the public supports charging Snowden as a criminal. Granted, all you need is one hold-out juror to walk free.
What exactly would be a fair punishment, anyway? In my view, Obama and his minions should be in prison for the NSA programs Snowden revealed. Snowden deserves a medal and compensation for the stress he suffered, and those Russian hotel bills. To me, there’s nothing fair or moderate about the idea of Snowden serving a single minute of prison time.
“The fact is, he dumped his data and fled to countries that are hostile to us and to the very principles he espoused,” Friedman writes. Well, yeah. Because, if you’re on the lam from Country A, you don’t go hang out in nations that are friendly to Country A. What’s galling is the implication that there is something immoral about Snowden’s refusal to turn himself in.
Why should he enable his own oppression? Why should anyone? Especially when the system he is challenging is lawless?
Why should Snowden voluntarily submit to punishment he doesn’t deserve?
Why should he trust the American system of justice, which found Bradley Manning guilty of similar “crimes,” after torturing him?
To which I add: Snowden does a lot more good to the American people by remaining free in Russia, where he can be interviewed and explain the data he is leaking, than behind bars.
Friedman’s analysis is infantile and absurd, and he deserves to be fired for this column alone.
8 Comments.
Friedman isn’t dumb. He’s writing to provide one of the most vital services of empire: making the self-indulgent winners of systematic rapine feel smart and, above all, moral.
We tend to think that he’s dumb because his disgusting, self-congratulatory dribble has nothing to do with reality, but that’s because we have to live in reality and when we’re wrong about reality, we experience pain. When he’s wrong about reality, the NYT cuts him a check. Our priorities are different.
Well, actually, jury nullification is a thing, but our authoritarian government has been squelching that notion wherever it can, dovetailing rather nicely with prosecutorial misconduct and police testalying.
Once you’re an enemy of the state, nothing else matters. This adherence to state authority is why revolution (as opposed to outright rebellion, which is inevitable and messy) hasn’t sparked; people in the U.S. still think that their tribe includes some element of the U.S. aristocracy and/or government, which is just as tremendously fucking stupid and wrong as anything Friedman will pen. Practically speaking, we have a huge chunk of the population that simply doesn’t consistently operate with a moral compass when it comes to politics, and you can’t build a political faction staffed by people who would go tell the person next to them to go fuck themselves as soon as word came down from their enemies that he or she was a “bad person.”
The fact that Manning is and was tortured is not part of the Official Narrative, and that’s due in part to persons like Friedman that act to help the intellectually idle ignore the obvious. Having obscured this relevant fact, Friedman need not ask this obvious question. His screeds are self-serving even as they are self-serving.
Everything I’ve read of his is either stupid obvious or stupid wrong. He’s a boring read too…don’t get why anyone takes him seriously.
This is what I’d expect of him on this issue. He is one of those “the American government is mostly a force for great good and the system works and the people are smart and fair” type of guys. La-De-Da. What a fanciful world he inhabits.
Indeed, Jack, what’s strange is that relatively intelligent people take him seriously. Well, what’s really strange is that he remains employed. On the grounds of writing ability alone, the man ought to be unemployed.
Ted,
On the basis of his writing he ought to not only be unemployed, he ought to be unemployable.
I’ve said it before. Thinking is hard. Friedman doesn’t think. He can’t. I mean “he can’t” as a conscious decision. See, if he were to start thinking about what he’s writing, he’d run into the contradictions and the fallacies, and he’d have to go back to the beginning of the page. And then he’d realize that pretty much every word he’s ever written was nonsense.
So he doesn’t think about it. It’s the only way to avoid more work.
Why wouldn’t Friedman be taken seriously? What has he done to not be taken seriously by intellectuals?
Friedman deliberately and recklessly gets facts wrong. This is of no moment to intellectuals so long as these falsehoods — some deliberate lies, some recklessly self-serving, some insinuiating lies of implication — do not contradict the narrative circulated amongst these intellectuals, a.k.a. mainstream thinking.
So why would Friedman be fired for saying mistruths that are already deemed to be objective truth by his target audience?
Friedman isn’t a mystery. The confusion he engenders comes from the fact that people seem to think that the NYT is for them. Parts of it are, sure, but Friedman’s column is designed to keep the parasitic portions of our culture hale and healthy. It’s like getting a perscription for estrogen if you’re male: it may not be that your medicine is bad, it may well be a simple case of misdelivery.
Think of it this way: is it right to have been wrong about the Iraq War? I mean that in every possible way. Is it morally fine to have been pro-war? Was it logical to have been pro-war? Was it factually correct to have deemed Iraq a threat to the U.S. population at large? Not just “was it acceptable?” but was it right to think this way?
Well, there’s a bunch of war hawks who would answer with a resounding yes, and many of them are “relatively intelligent.” They fucked up, morally and intellectually, at the biggest question you could possibly be wrong about. But they didn’t want to feel bad about that, or change the horrible personality traits that made that failure possible, so how do intellectuals respond to this catastrophe?
Friedman. Friedman bridges the gap between self-serving bullshit and cultural acceptance. Courtiers like him are why we have a mainstream media. Authoritarianism needs respectability, and creatures like Friedman provide it.
We have a massively well-heeled social class that bases their intellectual elitism on demonstrable stupidity. They need Friedman. The rest of the NYT is along for the ride.
My comment on Friedman (with which two agreed) was that he always says that America is the Greatest Force for Good the world has ever known, so anyone and everyone who opposes the US president (Snowden and Putin in this column) is fighting for Evil Incarnate.
I would disagree with Sekhmet that intellectuals mindlessly agree with this sentiment, because my definition of ‘intellectual’ is someone more narrow than Sekhmet’s.
I skipped over Snowden because Friedman blames Putin for the slaughter in Syria. Friedman is, of course, beating the drums for a US decapitation of the Syrian state. Not an unpopular idea: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Britain, France, and Turkey would like a chunk of the fertile crescent, and if Obama will just decapitate Syria, every one of them hopes to pick up a fertile piece of that crescent. That this will be rather unpleasant for the ordinary Syrians is irrelevant to US policy.
If one reads Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (please don’t watch the Audie Murphy travesty), he says there were two options in Vietnam: the French or Ho. The US rejected both, picked a weak, corrupt (but Christian) group hated by 99% of Vietnamese, supported the US puppet with 500,000 troops and more tonnage of bombs than all that was dropped in WWII (including the two nukes), killing millions of Vietnamese, and finally losing.
Given that the anti-Assad forces are Islamic radicals who cut the hearts out of their defeated foes (‘foe’ is rather broader than ‘enemy’ since they’re killing anyone and everyone who isn’t a radical Islamist Sunni Arab, and Syria has lots who aren’t), it seems that, as in Vietnam, the US is backing the wrong side. And Putin is backing a side that’s by far the least of the available evils.
So Friedman’s condemnation of Putin is just more of The US is the Greatest Force for Good the World has Ever Known.
Only some of us question that premise.
(Which is why I started watching RTV after learning about it from Mr Rall.)
I didn’t say anything about intellectuals being mindless. In fact, my last post directly contradicts that notion and implies that intellectuals are very self-aware, hence the love for and necessity of Friedman.
Wow – so many words to say something so simple. Snowdenmgave up his freedom to try to save or help ours. The last news I heard was proof that the NSA has violated our trust thousands of times. If this is true, then Obama has to lie against it even more…