Yes, there's an NSA spying scandal--it's just not the one everyone's talking about

The far Left and the far Right are full of paranoid antigovernment zealots who think Snowden is a hero for revealing the gummint's evil plot to spy on us all. But it wasn't and isn't, as a less paranoid court recently adjudicated (on this case's way to the Supreme Court).

The real scandal is how the National Security Agency let someone--not even an employee, but an outside contractor--steal a boatload of Top Secrets. That reveals a kind of incompetence that's truly scary. Heads should roll when we find out how this happened.

Of course the Republicans don't care whether our security apparatus works well or not--only whether they can lay their hands on a lever that can get them back into the White House.

As for Snowden--he isn't a whistleblower. A whistleblower is a member of an institution who comes to believe that the institution he belongs to does bad things in the dark that conflict with the things it says in public.

Snowden has stated that he sought the position he held in order to steal secrets from the NSA and reveal them. That makes him a spy in doing so--and remember, someone can be a spy for money or for ideology. They're a spy either way.

And then he revealed things about American spying activities that damaged our national interests. Since Snowden is an American citizen, that makes him a traitor. And now he's promising to reveal further secrets about America in exchange for residency and protection in another country.

It is true that whistleblowers are frequently punished severely for their actions. That's unjust and corrupt, but it isn't germane to Snowden.

The question for those inclined to treat Snowden as a hero is whether they're taking into account the damage he did the nation in the course of making his revelations.

Cyberwarfare and treason

Today, GOP Ministry of Propaganda spokespuppet John McCain traded in his military credibility once again by attacking the Obama administration for leaking details of our cyberwarfare against Iran to the New York Times' reporter David Sanger.

First, this is a lie at its very foundation. The Obama administration has never betrayed the trust of the American people and its spies like the Republicans did by outing a CIA spy and thus all her contacts abroad, for the petty reason of political revenge.

The only reason the NY Times could talk about this cyberwarfare is because a revision of the software "misbehaved" and thus revealed its existence and purpose to the Iranians and their Russian allies. Up to that point the Iranians had just believed that their nuclear power/weapons development systems were crappy and/or their engineers were crappy. But then a bug in a rev of the software let the cat out of the bag.

Moreover, the NY Times and David Sanger redacted all operational details that might tell our enemies anything they didn't know.

Now the Republicans know all this--they aren't idiots. Just amoral. The purpose of their denunciation is to bury the fact that the Obama administration is pursuing our interests abroad as aggressively and effectively as the Republicans pretend to be and aren't (as in attacking the country that had nothing to do with 9/11 while simultaneously letting the author of the attack and his henchmen go free.

One of the fundamental laws of the Ministry of Propaganda is: Attack the strengths of the GOP's enemies. They did it to Senator Kerry with the phony Swiftboat campaign (abetted by Kerry's ridiculous military salute at the Democratic convention). Now they're doing it to President Obama, with complete nonsense like Mitt Romney--who constantly reveals his ignorance of foreign affairs--giving President Obama an "F" in foreign affairs efficacy, and by today's attack on President Obama by John McCain, who as an ex-military man himself and someone who once showed signs of integrity before abandoning it for political gain, should know better (and probably does).

The Ministry of Propaganda is distressed by President Obama's intelligent, forceful pursuit of our interests abroad, free of the Republicans' specialty--big talk that just panders to the bottom half of Amercans' IQ bell curve. His cyberwarfare campaign, continuing what President Bush started, to his credit, is a prime example of this. And the Ministry of Propaganda doesn't just believe in calling patriots traitors, it also believes in always stepping on the other sides' lines.

You see this on political talk shows, where the Republican operatives routinely interrupt the Democrats on any panel, feigning choleric outrage at whatever the Democrat says, and accusing any host that tries to stop them of being So-shul-ist tools.

Welcome to the New Republican Party--the party of swaggering bullies who treat the truth purely operationally.

They're coming to resemble the conservative political parties of Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries more and more. I await their trying to make it a felony to criticize a Republican.