Edward Snowden’s Parasites: Evo Morales, Julian Assange & More
I know, I know. We aren’t supposed to pay attention to Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker doing an uncanny Sir Alfred Mehran impression at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. It’s the drip, drip, drip of purloined documents that counts.
But a story this big, this consequential, needs a dramatis personae of dramatic people. So let’s offer Snowden a brief respite from the spotlight, pretend his motives are either pure or of little consequence, and instead turn our gaze toward those grandstanding politicians and activists demanding that our hero be left alone and all attention refocused on them.
After a few weeks of hypocritical outrage and bluster from Ecuador, Cuba, and every other recent recipient of Venezuelan largesse, the media gaggle has shifted to the blustering and outraged Bolivians. According to the Bolivian government, President Evo Morales’s plane, traveling from Moscow to La Paz, was diverted to Austria after rumors percolated that Snowden was on board. He wasn’t. Morales was said to have been “humiliated” by the unplanned stopover, the victim of yet another yanqui affront to Latin American sovereignty.
Indeed, the wonderful benefit of being a small, Hugo Chávez–influenced Latin American country is that employing measured language of diplomacy pays fewer dividends than unrestrained populist rage, something that one doesn’t frequently hear from the Obama administration. As Chávez well understood—having learned it from Fidel Castro—blame for any problem or self-inflicted disaster is best transferred to the malevolent agents of Washington imperialism.
Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/05/edward-snowden-s-parasites-evo-morales-julian-assange-more.html
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