The New York Post is out with a libertarian-bashing editorial, courtesy of former Bush speechwriter William McGurn, about how there’s no moral difference between supporting Snowden and cheering for murderous mob bosses.
McGurn, horrified by recent write-ups of the standing ovations Snowden received from “excited college kids” at the International Students for Liberty Conference, is even more upset that adults are also Snowden fans:
In this case, however, the idea of Ed Snowden as hero is not confined to tender young minds caught up in the afterglow of their first encounter with “Atlas Shrugged.” It also affects grown men who should know better.
He is particularly disturbed by Sen. Rand Paul’s refusal to outright condemn Snowden and call for his head. “[T]he younger Paul has hedged more on Snowden, saying he doesn’t like breaking the law but that Snowden is mostly guilty of ‘civil disobedience,'” he writes. “Never mind that the heroes of civil disobedience from Henry David Thoreau to Martin Luther King went to jail for their beliefs.”
Is McGurn’s argument here, then, that Martin Luther King should have been jailed?
He, of course, proceeds to throw in some dark insinuations that Snowden is probably definitely a Russian spy (a claim Snowden has dismissed as absurd) and refers to the revelations of NSA spying as “stolen secrets” that Snowden “published where all our enemies could read them.”
But things really get on a roll when he asks, “[S]ay you oppose the NSA program and believe it a good thing it was exposed. Does that make Snowden is [sic] a hero? ” He continues:
It’s an elementary distinction, between those who honorably serve our nation and those who betray her.
The libertarian inability to make it with Ed Snowden helps explain why libertarians have a long ways to go before the American people will ever elect one president.
Speaking of “distinctions”— there are, perhaps, some fairly large distinctions to be made between a cutthroat mob underboss who became a government informant after being indicted for murder and racketeering, and a principled individual who sacrifices their own liberty in the hopes of advancing protections for the civil liberties of others.
