‘Shrill and Hysterical’: Michael Bennett, Tulsi Gabbard and Edward Snowden
Posted on | February 4, 2025 | No Comments
Everybody has commented on last week’s drama during the Senate confirmation hearing for Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence. Many of my readers are big fans of Tulsi on “Rule 5” grounds, but I hope you’ll forgive me for saying, “Meh.” Just not my type. I mean, don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are Samoan, but . . . Well, best not to give more fodder to the SPLC, I suppose.
Anyway, my point is that my support of Gabbard’s nomination is objective, and not influenced by considerations of her alleged hotness. Her assignment from Trump, as I understand it, is to root out the Deep State corruption in the intelligence community (IC), and she was chosen for that task in large part because the Deep State went after her when she was challenging Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic primaries. She was a target of the “spies who lie,” and is therefore highly motivated.
Trump II: Sweet Revenge, this administration would be called, if it were a blockbuster Hollywood adventure flick, and I’m totally down for this agenda, let the debris land where it may. A populist disruption of the bipartisan D.C. status quo is long overdue, and I probably shouldn’t be surprised by unexpected reactions to this, as the disruptive impact has shaken and shifted the coalitions which make up the two parties. People I have detested for years are now on “my” side, while others who I’d long considered my friends are now on the other side — despite the fact that I’m the same person I’ve always been. Going back to the earliest years of this blog, for example, we haven’t been exactly friendly toward Meghan McCain, to put it as mildly as possible. So it was with mixed emotions that I found myself nodding along with what she told Mark Halperin:
“Senator [Michael] Bennet’s behavior is an example of what Americans are sick of. It was designed for YouTube. . . . Like, I could see him looking for his camera angle. . . . No woman could scream at the top of her lungs, doing what he did, and not be called unhinged and shrill, and so I’m calling him unhinged and shrill.”
We are truly through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole, when I am favorably citing Meghan McCain. Now, as to the substance of Bennet’s histrionic performance, he kept demanding that Gabbard give a yes-or-no answer to the question, “Is Edward Snowden a traitor?” Well, the colloquial use of “traitor” is different than its constitutional definition, but I don’t know if semantics was the cause of Gabbard’s repeated refusal to answer “yes” to Bennet’s question.
At the time of Snowden’s data-dump of vast quantities of classified data he’d obtained while working as a contractor for the NSA, the Left generally hailed Snowden as a hero, much as they’d hailed Bradley Manning as a hero, and I was having none of that. Readers will recall how the whole “Anonymous” thing was originally linked to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, so that Julian Assange was beloved by the socialist scum, even after he was accused of raping one of his fangirls in Sweden.
The hero-worship of “leakers” and “hackers” always struck me as folly, even if — as has sometimes been the case — these leaks and hacks were politically beneficial to Republicans. (Hello, Hillary!)
The problem with Snowden, as with Manning, is that these were people holding a position of trust, given access to sensitive information as part of their jobs, and it offends my sense of honor and propriety whenever anyone in such a position betrays their duty. Some of my friends have security clearances, and are thus required to keep secrets, and when you’d getting paid to keep secrets, you ought to either (a) do your job or (b) quit. Here I will invoke the once-famous saying of Elbert Hubbard, that “an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.”
To be entrusted with any secret as part of one’s employment is to accept the responsibility of protecting that secret as a moral duty. Notice that, in the Scout Law, “trustworthy” and “loyal” are the first qualities mentioned. This is not by accident. Snowden has said that his “breaking point” was “seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress” about domestic surveillance. We can all now agree, I believe, that Clapper is a wretched swine who ought to spend the rest of his life in Leavenworth, without endorsing what Snowden did.
What happened to those circa-2011 “Occupy” types, who once mentioned Snowden in the same worshipful tone that they praised Manning? What has happened in the past dozen years or so that Bennet is posturing like this — against a former Democratic congresswoman, I must point out — without any apparent fear that his party’s left-wing grassroots base will turn against him? When did Democrats become the party advocating domestic surveillance and defending federal spy agencies?
We live in strange times and, as I say, I’m the same person I’ve always been, just older and perhaps less prone to get excited over day-to-day battles of politics. Live long enough, you’ll see many situations like this, where the Democratic Party shifts en masse from one side of an issue to another, without ever acknowledging that they’ve changed their position. Of course, they went from being the party of Jim Crow to being the party of Black Lives Matter in roughly a half-century, and good luck trying to get any Democrat to provide an honest explanation of that trajectory.
Sometimes conservatives are accused of being similarly inconsistent, but I can answer that question simply: Conservatism is the opposition to liberalism, which is always the aggressor in the conflict. It has been pointed out — to me, directly, by friends who seem to think I’m in need of tutoring of the subject — that “liberalism” is a misnomer, adopted by Democrats in the 1930s as a way to escape the odium which attached itself to the “progressive” label that Woodrow Wilson had proudly worn. Over the past 20 years or so, the Left wing of the Democratic Party has tried to revive the “progressive” label, and some of them would even prefer to be known as “socialists.” My point, however, is that whatever they may call themselves at any time, liberals are always basically the same. Because they keep coming up with novel schemes to wreck the country (or sometimes re-branding their old schemes as “new”), liberals compel their opponents to shift their ground in order to defend the country from being wrecked. In this, then, conservatives resemble Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in 1864, constantly making flank marches southeastward, all the way from the Rappahannock to the James River, as Grant’s Union army shifted leftward in its attempt to get past Lee.
“Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.”
What we are seeing now, if we can extend our military metaphor a bit further, is a counter-attack, an effort by conservatives to seize the strategic initiative, to push the progressive Cthulhu into a corner and keep hammering away at him until he’s finally defeated. In such a desperate struggle, we must take our allies where we find them, and accept that the tactical measures involved may be somewhat outside the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules. So I find myself nodding in agreement with Meghan McCain, and the army must keep marching.
Carry on, my fellow soldiers.
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