Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

“But what about the lurkers?”

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Giving up is unforgivable.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Side Note Open Thread: Roger Stone, Less Than Meets the Eye

Side Note Open Thread: Roger Stone, Less Than Meets the Eye

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Kudos to Media Matters for spotting this, which might’ve gotten some traction this morning if Trump hadn’t decided to start calling for his supporters to shoot people:

QUESTIONER: With regard to the October surprise, what would be your forecast on that given what Julian Assange has intimated he’s going to do?

ROGER STONE: Well, it could be any number of things. I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.

Stone was working for Richard Nixon when the original October surprise may or may not have tipped the election to the Repubs (at the cost of many innocent lives, but what does that matter to the GOP?). He’s never stopped using that particular street-cred tidbit to inflate his resume, and his fees. Anybody can say he’s “communicated” with Assange — if you include public comments about the man, half the people on this blog have ‘communicated’ with Assange — but anything beyond posting YAY JULIAN YOU GO GUY on social media implies (a) Roger Stone has access; (b) Julian Assange cares about what Roger Stone wants; (c) Julian Assange can be asked/forced/bargained into compliance with anyone’s agenda other than Julian Assange’s (if that). It’s bullshit, fed to an audience eager to pay for it.

In semi-related news, I still {heart} my senior Senator…

I’m collecting tweets about “Second Amendment solutions” for an aggregation post later tonight, incidentally. Brace yourselves…

Reader Interactions

143Comments

  2. 2.

    RobertDSC-iPad Mini

    I hated Dubya with the fire of a thousand suns. But I never wished him, Laura, or the girls any harm.

  5. 5.

    Kay

    It’s great because Donald Trump probably believed women would like him:

    Of all the tribulations facing Donald J. Trump, perhaps none is stirring as much anxiety inside his campaign as the precipitous decline of support from Republican women, an electoral cornerstone for the party’s past nominees that is starting to crumble.
    In a striking series of defections, high-profile Republican women are abandoning decades of party loyalty and vowing to oppose Mr. Trump, calling him emotionally unfit for the presidency and a menace to national security.
    But even more powerfully, his support from regular Republican women is falling after Mr. Trump’s provocative remarks about everything from the silence of the mother of a slain Muslim soldier to how women should respond to sexual harassment in the workplace

    He probably believed this for the last 50 years, and it isn’t true- most women don’t like him. This crash will be fascinating to watch. For 50 years this guy has been living in a fantasy land.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    @Mnemosyne: Not to mention that when Preston Brooks returned home to his district, he was treated as a hero. Oh, and while he beat up a much older man trapped at a bolted-to-the-floor desk, one of his buddies pulled out a pistol to keep anyone else from interfering.

  9. 9.

    Schlemazel

    @redshirt:
    There certainly is some similarity. One portion of the nation would rather destroy the whole thing that allow someone they disagree with become President.

    A big difference is that it was relatively easy to divide the haters from the decent folks in 1860. in 2017 that is going to be very difficult as the haters are scattered across the country.

  11. 11.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    @Kay: Between The You’re Fired Show and Miss Universe Pageant he may have become too used to young women playing up to his power and thought it was his animal magnetism (sic).

  12. 12.

    danielx

    @Kay:

    Spoke to a friend in the bar business recently, asked her what the kitchen employees and servers thought of the Trumpster. She said, well, “….this is the bar business – how many variations on douchebag do you want? I’ve heard douche rocket, douche canoe, douchewaffle…and then we get into the really unpleasant stuff”.

    This being an establishment where women occupy eighty percent of the positions. They do not love them some Donald, no they do not.

  13. 13.

    sinnedbackwards

    @redshirt: I’m afraid so. I’m so hoping to timewarp to Nov 10th and Nancy worrying if her majority is in double digits.

  14. 14.

    Amir Khalid

    @Kay:
    My guess is, he’s the last remaining hope for many who want to see Crooked Hillary in jail for Grand Theft of Nomination.

  15. 15.

    Mike in NC

    Home alone and bored tonight, so I tuned in to MSNBC to see a parade of Trump apologists lying about what that squirrelly fucker really meant to say. Sad!

  17. 17.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

    Because they really do believe that Hillary is secretly crooked. It’s nuts, but they do. I had an otherwise sensible conservative tell me the other day that he thinks she’s just as dishonest as Nixon.

    (“Sensible conservative” because he thinks this but is going to vote for her no matter what rather than let Trump win.)

  18. 18.

    Gin & Tonic

    I know we like to make fun of Tom Friedman around here, often for cause, but here’s how he closes what I assume is tomorrow’s column, and it could hardly be better or more powerful:

    People are playing with fire here, and there is no bigger flamethrower than Donald Trump. Forget politics; he is a disgusting human being. His children should be ashamed of him. I only pray that he is not simply defeated, but that he loses all 50 states so that the message goes out across the land — unambiguously, loud and clear: The likes of you should never come this way again.

  20. 20.

    Patricia Kayden

    Wonder if all those on the Left who supported Assange/Wikileaks/Snowden now feel differently. It’s obvious that Assange is doing everything he can to tilt the election for Trump.

    Trump is working hard to thwart Assange’s assistance, however, by continuing to make train wreck comments.

  21. 21.

    Mary G

    Even the Mustache of Understanding wrote a barnburner in the NYT today, who put an extremely misleading headline on it, using the word ambiguous.

    People are playing with fire here, and there is no bigger flamethrower than Donald Trump. Forget politics; he is a disgusting human being. His children should be ashamed of him. I only pray that he is not simply defeated, but that he loses all 50 states so that the message goes out across the land — unambiguously, loud and clear: The likes of you should never come this way again.

    You tell ’em, Tom!!

  23. 23.

    RareSanity

    I haven’t been in moderation jail for quite some time…can someone fish my comment out?

  24. 24.

    dmsilev

    @Mnemosyne: I’m from Boston; Charles Sumner is someone you learn about early on. If nothing else, you learn his name the first time you ride a car to the airport (one of the tunnels under Boston Harbor is named for him).

  25. 25.

    Schlemazel

    @danielx:
    Back in the 80s I was in NYC and there was a story I read about the bridge workers who would piss off the bridges when Trump’s boat was going under.

    Lots of people have hated him a long time. the more they know about him the more they hate him.

  26. 26.

    Anne Laurie

    @Kay:

    Why do people believe Assange has anything at all?

    Security experts inside and outside the U.S. have agreed that there is evidence of Russian-based ‘agents’ tampering with the documents already released by Wikileaks. So Assange could certainly produce something that looked incriminating, to a Wingnut Wurlitzer audience well-primed to believe Demon-crats capable of bending time & space in our efforts to thwart REAL MURKANS.

    I don’t believe Assange has anything genuinely incriminating, or he’d have dumped it during the DNC convention.

  29. 29.

    Kay

    @Mnemosyne:

    I know why Stone is promoting it- he wants Trump supporters and donors to stick around until October.

    Assange just doesn’t seem that reliable to me. Maybe it’s because i thought the DNC emails were not a big deal at all. To me they were political people being political. Least surprising secret emails I have ever seen :)

  32. 32.

    Kay

    @Patricia Kayden:

    I don’t think we know why Assange is doing this. It could be just the oldest explanation in the world- someone is paying him. He must require quite a bit of income. It has to come from somewhere. I don’t know why Assange would be above getting paid. None of the rest of these people work for free.

  33. 33.

    Patricia Kayden

    @the Conster, la Citoyenne: A great read. There is no doubt that President Obama is leaving this country in much better shape than what he found it. And there’s nothing Republicans can do about that. Secretary Clinton was smart to embrace a very popular President.

  34. 34.

    Amir Khalid

    @Kay:
    Julian Assange considers Hilary a personal enemy. I understand he blames her for instigating the charges that have led to him being holed up n the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He hates her more than he likes Trump.

  35. 35.

    hitchhiker

    I listened to a podcast of the Bill Maher’s show from last Friday night. Assange was one of the featured guests (not in person, obsly), and he was gleeful about the departure of those DNC folks. Taking a victory lap, with fists pumped! He’s basically a tech-savvy version of James O’Keefe.

  38. 38.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

    At the risk of stirring up a blog war, the people who worship Assange are the same ones who think Snowden should get a full pardon and tickertape parade for his services to humanity. IOW, they don’t get why anything, anytime should be secret, even your credit card number.

  39. 39.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Mary G: Thomas Friedman doesn’t understand that Donald Trump just had to pick any one of a whole range of targets, political correctness, liberals, Democrats, anything in that region, and go there with a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, just go one by one insulting them and say what part of this sentence do you not understand? You think, you know, that we’ll just let this liberalism grow? Well Suck. On. This.

  41. 41.

    nutella

    @Kay:

    i thought the DNC emails were not a big deal at all.

    Yep, they were very dull, really.

    The only shocking thing about them was the invasion of privacy.

  42. 42.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Kay: It’s possible that someone is paying him. He seemed to have something against Secretary Clinton when questioned by Bill Maher. He should return to Sweden and face those rape charges and stay out of our election.

  44. 44.

    Mary G

    @Gin & Tonic: I do, and I imagine I know what kind. I paused to consider what to quote and you nipped in ahead of me. I thought about the first line:

    And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin got assassinated.

    The comparison of Trump to Netan-yahoo had me cheering.

  45. 45.

    redshirt

    @Patricia Kayden: Also, and most importantly, it will be Obama leading the transition from his Admin to Hillary’s. Imagine if it was from today’s Republican – do you imagine they’d actually surrender the office?

  48. 48.

    Kay

    @danielx:

    I think he’s repulsive in every way possible. I can’t believe any one woman married him, let alone more than one.

    He doesn’t have a single redeeming quality that I can see. He’s not even clownish in a funny, appealing way. In fact he seems to totally lack a sense of humor. There’s such a mean edge to him- you see it in that clip- how he deliberately goes over the line to rile the crowd up. He may give whole new meaning to ‘losing ugly” as this progresses.

  51. 51.

    nutella

    @Amir Khalid:

    Julian Assange considers Hilary a personal enemy. I understand he blames her for instigating the charges that have led to him being holed up n the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He hates her more than he likes Trump.

    Presumably because it was two women who accused him of rape in Sweden and everybody knows all those damn women stick together. Other than that I can’t think of any connection with HRC.

  53. 53.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

    Some people in the intelligence community think Wikileaks is being paid by the Russians.

    The fact that Assange was apparently claiming yesterday that it’s Hillary who has Russian ties, not him, makes me even more suspicious.

    Personally — and I have no expertise — I think the DNC leak did have Russian ties, but I doubt that even they want to tie themselves to Trump now. They’ll be happy to cause some mischief between now and November, but even Putin doesn’t want Trump with his finger on the nuke button.

  54. 54.

    dmsilev

    @Kay:

    I can’t believe any one woman married him, let alone more than one.

    Well, he has (or does a good job of seeming to have) a lot of money. For some people, that’s enough.

  56. 56.

    Kay

    It’s funny how things turn out, because to me Hillary Clinton seems particularly well suited to deal with Donald Trump. She is driving him insane and he doesn’t seem to phase her at all.

  57. 57.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Mnemosyne:

    IOW, they don’t get why anything, anytime should be secret, even your credit card number.

    Yes, your credit card number, but they don’t want anybody to know their credit card number.

  59. 59.

    geg6

    @Mnemosyne:

    This. I hates them. Assange is holed up because he is a sexual predator. Allegedly. /sarcasm Always waving one hand frantically in hopes of distracting you from noticing what the other hand is up to. Just like all PUAs and MRAs do.

  61. 61.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Kay: Trump is a bully with zero charm. How someone who talks to and about people the way he does could be President is beyond comprehension.

  64. 64.

    mkro

    Very similar to Trump’s motives, Assange is first and foremost motivated by promoting himself. Assange’s motives are purely to generate additional coverage of Julian Assange and documentaries and movies made about Julian Assange.

  65. 65.

    Anne Laurie

    @Schlemazel:

    A big difference is that it was relatively easy to divide the haters from the decent folks in 1860. in 2017 that is going to be very difficult as the haters are scattered across the country.

    That’s in our (the sane peoples’) favor, actually. In 1860, a handful of angry elites needed just one attack on the civil government to spark the Civil War. What 90% of the people in the “secessionist” states wanted didn’t matter; the majority of them (women, people of color, poor white men) had no votes & effectively no voice in the decision. And once Fort Sumter happened, everything rolled inexorably downhill; the sane people had been shouted down by the “Sothrun gennlemin” in control of the government, the military, and the press.

    That can’t happen, in 2016. First of all, some band of revanchists manages to take control of a military installation for ‘provocation’, best scenario for them would a repeat of the Loon Lake LARPers scenario; more likely they’d be a news story on the scale of the San Bernadino terrorists before being disarmed/put under arrest/terminated. Even a band of bold top-level Tom-Clancy-inspired VIPs taking over the White House/Pentagon/NSA would be greeted by tens of thousands of localized social-media-commanding insurgents scattered all over the country — I doubt they could lock down a “safe territory” larger than a military base or two, and those bases would be under assault from all sides. Dictators and would-be dictators all over the world are discovering just how hard it is to keep even a much smaller population with a much longer tradition of political compliance under control.

    America might, theoretically, split into seven or nine or eleven ‘cantonments’ if environmental or social conditions got bad enough. But cleaving the whole country into Jesusland and Rationalia is no more than a happy fantasy… for partisans on both sides of that divide.

  67. 67.

    dmsilev

    @slag:

    His children run around continents killing elephants.

    …while Dad is doing his best to kill one elephant in particular.

  69. 69.

    PVDMichael

    This election is as if the internet’s comment section itself is running for President: ugliness, name-calling, low information, hyperbole about the state of economy/crime/terrorism, conspiracy theories and now threats…

  71. 71.

    gf120581

    @Kay: As Liz Warren tweeted, he’s going berzerk because he’s getting pounded by a woman and his ego can’t handle that. It was the same as being humiliated by Obama at the WH Correspondents Dinner five years ago. He’s the ultimate alpha male who can’t handle anyone getting the better of him, especially not a member of the “weaker” sex or one of “those people.”

    The debates between him and Hillary (if they even happen; I have my doubts) will basically be a bratty child throwing a massive temper tantrum while the adult watches with bemusement until he tires himself out.

  73. 73.

    Kay

    @dmsilev:

    It’s mean, but even his physical appearance and that braying voice and how he uses so many bullshit filler phrases- ugh. How much time does he spend worrying about his hair? Probably 10 years out of his 70 on that alone. It reminds me of doll hair- that odd reddish color and the plastic-y sheen. He’s one of those people that if you imagine the hair gone he’d just look like an ordinary old man.

  76. 76.

    Truegster

    Assange and his crew are usually white male anarchist libertarian types that are interested in watching the whole thing burn. I wouldn’t consider Assange, Snowden or Greenwald as philosophically left wing. Also, being anti-Bush, anti-war or anti-police state isn’t the same as supporting a progressive agenda.

  77. 77.

    dmsilev

    @Kay: Someone, I’d like to say one of the writers at Wonkette, did a Photoshop job where they replaced Trump’s hair with something more normal and he just looked like Generic Angry Old White Guy.

  78. 78.

    Kay

    @slag:

    I was wondering about that, too. I wonder if they got rid of the sons with that trip. They’re giving Ivanka center stage. She’s meeting with “experts” to draft the education plan. True. They released that today. Ivanka is doing the ed plan.

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    @geg6:

    I lost respect for a lot of internet dudes when they defended Assange because — get this — what he did isn’t illegal in other countries, so how was he supposed to know it was wrong?

    Fellas, it may not be illegal in your part of the world to have sex with a sleeping woman and refuse to stop, or to remove a condom halfway through intercourse without telling your partner, but that doesn’t mean that those things are moral or no harm no foul, you fucktards.

  81. 81.

    Anne Laurie

    @Mnemosyne: Snowden broke with Assange months ago. I know you want to see him punished, for reasons, but I’d be perfectly happy if President ‘Rhymes with Bucket” Obama works out conditions where Snowden feels he can return to the US, accept some punishment this side of throw’iminGitmoferevarrr!, and start working as a White Hat hacker over on this side of Putin’s wall.

  82. 82.

    redshirt

    @Kay:

    It reminds me of doll hair- that odd reddish color and the plastic-y sheen.

    This is it exactly and I’ve never seen it so well put. Kudos Kay!

  84. 84.

    dmsilev

    @Kay: I assume that will go about as well as her previous foray into policy re: women’s issues. I think the campaign dropped that line once it came out that the employees of Ivanka’s clothing company didn’t have any provision for paid parental leave.

  88. 88.

    redshirt

    You know, the idea that in the Debates Trump can’t just walk over and throttle Clinton is probably now not too far off the horizon. I hope the SS can prosecute an active Presidential candidate.

  90. 90.

    Kay

    ‏@mckaycoppins
    Paul Ryan says he hasn’t heard Trump’s 2nd amendment comments. “It sounds like it was just a joke gone bad. I hope he’ll clear it up.”

    Such a liar. You know he gets horrible Trump alerts every 45 minutes.

  92. 92.

    dmsilev

    @redshirt: I assume she’ll have a can of Mace or pepper spray at her lectern for just that eventuality. Plus, of course, a whole phalanx of Secret Service just off-stage.

  93. 93.

    Mnemosyne

    @Anne Laurie:

    Having to move from Hawaii to Moscow is a pretty good existential punishment already, actually.

    Greenwald, Assange, and Snowden are all still linked (see somebody else’s link above). Snowden was escorted to Moscow by a Wikileaks employee. It’s not my fault that Snowden chose his friends poorly.

  97. 97.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @dmsilev:

    I assume she’ll have a can of Mace or pepper spray at her lectern for just that eventuality.

    Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease!

  98. 98.

    Kay

    @dmsilev:

    I know I whine about this, but why is this okay? Ivanka Trump doesn’t know the first thing abut education. I mean seriously- does merit matter at all? Can anyone just wander in and start drafting public policy for 50 million children?

    It’s the definition of “privilege” to me, this belief these people have that they’re automatically qualified to do anything. People spend entire careers learning how to do things. Not them! 45 minutes with “experts” and they’re good to go.

  100. 100.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Mary G: I first saw the concept over on GOS referred to as stochastic terrorism: No need to plot, let alone commit, an act of murder (mass or individual) when you can vaguely insinuate that someone deserves to die & create a nonzero probability that some damaged but capable soul will hear “the signal in the noise” & do the killing himself* without legally implicating the insinuator. There are similarities to the setup in The Fisher King** except that the link between insinuation & performance is indirect, “stochastic.”

    * In rare occasions, herself.
    ** I had understood that the flick was based on a somewhat similar incident IRL but Wiki makes no mention & I haven’t found corroboration.

  101. 101.

    Feebog

    Trump is obviously bald and the reverse combover is hilariously ineffective in covering it up.

  106. 106.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @dmsilev: And if he keeps doing it as skillfully as he is currently through November 8, I for one would be happy to award him both ears & the tail…

  113. 113.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    It’s funny how things turn out, because to me Hillary Clinton seems particularly well suited to deal with Donald Trump. She is driving him insane and he doesn’t seem to phase her at all.

    She’s been hunted by the GOP for 25 years. Trump doesn’t scare her one bit. Her ‘wonkiness’ works so well against him. Being ‘personable’ isn’t her strength ; being COMPETENT is – and it reeks from her core – her COMPETENCY.

  115. 115.

    Smiling Mortician

    @PVDMichael: This election is as if the internet’s comment section itself is running for President on the Republican ticket: ugliness, name-calling, low information, hyperbole about the state of economy/crime/terrorism, conspiracy theories and now threats…

    I’m probably late with this observation, but I’m watching the Olympics. Gymnastics. West Coast. Yadda yadda.

  116. 116.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Comrade Scrutinizer: Callers at the contra dances I used to attend were abnormally fond of Beckett formations, where couples start on the same side of the double contra line & usually completely screw up the switchover at the end of the lines because none of the goddamn callers walk the dancers through it. Whenever I heard a caller say “Beckett” i used to snarl in response, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome dance?” A few people caught it. Most just stared as if I was daft. Hi ho.

  119. 119.

    danielx

    @Kay:

    This is true. I cannot understand why any woman would vote for the guy, much less want to be alone with him. A more disgusting human being may never have reached such high status within this here US of A.

    For me, one of the most fascinating and alarming things about Trump is his ability, or maybe compulsion, to do these Jekyll and Hyde transformations from one day to the next. Yesterday, the unalarming Dr. Jekyll who makes a speech economics something something, which had no substance or sense but which didn’t involve actual frothing at the mouth. Today, here comes Mr. Hyde wrapped in a copy of the Second Amendment, fangs out and hair on fire. I keep thinking wtf, what gives? Meds dosage not right? Simply can’t suppress those Trumpian high spirits and humor for which he is so justly famed? Is there any kind of psych evaluation he has to pass and if not, why?

  120. 120.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    I know I whine about this, but why is this okay? Ivanka Trump doesn’t know the first thing abut education. I mean seriously- does merit matter at all? Can anyone just wander in and start drafting public policy for 50 million children?

    No. Merit matters little to nothing for them, Kay.

  124. 124.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Anne Laurie:

    and start working as a White Hat hacker over on this side of Putin’s wall.

    Meh, Snowden was some temp IT guy who copied some power point presentations. I think the Russians are ready for him.

  125. 125.

    muddy

    @the Conster, la Citoyenne: In Vermont this is referred to as a lake camp, not “private beachfront”. North Hero is a very nice town, I used to live there. Our piece of lakefront was practically a cliff, my son and I used a rope to help get us up and down. The dog could scramble. The “beach” was a long slab of black slate. They do have nice sandy beaches at the State Park end though, and camping. Tremendous ice fishing in the Gut. But if you have property at the lakefront, that’s expensive and that’s probably not a very fancy house for that amount of money. Many upper middle class people here have lake camps or deer camps, It’s not a special rich thing like it’s Malibu or some shit. I also know a number of people who live by the lake and then rent it out a few weeks a year to help pay the taxes and that. OOO Bernie bought a lake camp when he’s near to retiring….frankly I’m surprised he didn’t already have one. I’m feeling like Pat Leahy probably does because we were having some boat talk one time. Can’t be arsed to look it up.

  126. 126.

    Ruckus

    @Kay:
    From all of your posts about education I’d say that you know the answer to this. Lots of people have assumed that they can devise policy on education. After all they went to school and passed, how hard can it be? Obviously harder than ordering a drink in a bar because they keep screwing it up. You know the names a lot better than I do.

  127. 127.

    Anne Laurie

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    Meh, Snowden was some temp IT guy who copied some power point presentations. I think the Russians are ready for him.

    Oh, I’m nowhere near competent to critique anyone’s tech skills. But I think what Snowden did involves something other than ‘copying some powerpoint presentations’ — he perceived an imbalance, was perturbed by it, and managed to do something to change the imbalance. Something like Churchill’s comment about FDR: “A second-rate intellect, but a first-rate temperament.”

  128. 128.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Anne Laurie:

    “A second-rate intellect, but a first-rate temperament.”

    Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr., not Churchill. Winnie had enough sense to never bad mouth FDR.

  129. 129.

    Miss Bianca

    @Uncle Cosmo: OMG. I love you. Contra dancing *and* Becket references (and that Beckett not Samuel?)?

    And what’s with your snobby callers? Out in the Midwest and even further into the sticks out West, you can’t get away with not waling everybody thru’ thoroughly – complete chaos and breakdown would be the result.

  130. 130.

    Miss Bianca

    @Joel: Wait, you mean Brecht’s going to East Germany? He had a very specific reason for that: they promised him a theater (and they delivered!).

    If the price of that was that he had to tailor his art to meet state approval, and that he had to put up with things that disturbed him…did he regret it? Not enough to leave.

  131. 131.

    Hob

    @Anne Laurie: I think the point is that there’s no reason to think Snowden would be valuable as a “white hat hacker.” He did work as a security consultant so presumably he has some knowledge of IT security issues, but the documents he leaked were not acquired through any kind of hacking at all— he just had access to them through his job. You don’t need to know the details of his technical skills to know that the thing he’s famous for had nothing to do with those skills.

    So you’re basically saying that he should be hired back as a security consultant on the basis of the same résumé that he originally used to get a job as a security consultant; the thing that distinguishes him from every other security consultant is that he’s willing to leak information. Why would the government want to hire him on that basis?

  133. 133.

    Miss Bianca

    @Omnes Omnibus: Actually Brecht was *not* a Communist – common misconception (HUAC thought otherwise, but HUAC was, collectively, an ass). Hs wife, Helene Weigel, was the Communist. It was actually she who guaranteed them the gig in East Germany – because she could be trusted to hew to an ideological/didactic hard line – and she was the one who was basically tasked with keeping the art of the Berliner Ensemble in line. Brecht, as I said, was willing to go anywhere he could get a theater – and the East Germans were the ones that delivered.

  136. 136.

    Miss Bianca

    @Omnes Omnibus: Good! Glad we got that straightened out! //

    Helene Weigel was never hot like Lotte Lenya – she was little and skinny and had one of those “ugly but characterful” faces. But she was considered one of the best actresses of her generation.

    It’s too bad that she never learned to speak more English – she might have got more work in Hollywood when they were there.

    Weill and Brecht started out really admiring each other and cranked out some awesome work together – but ended up unable to stand one another. Brecht had that “love him or hate him” thing going on big time – Weill was a little easier to get along with, but even he had enough eventually.

  137. 137.

    Hob

    @Hob: Or to put it more briefly: The point of white hat hackers is that they can poke at things and then advise you on how to defend your data against people like them. But in Snowden’s case, the beginning and end of his advice would just be: “Don’t hire and give security clearances to someone who has severe ethical qualms about what you’re doing.”

  138. 138.

    Anne Laurie

    @Hob:

    So you’re basically saying that he should be hired back as a security consultant on the basis of the same résumé that he originally used to get a job as a security consultant; the thing that distinguishes him from every other security consultant is that he’s willing to leak information. Why would the government want to hire him on that basis?

    No, I think he’s got a different talent than cranking out awesome code; apparently he actually worried about what was being done with that code… and managed to get his qualms into the public forum, despite the odds against him. Totally inspired code-artists are vital, but maybe we also need the occasional person at a perpendicular asking But why? and What for?

  139. 139.

    PIGL

    @geg6: you’re going overboard with this. @Mnemosyne: if this true, then he’s a rapist scum…who may also have done the world some service.

    Myself, I resent the imputation that leftists such as myself are womyn-hating MRAs.

  141. 141.

    Hob

    @Anne Laurie: I don’t want to belabor this, but what you had suggested was that the government take him on as a white hat hacker. I was saying why that suggestion made no sense. If that’s no longer what you’re talking about at all… well, OK.

    However, I think what you’re now suggesting is even more unrealistic. I mean, yes, it’s healthy for government agencies to have dissenting voices within them at a policy level… but that’s different from having some kind of ceremonial office of “guy who dissents.” And if you did manage to persuade them of this, why on earth would they turn to a former contractor with no policy experience whose dissent took the form of secretly leaking a bunch of documents and then fleeing the country? Snowden isn’t the only person in the world who knows how to say “we should think twice before spying on everyone”; many others agree with him. In fact I’d be amazed if there weren’t already people saying just that within the government during Snowden’s time there… and being ignored.

    The way to change policy is to get elected officials to come around to your point of view and to increase oversight of the agencies they control. This has nothing to do with whether Snowden should be granted some kind of leniency for his whistleblowing, which I tend to think he should be.

  142. 142.

    aimai

    @Anne Laurie: I hate to say this but this comment seems nuts, to me. Snowden is not some kind of humanitarian or national hero spy, who returns to a grateful country after doing his spy work among the enemy. Our government, for all its problems, is not our national enemy. There is a place in a democracy for whistleblowers and for courageous rebels but what Snowden did was not that at all. He simply took information and handed it over to our enemies and let them use it for whatever purposes they wanted. He didn’t do it on my behalf, that’s for sure. And I fail to see why he should be given special treatment or a warm welcome home. His skills, such as they are, are probably not needed at all qua “white hat.” And it sets a very bad precedent to let someone fuck over your country and then give him a golden parachute.

  143. 143.

    Matt

    Funny thing: the more that Assange turns into a GamerGator and gently tongues the ringpieces of folks like Stone, the more plausible those rape allegations he’s hiding from seem.

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