So if you’ve spent the last month sleeping under a rock, you should know that a number of “scandals” have hit the press, centered around the Obama Administration, and its repetitive intrusions into American privacy. It started with the Justice Department acquiring the records of a Fox reporter and the entire Associated Press Editorial Staff, but has since been expanded because a former National Security Administration contractor released classified documents that outlined the NSA’s ongoing effort to acquire every bit of information available on every person in the US, on the off-chance that Frank from accounting is making terroristic plans on the Catholic Schoolgirl website he alt-tabs out of every time someone comes into his office.
The horrible traitor, Edward Snowden by name, informed the country that not only was the NSA spying on American lives and conversations, but that they were outsourcing access and analysis of sensitive and classified material. Never mind that Big Brother is poking his nose in our business, it also turns out, he’s a moron. You don’t give a contractor access to classified material for the same reason you don’t let your plumber thumb through the boudoir pics your wife had made for your ninth anniversary: It’s none of his business and you can’t trust him to keep it to himself.
So, anyway, I can call Mr. Snowden a traitor because Speaker of the House Jon Boehner called him a traitor, and who am I to contradict the Speaker of the House. I mean, sure, Snowden committed exactly zero of the two definitions of treason found in the Constitution, but, if we’re going to limit our definition of treason to the only one that legally exists, then how are we going to get rid of all the bad men who wake us up and spill water on our beds every night?
Sure, I know what you think. Why don’t we do what we’ve always done: wait for people to commit an actual crime before treating them like criminals. Pfft! What do you think this is 1978? The Post-9/11 world is all about prevention! “Never Again” is the motto and the watchword, and justifies every act from moronically expelling kids for having a finger-gun battle in the schoolyard to murdering an American citizen with a robot because a couple of his known enemies said he was probably a terrorist.
And thank god we do, too, because that attitude has prevented any number of terrorist threats that none of us ever knew about because they were handled quietly and remanded to a secret court (the same one that decides whether or not it’s okay to spy on and/or murder American citizens, I assume). I’d tell you what they are, but then I’d have to schedule a drone strike for your next crowded commute. Suffice to say, that if we weren’t being constantly watched, recorded and analyzed, then events like the Boston Marathon Bombing and Newtown shooting would just be Tuesday. I mean, the Marathon Bombers were just normal citizens who flew well below the Justice Department’s radar, right? (No, they weren’t.)