Two separate dispatches from Edward Snowden on Monday have continued to unravel the wannabe whistleblower and show him to be something of a simpleton in the way he views the world.

First, his latest leak published by The Guardian. Snowden has revealed the shocking fact that the American government spies on people. Not just any people, but agents of foreign governments. Of course, the overall concept of this practice is widely known by any citizen with half a brain in their heads. All Snowden and the Guardian have done is expose some of the secret methods used in an attempt to embarrass President Obama and our allies.

The other, more revealing data point came in Snowden’s online chat mediated by his Svengali/confidante/press agent Glenn Greenwald, in which he decried the practice of spying on foreign entities “without asking for public permission.” That naiveté exposes Snowden’s childish thinking.

In the real world countries spy on each other. This practice is not limited to enemies or countries with some hostility to each other, but even allies spy on each other to keep up with the Joneses. That is how the world works, and that is how it has always worked. Espionage is as old as civilization; you can probably find Cro-Magnons who spied on each other’s tribes and such in order to maintain a competitive advantage.

But for guys like Snowden – and Bradley Manning and Greenwald – this is too much for them. The Great Satan (America) must never spy on others. Not just the sort of domestic surveillance that rightfully is constrained by our laws, but routine espionage work apparently should only be done by everyone but America.

This is ridiculous, but par for the course for this “no more secrets” mindset. It continues to push this idea that if America’s secrets are just exposed, no matter the short and long term effects on the country you profess to love, that our objectionable practices will magically stop and that will stop the world.

In reality, all it does is lead us to double down on secrecy, continuing to work in the shadows to do the unseemly activities it sometimes takes in order to keep the world running at a reasonable pace. It is what the adults do, while the children turn over their bowl and throw a tantrum from their high chairs.

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It’s pretty hard to make a globally recognized 75 year old icon appear new and fresh, but somehow Man of Steel manages to do it.

I’ve loved the character of Superman for most of my life (age 4 or 5 to present) and the fanboy cliché with these sort of movie reboots often ends up in a lot of wailing about “WHAT have you done?” After watching Man of Steel, which is a sensory overload from the opening frame to the last, my feelings ended up being more along the lines of “Oh! What HAVE you done.”

Man of Steel has the best action/fight sequences of any superhero movie ever. They surpass the spectacle of The Avengers and out-class the classic battle from Superman 2. While I’m not always fond of the film’s handheld camera style (it sort of reminded me of the docu-style of United 93 at times), they really work well in the fight scenes.

In these sequences we get a true sense of what its like when superpowered Kryptonians go head to head. There is damage, tons of it, and we even get a sense of the collateral damage in a fight like this.

In the mythos of Superman, what this movie does that only the comics have done before it, is give us a real, true sense of Krypton. Contrary to past efforts, Superman’s doomed home world isn’t just a convenient plot device to create an orphan hero. We learn about Krypton’s culture, its past, its rigid social structure and its amazing geography. We even get a very cool look at Krypton’s technology and it isn’t superfluous to the plot.

The hero of Krypton is of course Russell Crowe’s Jor-El, the most badass Jor-El we’ve ever seen in any medium. We find out that not only is he a brilliant scientist, a moral compass, but a societal rebel (along with his wife, Lara).  Marlon Brando’s Jor-El was almost an all-seeing God that bequeathed the knowledge of Krypton to his son. Crowe’s Jor-El has that element to him, but is also a father saving his son and a man trying to save his people.

Heresy, but I think Crowe’s Jor-El is better!

The fleshing out of Jor-El helps to build the groundwork for Superman’s arrival on earth. It isn’t just random where he ended up. There was a purpose and a plan.

The other half of the Krypton question is Michael Shannon’s Zod, who is fleshed out enough in the film that he becomes more than just a stock villain bent on evil. If you look at the events through Zod’s eyes, his actions make a strange, twisted sense. When he intones that he does the horrors he does for the good of Krypton, it makes a sort of logic you rarely get in a comic book movie.

The star, of course, is Henry Cavill as Superman.

We get a look into how Superman was raised, and why even though he is reluctant to use his powers for good, he is still drawn to do so because it’s the right thing to do. His two sets of parents instill in him the understanding that he is where he is not out of random luck but because he is there for a reason. And that is the essence of Superman, and Cavill does a great job in communicating both Clark/Superman’s vulnerability and the raw, unbridled, ass-kicking power that is Kal-El/Superman.

I also enjoyed the non-linear way in which Superman’s story was told and the realistically paranoid reaction from the U.S. government to his existence.

The film also touched on the Superman-government dynamic and the stark difference between that relationship and Batman’s government dealings. Superman is willing to submit to the government in order to do the right thing and also gain acceptance, while Batman aids the cause of law and justice while also being considered an outlaw and enemy of the state.

It’s why the two characters mesh so well and why the world needs a Superman/Batman movie.

The Lois/Superman/Clark troika appears in this movie unlike any way we’ve seen it before, period. I’ve wondered for months how they could execute this, and they made it work in a way that I ended up loving by the end of the movie. “That does make sense,” I said to myself. I can’t say anymore without ruining it but this relationship, which will always be central to any execution of Superman (and why I’ve had problems with the “New 52” relaunch from DC), won me over. It works.

As a reboot, I had to be open to new interpretations of characters, and I’ll confess I’m still a little unclear on Amy Adams’ Lois Lane. She has the toughness and intuition of past Loises, but without much of the damsel in distress cliché that was all the Lois Lane of the 1950s did. But I don’t know if she had a hard enough edge – though it may not have worked well in the more grounded, “real” world of this Superman. I hope they give us more Lois in the sequel and flesh this out some more.

I wanted the movie to be much longer, and even at its extended running time I was on the edge of my seat for the entire thing. The action set pieces and even the smaller “Superman moments” were appropriately epic for the greatest fictional character ever created.

This movie was the Superman I’ve loved my entire life, in epic, gargantuan scale that I’ve always wanted to see, but still fresh and new and accessible and modern without losing the heart of what Superman is all about: hope.

5/5 Must See

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I’m a pretty bad person to argue in favor of nuance. Historically, I’m more likely to take a hammer to an issue, rather than a scalpel. But for a second, I’d like to amble on over to Nuanceville.

I think that leaking classified information is clearly a crime, punishable by jail time and even worse in some cases (Bradley Manning, for instance). Ideally, real “whistleblowers” who want to alert us to abuses within the government should use the resources available to them to alert the proper people – often congressmen and the like – in order to have these issues addressed in a way that does not possibly endanger national security.

THAT SAID.

I think that Edward Snowden did, in fact, highlight an actual problem. I think the NSA dragnet of information is far too wide and indiscriminate. I don’t think that those arguing that this was previously known have a good case, because the wide net is still in place and may have in fact been widened. At the same time I honestly admit that I personally trust an administration led by Barack Obama to guard civil liberties more than one led by George W. Bush, because I think that Obama (and most leaders in either party) is more sensible and honest and patriotic than Bush on his best day.

But there is the possibility for abuse of this system, and so it should be significantly curtailed.

THAT SAID.

Snowden’s disclosure – the Guardian’s disclosure – of American cyberwarfare strategy, on the other hand, was just wanton disclosure of American national security without the documentation of any abuse or other violations. It was simply a disclosure, apparently, because Snowden and the Guardian believe that the mere existence of an American cyberwarfare apparatus is an affront to something.

First off, that’s not for Snowden and the Guardian to decide. We decide these things, in flawed but consistent regular elections of our representatives in the government. If we are to be transparent with our efforts to fight cyberwar, let the American people decide at the ballot. Nobody elected Snowden and company to make these disclosures based on their ideology – again, no civil liberty violations, no people being tortured or killed – this was a document detailing our defenses and contingencies in the field of cyberwarfare. Its disclosure was a matter of a difference of opinion, not an appeal against the state abusing its power.

And in both instances, the one I understand and the one that enrages me, Snowden broke the law. He broke the law and then unlike others, he escaped to foreign soil.

Ah, nuance. I don’t like it.

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The people have a right to know what their government is doing, certainly when it involves deaths and possible abuses of a physical or civil libertarian nature. But there are some things we don’t need to know.

At any given movement, the world’s governments are all spying on each other, keeping an eye on enemies and allies alike in order to stay on top in one way or another. It’s why we have the CIA, the British have MI-6, the French the DGSE, Russia has the SVR, and so on. These are not nice things, but they must be done for nations to maintain and acquire power.

While a case could be made for The Guardian’s previous disclosures of NSA’s dragnet and the surveillance of Internet usage (before you even start, here is my position on that), the release of classified cyber-strategy documentation is just releasing sensitive material for the hell of it.

No abuses are detailed, and the release just damages cyberwarfare efforts for the benefit of the ego of the paper and its libertarian writer.

American cybersecurity has been compromised, and either doors have been opened to our adversaries or we will now need to spend tax dollars in order to undo the damage.

For what purpose? This is activity that rightfully stays in the shadows, much like spy work does. They’re looking at us, we’re looking at them and we’re all trying to stop the other guy from seeing what we have. There’s no need to help, and it could be dangerous to do so.

I don’t understand the idea that America has no right to engage in cyberwarfare, when our allies and adversaries all have been doing so for years now. There is an odd strain of thought out there that due to our superpower status, America shouldn’t be able to wage even this sort of combat. As if everyone else can be armed, but we shouldn’t be.

Whoever leaked this information has done harm to our security, and possibly worse. It isn’t uncovering potential abuse like the previous leaks did, just creating a security compromise and generating pageviews for a newspaper.

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In the film The Dark Knight, Batman believes that the threat from mass killer Joker is at such a high level that he makes the choice to violate the privacy of the entire city by tapping into their cellphones in order to find and eliminate his nemesis. His friend and ally, Lucius Fox, is shocked and appalled by this. He goes along with Batman, because he knows the Joker won’t be satisfied until thousands maybe millions are dead. But Batman builds in a self-destruct mechanism for his giant dragnet, which is erased after one use.

The National Security Agency, on the other hand, has taken a program alarmingly similar to Batman’s device, and renewed its usage again and again and again.

It’s too much information in the hands of the government, a treasure trove of data that they should have limited access to under clearly defined circumstances and not at their leisure.

This is one of those areas where President Obama has clearly continued a policy that began under President Bush, and like most bipartisan things nowadays it’s a bad precedent.

That said, the right is of course being hypocritical about this. They were the champions of ideas like the PATRIOT Act, which passed with both Democratic and Republican support but only serious opposition from the liberal movement – not the right. It was a lot like support for the Iraq War, which had the backing of Democrats but not the left.

But Obama is President now and he should limit the scope of these operations by a huge factor. There’s nothing wrong with being proactive about stopping the next threat. But like even Batman acknowledges, there are limits for a lawless vigilante even when he has the angels on his side – the government should fall in line.

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Imagine if a special interest group controlled the news, particularly the news that was about the issues near and dear to them and their lobbying interests. Imagine if only the NRA wrote all the stories having to do with guns, or if only Planned Parenthood had a say in stories about abortion and choice, or if every story about the NFL had to be written, vetted and approved by the NFL’s management?

We face this situation in the real world all the time with journalists and issues affecting the news media. It isn’t that I don’t believe that the story of the Department of Justice investigating leaks isn’t important or worth coverage. But the media has focused on the story with all the intensity of a life and death struggle for the future of the free press (it isn’t) often giving other, more important stories the short shrift. In the daily White House briefing, Jay Carney is peppered with questions about James Rosen, Fox News, hysteria about wiretaps and the like because this is an issue that directly affects the press class.

By comparison, for instance, how much of the mainstream reporting around sequestration’s effects has been as pronounced? The exception was probably the hullabaloo over air travel, not coincidentally another set of circumstances that did directly affect journalists.

Combine this with the obsession among political journalists for “centrist” solutions that neither party nor the movements surrounding those parties is remotely interested in. For the journalism crowd who will likely never feel the effect of those cuts in the social safety net they often push for in order to achieve “balance” with some small concession to the progressive economic view, there’s no downside. They have no skin in the game, not really, so unlike harrumphing about an investigation into the leak of classified material, they feel justified.

It would be great if journalists could report as if they live in the real world. They could report on how policy affects actual people, and not just be intense when their own special interest group is affected.

And pigs could fly.

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The conservative media isn’t what it used to be. The height in power of the right wing press in the modern era probably encompasses the years 1998-2004, which include four of the movement’s major victories: the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the election of George W. Bush , the launch of the Iraq War, and the re-election of George W. Bush.

Having observed and commented on this world for about 13 years, I have seen its influence grow and dominate the conservative movement, but also become a hindrance to conservative success in the mainstream of politics. Where NBC News once saw the upside in inviting Rush Limbaugh on-air to comment on electoral politics, it is less likely that we would see that today. This is not to say that conservative media, unfortunately, is without influence. In reality the dumbest memes and themes of the movement still have a path to the mainstream press, time and time again.

Rush (Still) Rules The Right

The most dominant voice in conservative media is also one of its oldest, with an audience that is dying. Limbaugh still acts as the fireside chat voice of the right, chewing up the news of the day and regurgitating it with a conservative spin for his willing audience. This is both a boon to conservatism and a liability.

There’s no Limbaugh equivalent on the left, but instead a group of people and information sources (Maddow, MSNBC, Huffington Post, etc.) that are influential in stature to his position on the right. Limbaugh tells many on the right how to think. Having been on the receiving end (indirectly) of more than one of his attacks, I can tell you that the hivemind is strong with his supporters. When Rush tells them to jump, they don’t even bother asking how high. They just jump.

The problem for the right with Rush is simple. He’s old, and his audience is older. An example of this: when Limbaugh decided to attack Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and it created a backlash among his advertisers, he – well, his PR agency really – took to Twitter. But that Twitter account is now more dormant than it is active. While other radio shows, particularly conservative ones, have taken to social media to keep the conversation rolling, Rush’s core audience simply isn’t online. And if they are, they’re at best on email and probably have little to no idea what a social network is. Rush’s audience is old, getting older, and dying.

Limbaugh panders to this audience – who can blame him, they made him a multimillionaire – but it keeps his world view firmly stuck in the past. He cannot adapt, and there’s no incentive for him to adapt. For Rush, the glory years will always be the early to mid-nineties, the height of his power. If you listen to his show, he is constantly reliving that moment. It hinders him, and makes him incapable of seeing oncoming trends that elect people like President Obama, twice.

But conservative politicians still have to kiss his ring. He reprimands and receives apologies from RNC chairmen, Representatives, and Senators. Presidents and wannabe presidents like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush appear on his show and pucker up. The base of the Republican Party increasingly doesn’t look like America, but it looks a lot like the average Limbaugh listener, and conservative politicians are aware of that whether they like it or not.

Drudge, Beck, And Embracing The Fringe

Both Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck are doing well online, but again they are increasingly preaching to their own tinfoil-hat wearing choir.

Mainstream media organizations still pant heavily when they get a link from Drudge, but his habit of promoting conspiracy theories from 9/11 truthers and looking for the most race-baiting angle to his anti-Obama stories have diminished the ringmaster of the Clinton impeachment circus. The Romney campaign had a direct line to the Drudge Report, and they used it to good effect to trash their Republican rivals, but it was of limited effectiveness in the general election. At least in 2008, the McCain camp was able to use Drudge to launch absurd attacks like the entire “lipstick on a pig” episode, which played well in conservativeland but fell short of helping McCain to win the election.

Glenn Beck was too crazy for Fox News. I repeat: Glenn Beck was too crazy for Fox News. While his show was the right-wing hotspot from Obama’s inauguration until the 2010 election, Beck went so far off the rails that Fox boss Roger Ailes – who’s top goal in life is making money and crushing the left – sent him away.

Online, Beck can be as nutty as he wants to be, which inspires a devoted audience, but a smaller and less influential one. Beck adds the religiosity that the more secular Limbaugh won’t, but Limbaugh knows that not going into God talk helps him appeal to more people.

Beck’s show is designed around the slow-rolling reveal. He teases his audience with a tale, and then at the end of the show he makes a huge promise about the next episode, usually along the lines of “it will blow your mind.” In the short term this can work, but I imagine there are a few ex-Beck fans out there who just got tired of the tease followed by a tease.

Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy, Breitbart.com, And Why Liberals Have Hope

The new generation of conservative media could be the best thing to happen to the left. They make the attacks of Limbaugh, Fox, and company look coherent and solid by comparison. They are a gaggle of clowns and they are the future of the right.

Twitchy is Michelle Malkin’s site for complaining about people she doesn’t like. It is as if they took her perpetual rage and made it into website form. Twitchy connects tweets conservatives don’t like with conservatives complaining about those tweets. That’s it. The future!

On the other hand, Breitbart.com actually seemed like a decent idea under Andrew Breitbart’s leadership. Evil, but a good idea. Since his death, it has become clear he was the only one on that site that knew what the hell he was doing. The people running it, like John Nolte, Larry O’Connor and Ben Shapiro, are about the worst possible people to put in charge of a serious or semi-serious website. They act with the world view of people who grew up on Limbaugh, in a world of conservative dominance under Bush. In the world of Obama and Democrats who can win elections, this is a liability.

You end up with things like “Friends of Hamas” which sounds dumb on paper, but even worse when you realize that they talked about it like it was a serious thing. They really thought some throw away name some Hill staffer joked about with them was enough to derail the nomination of a defense secretary. REALLY.

As a liberal who wants conservatism to fail, I thank God for sites like Breitbart.com and Twitchy. They are frustrated conservative rage hubs with little to no application in practical politics or movement advancement. They aren’t serious journals of policy, but rather impotent scribbling on a bathroom wall in a movement so lacking in intellectual depth that this is the best it can muster.

New conservative media is a clown show.

Conservative Media Forever

Conservative media is a feedback loop, now almost completely sealed off from reality. It is insulated from the real world, and is unable and disinterested in responding to real things. It creates its own controversies, which are non-troversies in the real world, but it just goes ahead with them and furiously feeds the rage lust of its audience base.

Example: We spent multiple weeks during the 2012 election with conservatives insisting that the polls were “skewed.” Much of this analysis was based on some random crackpot with a website who is now claiming that President Obama was on crack during the Benghazi incident.

It is still among the more potent weapons the right has, and an entire party of politicians unfortunately uses it as their lodestone to obstruct needed legislation while promoting its own crackpot, impractical ideas.

But while it remains a threat to a functioning, modern democracy because of its ability to feast on its own nonsense, it isn’t quite the monster it once was. And that’s a good thing.

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Sometimes I get really really disillusioned about the state of American politics. I had one of those moments on Saturday morning listening to an episode of This American Life about climate change. One of the segments detailed how the people who are most affected by climate change – farmers – are also in the political constituency least likely to believe in it. One farmer even got enraged at the reporter when he found out she might be an environmentalist, because obviously that’s the worst thing in the world.

Which led me to the thought that sometimes, for those of us on the left, life is a lot like Jor-El in front of the Kryptonian Science Council. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, Jor-El, Superman’s father, is a leading scientist on Krypton. Krypton has a largely science-based culture and their Science Council is one of the major ruling bodies.

When Jor-El discovers that earthquakes on Krypton mean the planet is doomed, he presents his findings to the council. Instead of a scientific response to his data, however, the council chooses to ignore Jor-El. They insist that his data must be wrong. There’s no way Krypton could be in trouble.

And then this happens:

For our purposes in America, the government is the science council. Sure, Earth isn’t going to blow up tomorrow (I hope) but there are warning signs telling us that we’re on the wrong path.

I should take a sidebar here to note that I’m really not what you’d call an “environmental guy.” I own an SUV (that I don’t drive much) and I’m not the stereotypical crunchy earth type. What I am is an average resident of the planet Earth who thinks that we probably shouldn’t destroy the only planet we have, and there are practical steps to do so.

But Jor-El’s story does show us that there is reason for hope, even when a planet is doomed. Jor-El and his wife Lara lost their lives like most Kryptonians, but they were able to save their son’s life. Baby Kal-El went on to become Superman/Clark Kent and the last son of Krypton has probably saved the lives of several Kryptons over and over since his parent’s death.

There is optimism in even the darkest moment. There is a light. In America, and on Earth overall, we haven’t always gotten it right at first. We exclude and oppress, and then after much fight and struggle we find a way.

Eventually.

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I’m 35, which some people still count as kind of young but sort of old, but watching the GOP do its dance with the mainstream media over fake scandals, I end up sighing like an old man. I’ve seen this show before. Democratic president with a recovering economy, just re-elected over the latest next great hope of the right (in 1996 it was a war hero, in 2012 it was a capitalism hero), so of course they turn to scandal.

The problem for them is that the left isn’t as stupid and naïve as it once was. Where the Clinton era left approached the GOP House’s claims as if they had some legitimacy to them and stupidly gave in to them (most egregiously with the appointment of an independent counsel), the Obama White House has veterans of the Clinton Wars both from the Clinton administration and from America.

There is an entire generation of Democrats – me included – who saw the right persecute the Clinton family, then go on to attain the White House and run roughshod over America. Any pretense they may have once had to doing what they do out of love of country over political gain is dead in the water.

We know how badly they want to negate President Obama’s power, and the mainstream press’ dutiful water-carrying that is part and parcel to the entire operation.

Been there, done that.

Of the three issues at hand – Benghazi, the DOJ leak probe, and the IRS, only one is of any serious concern. The abuses at the IRS have been roundly condemned from all quarters, and in many ways they are an outgrowth of concerns liberals have repeatedly made about the role unlimited financing has in politics.

As usual, the right is taking a legitimate concern and perverting it into kooky conspiracy theory. Conservative groups are now citing increased web visits and statistically unremarkable IRS audits as evidence of evil Obama ordering a crackdown on his political opponents. Presented with the fact that Obama had no knowledge or connection to the abuses, they’ve begun rolling out what I call the “Professor X Theory” of his presidency, insisting that his desires were essentially communicated telepathically to IRS officials.

They have a legitimate issue, but because the paranoid style is as much a part of the right as inhaling oxygen now, they’re going to squander it (and probably stymie much needed reforms).

I’ve discussed the other two issues, and besides the actual military/law enforcement operations to catch the Benghazi attackers, the right’s obsession with talking points has all the resonance of Al Capone’s vault.

There will be more attempts to breathe life into Benghazi and other fake scandals – as we’ve seen since practically the day of Obama’s first inauguration – will come up and be given life by the mainstream media (“scandal” is the closest thing they’ve got to horse race coverage and they’d rather cover either over actual policy that affects the lives of millions directly and billions indirectly).

But I doubt much of the left will be the willing dupes they once were. The era of the Ken Starrs of the world being given carte blanche to attempt to incite a Constitutional crisis are long over. We know they don’t have America’s security or integrity in mind, just a frustrated rage that America rejected them at the polls yet again and nothing more.

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From Breitbart.com today:

Comedian Jay Pharoah won’t go down as one of Saturday Night Live’s best presidential mimics. How could he?

The talented comic never lays a satirical glove on the president thanks to a writing team which refuses to take tough but fair shots at the president or his policies.

Emphasis mine.

This is one of the right’s top websites. They are also idiots. Do the math.

From Breitbart.com before today:

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