The Snowden Saga has revealed something else

[DirkGently]

29. We've given other nations the ammunition to call us a rogue state.

Another thing that's supposed to identify the small and large "d" democratically minded is that we put principle over personality, what we do over who we are.

And we've been acting like a rogue state. Iraq, waterboarding, indefinite detention, and now illicit global surveillance.

We've never been a perfect country. But we used to at least have a good faith claim to occupying some kind of moral high ground. Bush destroyed a lot of it. Obama seemed to be putting some of it back.

But not on this stuff. Not on the new, red-hot, big-dollar world of massive electronic surveillance. And not on government secrecy. No one has abused the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers this way. What Bush began in this arena has been expanded and worsened.

The fact that American "dissidents" are now fleeing to foreign countries is not a reflection on them, so much as it is on US.

Question is, what are we going to do about it? Become the old Soviet Union, demanding our "defectors" be returned to us in chains, to be stripped and held in some secret dungeon?

We claim to be better than that. But apparently when it comes down do it, we have plenty who are too scared, too stupid, or too otherwise motivated to stand up to it.