Yesterday afternoon, Dr. Margaret Scheisshower, Senior Deputy Assistant for Policy to President Barack Obama, paid me a visit. She demonstrated her forthright nature by striding into my office and selecting the chair positioned directly in front of my desk.
“Mr. Collins,” she opened in a well modulated contralto with a slight Chicago accent, “the Administration is highly concerned with Edward Snowden.”
“To the point of obsession,” I observed. “At the risk of costing myself the fee for this consultation, my advice is that the Administration simply ignore him.”
“We can’t,” she objected. “Snowden is a fugitive criminal guilty of betraying the United States of America, and we’re doing everything we can to bring him back here for a fair trial.”
“One would certainly think,” I pointed out, “the way the United States of America has treated Private Bradley Manning would give Mr. Snowden ample incentive to do everything he can to avoid that.”
“Manning received a fair trial,” she huffed, slightly ruffled at my comment, “and didn’t even get convicted of the most serious charge.”
“Thus escaping a firing squad,” I conceded. “Still, he nevertheless could be sentenced up to one hundred and thirty two years in a military prison. And the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture cited the US armed forces for his pre-trial treatment. If a situation like that is what Snowden can expect, there’s no wonder that he’s learning to speak Russian.”
“Well, he’s still blabbing secrets that endanger our national security,” she insisted, “no matter what language he does it in. Just this week, he spilled the beans about XKeyscore. The top dogs over at the NSA are furious!”
“It’s not entirely clear,” I noted, “that Snowden was the source of the XKeyscore leak.”
“It was him all right,” she insisted.
“Be that as it may,” I continued, “the man is in Russia and clearly out of your reach.”
“Which is why I’m here,” she revealed. “A lot of people still think that traitorous scumbag is some kind of hero.”
“A lot of people still think Bradley Manning is a some kind of hero,” I dryly responded, “including Edward Snowden.”
“The difference being,” she shot back, “that we have Manning and we don’t have Snowden.”
“So?” I inquired.
“So,” she growled, “if we can’t get him, we figure the next best thing would be to discredit him. And that’s what I’m expecting from you today – some ideas on how to do that.”
“Okay,” I acknowledged, “in that case, for starters, like all computer geeks, Snowden has an advanced case of Asperger’s syndrome, with all the associated symptoms, including lousy social skills, bad breath, poor personal hygiene and a peculiar, nauseating body odor. Naturally, he can’t see a thing without his thick, geeky glasses and he’s too much of an uncoordinated spastic to manage a set of contact lenses without constantly losing them, putting them in backwards or getting the left and right ones mixed up. He eats nothing but junk food, of course, dresses like a color-blind retard, and doesn’t even know how to knot a necktie. He compulsively picks his nose in public and sniffs his own belly-button lint. A wet dish rag has more personality than him, and when he walks into a room, he might as well be invisible.”
“All of which means what?” Dr. Scheisshower demanded, looking up from her laptop, upon which she was taking notes.
“It means, if he is, as you say, a criminal, that Snowden is a loser and a coward whose parents messed up his early toilet training and ignored him at crucial points during his childhood development.”
“And,” she prodded, “therefore?”
“Therefore,” I explained, “his true motivation would not be patriotic concern for violation of Americans’ constitutional rights, but an infantile need for attention.”
“And you’re suggesting we should start characterizing him that way?” Dr. Scheisshower asked.
“Sure,” I confirmed. “How many people will idolize a repulsive, immature, attention-starved snot as some kind of hero?”
“Not many,” she nodded with a smile. “I’ll recommend we start talking about Snowden like that – a disgusting, pathetic little fool. That’s bound to take some of the shine off him with the Russians.”
“Also imply that he’s in the closet,” I suggested.
“But won’t that stir up a lot of blowback from the American gay community?” Dr. Scheisshower fretted.
“No,” I countered, “because the contemporary American gay community doesn’t respect gays who are in the closet. Furthermore, if you can get any of our operatives in Russia to produce some pictures or videos of Snowden with other men that make him look gay, that alone might be enough to get him arrested by the Putin government – perhaps even expelled from Russia and maybe even turned over to the United States.”
“Such a strategy,” she told me with a cluck of her tongue, “will definitely require some serious review. But nevertheless, I agree that it could be very, very effective. What else do you have?”
“If Snowden stole secrets,” I syllogized, “no one would be very surprised to learn he likes to steal other things, too, would they? Once he’s out and about in Moscow, why not arrange for our operatives over in Russia to frame Snowden for shoplifting? That shouldn’t be terribly difficult, should it?”
“No,” she agreed, “probably not. And there’s no American shoplifting community to raise a ruckus about it, either. Good idea. I’ll be sure to spotlight it in my presidential briefing.”
“And if President Obama’s leery of the gay angle,” I offered, “how about setting Snowden up with one of our female agents? I know it will require that she have a pretty strong stomach to get involved with a guy like Snowden, but if you can find a reasonably good-looking woman who can manage it, you could set things up to construct a very believable rape case against him.”
“Frame him for rape, huh?” Dr. Scheisshower chuckled. “Not bad, not bad at all. That might work, if, as you said, we can find a woman agent who would be willing. That might be more difficult than it would initially appear, though.”
“Well,” I shrugged, “you could always wait for Snowden to take up with some pole-dancing Russian bimbo, then have our operatives kill her and frame him for murder.”
“Mighty strong stuff there,” she exclaimed. “I can’t brief that to the president, I don’t think! But, on the other hand, I could brief the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence about it over lunch at Tyson’s Corner and she just might end up contacting Covert Operations in Langley. That way, the Administration would have plausible deniability if anything… ah… you know… went awry.”
“I’ll leave those decisions in your capable hands,” I allowed. “And, of course, if an unstable person like Snowden were to ingest six or seven hundred micrograms of LSD, who knows what he’d do or say? If any of it were critical of, or embarrassing to the Putin regime, and Snowden subsequently died from a dose of polonium 210, well, I think most folks would conclude the Russians had simply gotten tired of him, wouldn’t they?”
“Some very… provocative ideas,” she remarked. “But I don’t think that the associated risks will be found to be… acceptable. Could you recommend something less problematic in that regard?”
“I already have,” I reminded her. “If, as you say, he is a criminal, plus, as we know, being a hopeless geek with Asperger’s, then Edward Snowden is a mental meltdown looking for a place to happen. Consequently, if the Administration simply ignores him, it will deprive Snowden of the attention he so desperately craves. Ultimately, the strain of being ignored will prove more unbearable than anything else the US could possibly do to him, and under that strain, he will crack, snap and pop like bowl of Rice Krispies hit by a stream of cold milk.”
“Just because he’s a weak, degenerate criminal?” Dr. Scheisshower objected. “You’re saying that if we ignore him, he’ll neutralize himself?”
“Assuming he actually is the degenerate criminal the Obama administration says he is, then yes,” I affirmed. “And if he’s not, and his motives are indeed noble, then he’s an American hero and the Obama administration should not be harassing him.”
“The Administration,” she stormed, “is in no way prepared to accept the possibility of the latter state of nature you describe! He’s a criminal, do you hear? Edward Snowden is a criminal, plain and simple, and that’s all there is to it! Of course he’s a criminal – he committed criminal acts, didn’t he?”
“So did the Earl of Huntington and Jesse James,” I reminded her. “But they were heros to the common people.”
“Damn the common people!” Dr. Scheisshower snapped as she packed up her laptop and rose from her chair.
“And damn their protections under the Fourth Amendment?” I asked as she stalked toward the heavy oak doors leading to the reception area.
“Fourth Amendment protections? You tell me, Mr. Collins, why should people who reveal every detail of their lives on Facebook,” she demanded as she turned to confront me, “people who report where they are and what they’re doing every fifteen minutes on Twitter, people who expose every inch of their… foibles… on Internet videos – why should people like that give a single hoot in hell about their God damned privacy?”
“Because,” I proclaimed, “in a democracy, it is the citizens’ prerogative to behave like idiots if they feel like it.”
“True,” Dr. Scheisshower spat back at me as she opened the door, “and damn pitiful that so many of them do!”