Reason #1: Snowden broke the law and ran away from the legal process.
It's self-evident that legal/illegal trumps right/wrong. More than that, meta-ethical relativism and relativized truth, accepted by every distinguished moral philosopher in the world, demonstrate that legal/illegal is right/wrong (aware of the possibility of contradicting myself, there are constraints, to be discussed below).
You simply cannot call yourself a good American if you don't respect the soundness of American law. Although we've had pointless legal (= moral) exercises in our national history – including women's suffrage plus the Nineteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other legally (= morally) superfluous trifles – most progressives nowadays accept that American law is and has always been in a state of apotheosis.
I say American law because international law is in its well-deserved death throes. As Alberto Gonzales astutely observed, things like the Geneva Conventions are “quaint” relics. Critics of America have long failed to draw this important distinction when questioning our forward-looking, off-the-table approach to mischaracterized “atrocities.” So charges of hypocrisy are misconceived.
Nor is there any hypocrisy in “glossing over” the understandably faulty memory of James Clapper. Look, if the Director of National Intelligence were a job that required a keen memory for details, I'd be the first one clamoring for his replacement, but there's simply no bald-faced lie here – at best, there's just a lot of bald.
Now, there is another distinction, this one an erroneous one, that my critics, engaging in sophistry, try futilely to establish: the distinction between American law and the American legal process. Realizing that American law is indeed in its state of apotheosis, these critics nevertheless try to argue that the American legal process is highly fallible and that Snowden did the right thing in running away from the legal process.
This distinction doesn't hold water, for the American legal process 'projects' into, as it were, or is 'contained' in, so to speak, American law. Every day we see compelling evidence that the American legal process is – if you'll excuse the folksiness – fine and dandy. My critics, intelligent enough to ascertain that George Zimmerman received a perfectly fair trial (and thereby seeing no reason to criticize the legal process), will try to argue that Snowden can't likewise expect a fair trial. This is patent nonsense.
Also patent nonsense is the argument that Snowden has a reason to fear torture at the hands of the American government. There's simply no parallel between the torture of Bradley Manning and what Snowden can expect, and this is because the torture of Bradley Manning is old news, which brings me to my next reason . . .
Reason #2: NSA surveillance is old news.
American law, to be worth its salt, must embrace human nature, or what can be described as human law. And one readily recognized aspect of human law is the desire for novelty, on which marketers capitalize all the time. I have in my possession classic copywriting books that give the three primary ingredients of a great headline: benefits, novelty, and curiosity. You will observe that the title of my diary contains a benefit (any 'you' usually implies a benefit, even if that benefit is simply knowledge of some sort) and curiosity (wow, what are the 3 reasons?). The reason I didn't incorporate novelty is that I didn't want to send my readers into a deranged frenzy of excitement, which would have shut down their cognitive faculties completely and made sober reflection impossible. Novelty is veritable crack, after all.
Anyway, what I don't understand is the selectivity of my critics when they decide to focus on old news, in this case NSA surveillance. What's so special about this piece of old news? Why don't they ever seem to focus on other pieces of old (and unimportant) news, such as global warming, institutionalized misogyny, animal abuse, sub-standard education, Obamacare, Republican dumbness, guns, racial injustice in the courts, racism overall, . . . ?
The fact that NSA surveillance is old news is also the reason that Snowden won't be charged with any wrongdoing, for he revealed what we already knew. Much to the chagrin of my critics, this further bolsters my point that he ran away for no reason.
Reason #3: NSA surveillance is low on the totem pole of problems.
The old stand-by about chewing gum and walking at the same time would be meaningful if my critics actually did more than chew gum. But they're monomaniacs who can't escape their fixation on Snowden and the NSA.
No progressive disagrees with the prudence of ignoring the aforementioned old (and unimportant) news so that we can direct all our attention and resources to the more pressing problems depicted in the Human Development Reports in all their statistical horror (e.g., child poverty). No progressive disagrees with the prudence of forsaking the luxury of making fun of Republicans, fapping off vigorously over upticks in electoral projections, capturing the Congressional dog-and-pony show in excruciating detail, and indulging in pointless political minutiae . . .
. . . which leads me to believe my critics are self-absorbed pseudo-progressives with no sense of proportion.