What to Call This? Assholes and Hypocrites?

It seems more than a little unseemly, this full-court press that the U.S. is engaged in to thwart Edward Snowden's attempts to gain asylum somewhere. Ultimately, one supposes, the intention is to give him no place to turn and finally nab him and bring him to justice, as our most self-righteous leaders like to say. The whole world knows what that means.

I'm not going out on much of a limb here when I predict Snowden is going to be granted asylum somewhere, so why don't we quit making assholes of ourselves and accept it?

There was a story in the NY Times today about the pressure the U.S. is applying to Latin American countries about Snowden. There are really only three or four countries that would seriously consider granting asylum to Snowden as a means of thumbing their noses at the U.S., i.e. Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua. But the U.S. is finding it just doesn't have the leverage it had over Latin American countries back in the day. About all we have now is economic and trade policies, which are not without some value it should be noted, and may still have some effect.

For one thing governments in the entire region were up in arms (figuratively) about the insulting treatment of Bolivian President Evo Morales last week. I read that they planned to call an emergency meeting of the Union of South American Nations the day after France, Italy, Portugal and perhaps other European nations refused to allow Morales' plane to enter their airspace because of unfounded rumors that Snowden was on board.

On his return from a meeting of natural gas exporting nations in Moscow, Morales' plane was refused permission to enter French airspace just minutes before it reached the frontier, and was forced to return to Vienna for refueling. Every Latin American leader understandably saw this as a slap in the face of the entire region. Morales called it a high jacking, and he has a strong case. Naturally people down here see the hand of the U.S. in this, and they don't much like it.

For one thing it was a just plain stupid rumor from the beginning. Snowden is at one Moscow airport and Morales, like all foreign leaders, flew into and out of another. To channel Molly Ivins, you'd have to be about as smart as a box of rocks to think Snowden was on Morales' plane.

And then there is that old specter of U.S. hypocrisy again:

....Washington’s push for extradition has poked at a sore spot for several countries that have sought the extradition of people wanted by their justice systems.

Mr. Correa has pointed to the case of two brothers, William and Roberto Isaias, who ran a bank at the center of a huge Ecuadorean financial scandal in the 1990s. They were convicted in absentia of financial wrongdoing in an Ecuadorean court. They now live in the United States, but repeated requests for extradition have been unsuccessful.

And Venezuela has demanded the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles, a former C.I.A. operative accused here of masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people in the 1970s. He escaped from a Venezuelan prison in the 1980s and went to live in the United States.

“The first thing you need to do to have the moral standing to ask for the extradition of this youth Snowden, whose only act is to reveal the crimes that you committed, is to turn over Luis Posada Carriles, who you are protecting,” Mr. Maduro said this month.

And why has the U.S. protected Carriles for so many years? He was one of our favorite anti-Castro Cubans and, yes, a C.I.A. "operative." Sometimes when you bomb an airplane and kill 73 people you're a terrorist; sometimes you're a freedom fighter, apparently. Most importantly, how do you feel about Castro?

We wring our hands and wonder, "why don't they like us?"