A Bolivian Steamer

A Bolivian Steamer:
The Rude Pundit just wants to pause for a second to see if he can get his head around this: Based on something, a rumor, intel, a Scooby-Doo hunch, a tingle in James Clapper's balls, the plane carrying Evo Morales, the democratically-elected president of Bolivia, from a meeting in Moscow was blocked from entering the airspace of nations that it needed to, you know, fly across and was forced to land in Austria, where the plane was searched to see if Edward fucking Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, was on board. He wasn't. It's pretty much a guarantee that the United States (also known as "us") was responsible. That's deranged, man.

Let's give some advice here to the Obama administration. If you're gonna provoke an international incident, you better have a fucking photo of Snowden toasting Morales with a mini-bottle of vodka. Otherwise, you just look like an imperialist dickhead who knew he could bully the little brown leftist. You can bet that if Snowden had been getting banged by prostitutes wearing Biden masks on Vladmir Putin's jet, the flight wouldn't have been stopped at all. This is a big fucking deal, with leaders in Argentina and Peru (not just those putas in Ecuador and Venezuela) calling for a meeting of South American nations to respond.

Gotta say: this shit's embarrassing. Is this how the greatest superpower in the history of the whole goddamn world, as we're told again and again, is gonna act to try to catch a poindexter who handed flash drives to journalists? Snowden already gave away all that he had. Catching him ain't gonna stop a single secret from coming out anymore. It ain't worth pissing off an entire continent.

This whole thing feels so degrading, like getting a sweaty, drunken blumpkin in a festival port-a-potty.

Bolivian government officials are calling this incident a "kidnapping" of its president. And it's hard to argue. What would have happened if Snowden had been on the plane with the promise of asylum? Would we have arrested Morales as an accessory? How far would we go in violating international law just to show the world that only this America gets to decide what's right and wrong?