I’ve an “article”:http://nationalinterest.org/feature/big-brother%E2%80%99s-liberal-friends-11515 in the new issue of The National Interest looking at various liberal critiques of Snowden and Greenwald, and finding them wanting. CT readers will have seen some of the arguments in earlier form; I think that they’re stronger when they are joined together (and certainly they should be better written; it’s nice to have the time to write a proper essay). I don’t imagine that the various people whom I take on will be happy, but they shouldn’t be; they’re guilty of some quite wretched writing and thinking. More than anything else, like “Corey”:http://coreyrobin.com/2014/10/27/liberalism-then-and-now/ I’m dismayed at the current low quality of mainstream liberal thinking. A politician wishes for her adversaries to be stupid, that they will make blunders. An intellectual wishes for her adversaries to be brilliant, that they will find the holes in her own arguments and oblige her to remedy them. I aspire towards the latter, not the former, but I’m not getting my wish.

bq. Over the last fifteen months, the columns and op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post have bulged with the compressed flatulence of commentators intent on dismissing warnings about encroachments on civil liberties. Indeed, in recent months soi-disant liberal intellectuals such as Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley have employed the Edward Snowden affair to mount a fresh series of attacks. They claim that Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and those associated with them neither respect democracy nor understand political responsibility.

bq. These claims rest on willful misreading, quote clipping and the systematic evasion of crucial questions. Yet their problems go deeper than sloppy practice and shoddy logic.