by tristero
Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times:
I miss Barbara Walters already.
Brian Williams of NBC News did a good job of letting Edward J. Snowden say what he wanted to say. Someone a little nosier would surely have pressed the exiled National Security Agency leaker on what he held back.
Is he being followed? Where does he live? Is he alone? Is he learning Russian? Who pays his bills, and do Russian women consider him a catch?
You gotta be fucking kidding me.
But wait, maybe what she wrote really is high snark ‘n sarcasm. Let’s read on:
Mr. Snowden spoke lucidly, without remorse or emotion, expressing himself politely and calmly, without an “um” or a “like.” He was so fluent it almost seemed acquired – like Eliza Doolittle, of whom Zoltan Karpathy said in “My Fair Lady, “Her English is too good, he said/which clearly indicates that she is foreign.”
There was a tinge of superiority to his tone, telling Mr. Williams when his questions were “fair” and answering others as impersonally as possible. At the end, Mr. Williams finally addressed Mr. Snowden’s private life, asking what it was like to move from Hawaii to Moscow. “You know, it’s — it is — a major cultural gap,” Mr. Snowden said coolly, flicking his hand like a wine connoisseur evaluating a vintage. “ And it requires adjustment…”
He nevertheless was a far better ambassador for himself than Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who published his secrets and is a frequent spokesman for Mr. Snowden’s cause on television, where he mostly comes across as smug and unreasonable. Mr. Snowden, a high school dropout and a fugitive living in an authoritarian country, seems much more pleasant and even-keeled.
You gotta be fucking kidding me. My Fair Lady? Let’s take this real slow:
Snowden is not a celebrity – unless he really is Miley Cyrus, which I’ll go out on a limb here and say I think is pretty unlikely. Nor aside from his treatment at the hands of his government should Snowden be of much interest (except to family and friends) when compared to the incredible documents he revealed. Ditto Greenwald.
The NSA – that’s an incredible story. Let’s not forget it.
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