I’m late to this and I don’t really have anything substantive to add, but just for the record:
Did we really, seriously, strong-arm the governments of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy to deny the president of Bolivia permission to fly over their airspace? All because some moron in one of our intelligence services that supposedly tracks every communication on the planet decided that Evo Morales was serious when he joked about taking Edward Snowden home with him from Moscow?
If every country in South America responded by expelling every diplomat in every American embassy, it would hardly seem like an overreaction to me. This would have been outrageous and thuggish behavior even if Snowden had been in Morales’ plane. But he wasn’t, so it’s actually outrageous, thuggish, and clownish. Jesus.
UPDATE: The original headline of this post was “Obama Finally Shows His Chicago Thug Side for Real.” This was obviously a nod to the endless tea party invocations of Obama as a Chicago thug, but it’s been taken by many as a racial dog whistle. I apologize for that, since it certainly wasn’t my intent. I think the treatment of Morales’s plane was outrageous behavior, and quite likely a result of pressure from the United States, but that’s all.
