Russia?!
Doofus
~ A clueless person, most always lacking even the most basic social skills. A doofus often thinks they are a bit smarter than everyone else.
Example: A doofus views defeating a 6 year old at a game of tic tac toe as an accomplishment to be bragged about. A doofus does not understand why you are not fairly impressed by this.
~ The Urban Dictionary
Russia?! Cuba?! China?! Well, Ed, I guess your including these bastions of freedom in your ever-growing and increasingly desperate asylum request list pretty much nails you as a defector. Not that it makes much difference at this stage. Rest assured the Chinese and Russian intelligence services copied everything off of your four top secret-packed laptops while you were busy running off at the mouth before the media, changing your story pretty much every day. Only a doofus would flee from an overpaying job in Hawaii and a fetching pole-dancing girlfriend for balmy, fun-loving Russia.
But you haven't gotten even that far. You're stuck in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. Everybody's calling this "limbo." The Russian government even insists you technically aren't in Russia since you have no visa. And, guess what? Ecuador, on whom you were pinning your highest hopes for asylum, is backpedalling on welcoming you after VP Joe Biden had a frank and comradely phone chat with President Correa. Seems we have some leverage over Ecuador. Their national currency is, no, not the peso, but the U.S. dollar. Think of it. What if Fed Chief Ben Bernanke woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and decided to stop doing monetary business with Quito? Do I hear bank runs? Runaway inflation? Rioting mobs? And Venezuela? They're having a toilet paper crisis. I rather doubt their beleaguered president is going to want to stick it in Uncle Sam's eye just when tens of thousands of very uncomfortable Venezuelans are taking to the streets in protest against a government that can't even guarantee the right of personal hygiene.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet my latest royalty payment that our embassies worldwide have delivered the message to governments that they can expect a world of hurt to descend upon them should any offer you asylum. In a word, Ed, you're toxic. You're neither a whistleblower nor a hero. You're seen as the unstable, glory-seeking, high school dropout, loser, computer nerd you are. You're simply not worth the trouble.
Now, back to the transit lounge. Did you know that an Iranian,
Mehran Karimi Nasseri, spent close to eighteen years in the transit area of Charles DeGaulle airport? He slept on a plastic bench and relied on handouts from fast food restaurants to survive. Only illness finally got him sprung. Hollywood made a movie inspired by this, The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks. His character, Viktor Navorski, gets stranded in the transit area of JFK after a revolution in his home country of Krakozhia renders his passport invalid. Viktor has to survive on peanuts and whatever else he can scrounge up. It is reported that you have access to a mozzarella appetizer at 20 bucks a pop, a steak at $50 and red wine at $165 a bottle. Moscow indeed is expensive. And you exchanged delectable Honolulu sushi bars for that? Yes, I'll say it again: Doofus.
Your fellow prisoner of Zenda, Julian Assange, is egging you on from his perch inside the janitor's closet of Ecuador's lilliputian London embassy. He's been there a year, and counting. Sheremetyevo transit area and a micro-state's toy embassy. And, of course, Pvt. Manning at Ft. Leavenworth Prison. Not much of a future in data-dumping national secrets, is there? It's also ironic that you once attacked Wikileaks in chat forums, insisting that anyone passing secrets to Assange "should be shot in the balls."
I know readers of this post will view me as one super-caustic and insensitive critic. But this is what I see: free societies made more vulnerable to attacks and billions of taxpayers' dollars required to retool defense systems over many years just because three socially crippled, delusional losers and a complicit press decided to dump many terabytes of national defense information indiscriminately on the world. I don't know if you'll ever be extradited to face justice for your crimes, Ed, but one thing is clear, and that is, if you are guilty of nothing else, you are guilty of doofism.
(Note to readers: dedicated to free expression, I will accept honest criticism in the Comments section. Profanity is another matter, however, and will be deleted immediately.)