An “expatriate” is a person banished from his homeland or who chooses to live abroad. The expatriate may renounce allegiance to his homeland, or he may not, but he is not physically present there.
What do you call a person whose heart has long since departed these shores, but who lacks the courage, integrity or self-awareness to renounce his citizenship, and continues to bedevil his countrymen with his noxious presence?
How about an “expatriot?”
Some of America's media elite made a rocky entrance into Fourth of July week this year. Over the weekend the nation's erstwhile paper of record, The New York Times, and that newspaper's glossy elitist fellow traveler, The New Yorker magazine, both ran stories designed to frustrate the execution of American foreign policy. In publishing these stories, they callously jeopardized the lives of American servicemen and allies.
As most Americans were looking forward to celebrating their country's birthday, the New Yorker printed a piece by Seymour Hersh claiming that the U.S. has recently funded a “major escalation of covert operations against Iran.” The top secret information spills out: “covert activities supported by minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups” … “United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations since last year” … “undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change….” How long before Iran's mullahs crack down on the Baluchis?
Nobody knows how much of this is true, because Sy Hersh is not the most credible muckraker at the Press Club. Dating back to Vietnam days, Hersh has made a career of discrediting and embarrassing his native land, often with stories of questionable accuracy. According to various leftwing Web sites, he told an audience at an ACLU event that the U.S. government had video of young boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib:
Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying “Please come and kill me, because of what's happened” and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were investigated exhaustively, and none of this was verified. One wonders why the liberal media continue to treat Hersh as if he were the Oracle at Delphi, unless his anti-American message is something they desperately want to believe.
The New York Times, meanwhile, let the world know that the U.S. has authorized Special Operations units to “launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda.” Pakistan is one of the most important, volatile, politically unstable Muslim countries in the world, and much of the population would erupt in rage if they found out American troops were operating on Pakistani soil. Are the Timesmen trying to make it impossible for the U.S. to go after its archenemy? Or are they just warning Osama bin Laden that he needs to find a new cave in a different neighborhood?
The Times has printed a lengthy list of stories that have served only to complicate or cripple U.S. efforts to defeat the terrorists. Among the lowlights: the obsession with stories about U.S. casualties; the massive overstatement of the events at Abu Ghraib; the obscene misreporting of the “massacre” that wasn't at Haditha; the exposure of U.S. efforts to track international banking transactions by terrorists, and worst of all, the exposure of U.S. spying on terrorist communications.
Vice President Dick Cheney commented on the latter item at the National Press Club on June 2, with entirely too much grace:
The New York Times won the Pulitzer for revealing the fact of the terrorist surveillance program. Now, with all due respect to being here in the National Press Club with a lot of my friends in the press, I thought the idea that The New York Times would win the Pulitzer Prize -- one of the highest awards in journalism -- for revealing one of the nation's most important secrets and telling the enemy how it was we were intercepting their communications, frankly, was less than honorable. It bothered me greatly.
Less than honorable? How about downright unpatriotic, if not treasonous? Amazingly, The New York Times won a Pulitzer for crippling the nation's war effort. Apparently The New Yorker, the Times, and even the Pulitzer committee are shot through with expatriots.