A Best Defense competition: The worst op-ed column on the whole NSA mess?

I am struck by
how many bad op-ed columns have been written on Edward Snowden and the NSA
mess. We are seeing a lot of columnists who wouldn't know Big Data if it hit
them over the head struggling to explain what exactly happened. In total, they
remind me that we are seeing the last generation of pundits who can remember
the world before the Internet. They know something is happening but they don't
know exactly what it is, do they?

There are lots of
bad analogies flying around. (Is Big Data surveillance like reading addresses on
envelopes? Or, pops, is the Internet just like a telegram but faster and more
colorful?) 

There has been
lots of unearned intellectual snobbery. How could a high school dropout have
such a job? (I dunno, how could a college dropout be allowed to run Microsoft?)

There have been
some mighty casual dismissals of our constitutional rights by people who don't
understand just how invasive the new surveillance regime can be.

As Jack Shafer, opinionator for Reuters, noted, there
has been a whole lot of cheap psychologizing: "Leakers like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don't merely risk
being called narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state
secrets for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two
days, the New York
Times's David Brooks, Politico's Roger Simon, the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen, and others have vilified Snowden for
revealing the government's aggressive spying on its own citizens, calling him
self-indulgent, a loser and a narcissist."

As a former
dead-tree journalist, I am embarrassed to see it. No wonder no one under 30
reads newspapers.

So, I am
announcing a contest: Nominate the worst column you've read about all this. If
there are enough comments, I will at some point compile the results.