THE SPIES AMONG US - AT 9:03 A.M. ET:  We are not supposed to talk about this.  Polite people don't, you know.  After all, it's so unintellectual.  But NRO went slumming a bit, and gave us this remarkable piece about a spy among us, and how he was accepted by the elites.  Revolting.

Now another case of spying has emerged from the halls of our government institutions. And this one may raise a sardonic chuckle over how casual liberal sympathies and knee-jerk Bush bashing made a Communist agent seem normal among the elites in academia and our nation’s capital.

Kendall Myers, who worked for the State Department for some 30 years starting in 1977, eventually earning Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearance, pled guilty and was convicted last month of spying for Cuban intelligence for virtually all that time. He has been sentenced to life imprisonment. His wife, Gwendolyn, was not employed by the State Department, but pled guilty as his accomplice and received a sentence of six to seven and a half years.

They will now officially be listed by the left as political prisoners, victims of imperialism, and martyrs in the battle against BUSH (!!).

Myers also taught part-time at Johns Hopkins.

David P. Calleo, director of European studies at Johns Hopkins, knew Myers for 40 years but was taken completely by surprise at the news of the arrest in June. “Anyone who knows him finds it baffling and finds this completely out of character,” Calleo said. “He has this amazing intellectual curiosity. He is open to all kinds of ideas.”

Why such traits would make spying “out of character” in Professor Calleo’s judgment is not clear, but being “open to all kinds of ideas” is probably the ultimate compliment in the liberal mind, at least on a theoretical level.

And...

...during the couple’s time in Washington, nothing about Mr. Myers seemed exceptional. He fit right in with his anti-American attitudes and bitter fury at U.S. policies — his “deep and long-standing anger toward his country,” as court documents put it. “To his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary,” according to the Washington Post. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” volunteered a neighbor.

Finally...

A former colleague of Mrs. Myers during her time in a low-level Capitol Hill job observed, “She was not remarkably different than dozens and dozens of other people that you ran across in the 1970s who were McGovernites who got into politics for reasons other than to make a lot of money.”

Well, let’s hope she and her husband were at least a little different from all those other McGovernites. Certainly, not all ex-McGovernites receive the personal commendation of Fidel Castro himself for their “disinterested and courageous conduct on behalf of Cuba.”

COMMENT:  What is remarkable is that Kendall Myers was so open in his attitudes, and yet no one thought it unusual.  Maybe if he'd just come into the State Department one day wearing a hammer-and-sickle lapel pin, a few eyebrows might have been raised.  Then again, maybe not.  Just another narrative, you know.  Who are we to judge?

December 23, 2009