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" (Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post) Tout le Beltway seemed to go abuzz last night with the story of how former CIA and National Security Administration director Michael Hayden got all indiscreet on the Acela, blabbing away on his cellphone to a reporter while, luckless soul that Hayden is, sitting not far away from a former Moveon.org guy with a Twitter account who knew how to use it. This was not the national conversation that the president had in mind, I don&amp;#039;t think. The former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden ended up on the wrong end of a surveillance stakeout on Thursday afternoon when, while riding a commuter train, he was overheard &amp;quot;disparaging&amp;quot; the Obama administration. The over-hearer was a private citizen - Tom Matzzie, an entrepreneur who previously worked for MoveOn.org and John Kerry&amp;#039;s 2004 presidential campaign. Hayden was aboard an Acela train outside Philadelphia and talking by phone with a reporter when Matzzie, who was sitting nearby, recognized him. Matzzie heard Hayden insist to the reporter that he be quoted anonymously, as a &amp;quot;former senior administration official&amp;quot;. Then Matzzie began live-tweeting as the nation&amp;#039;s former top spy badmouthed the Obama administration, apparently in connection with the revelation hours earlier that NSA had monitored the phone calls of at least 35 world leaders&amp;#039; telephone lines. As it happens, the Acela is a marvelous environment for this kind of coincidence. Last spring, at the height of the mock controversies surrounding the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, I was sitting across the aisle from Washington Post embarrassment and former Romney fangirl Jennifer Rubin, who was bellyaching to someone about Hagel&amp;#039;s unfitness to hold office and on and on. I&amp;#039;d have shared some of it here but, frankly, she isn&amp;#039;t any more interesting on the phone than she is on the page. In the world revealed by Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage, I have absolutely no problem with Hayden&amp;#039;s stepping on his own dick this way. (I mean, geez, it wasn&amp;#039;t even the Quiet Car.) Put your business in the street this way and you deserve what you get. And the fact that Hayden was overheard going into his &amp;quot;senior administration official&amp;quot; cone of silence is not merely hilarious, but a ringing vindication of my running mate&amp;#039;s opinion of anonymous sources that he expressed in these pages yesterday. This episode also has the salubrious effect of rendering a mockery all those chin-stroking, thumb-sucking pieces by serious Washington journalists about how horrible it is that scurvy knaves who can&amp;#039;t get good tables at the Palm, or invites to Ben &amp;#039;n Sally&amp;#039;s, keep publishing Our National Secrets without regard to the opinions of the brave, but sadly all-too-human and error-prone, heroes of our intelligence community. Michael Hayden spent a lot of time slagging Edward Snowden -- and once made a funny-ha-ha about putting Snowden on a &amp;quot;kill list&amp;quot; -- and now he gets caught, gossiping like a high-school cheerleader on an open phone line on a public train. They serve very tasty ironies in the Club Car, I&amp;#039;m thinking. Mattzie speculated that one of the reporters was Massimo Calabresi at TIME magazine, but it will be impossible to determine until stories attributable to a &amp;quot;former senior administration official&amp;quot; begin to be published. Any publication that quotes Hayden anonymously now is embarrassing itself. He surrendered his right to anonymity when he decided to be a mouthy cluck on the train. The story is now his staggering indiscretion -- another towering blunder by the all-too-human, but sadly error-prone, heroes of the &amp;quot;intelligence community.&amp;quot; The story is now that this guy was &amp;quot;bragging about black sites,&amp;quot; where we sent people to be tortured because we&amp;#039;re far too delicate to do anything except subcontract our crimes against humanity. (And, as we saw yesterday, this brilliant moral dodge has complicated our ability to get justice for our own people. Nicely played, gang.) But doing so anonymously, because he is a brave fighter for freedom. He also ripped his former employers, and did so anonymously, because he is such a courageous fking hero. I have to say, by the standards of sheer Beltway stupidity, this ranks right up there with anything I&amp;#039;ve ever seen, and it makes me think that Edward Snowden maybe needn&amp;#039;t have gone to all the trouble to buy thumb drives. He could have just waited patiently until somebody forgot a bagful of national secrets on the counter at Starbucks, or left the nuclear codes on the table at Popeye&amp;#039;s. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25399/the-snowden-effect-on-the-train/>