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. Continued...