The System Works, Pt. 2: Privileged WASP Sentenced to Life In Prison On Cuban Spy Rap

More great news following the sentencing of Lynn Stewart: the retired State Department official arrested last year for spying for Cuba has been sentenced to life in prison. Hope his prison library takes The Nation:

Walter Kendall Myers, 73 years old, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 72, admitted in court to spending nearly 30 years passing classified information to Cuba's intelligence agency.

He was sentenced after pleading guilty to espionage and wire fraud. She was sentenced to 81 months after pleading to conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information. She is likely to serve 4½ years.

Their story, coming on the heels of the Russian spy ring, reinforces the assertion of counter-intelligence investigators that foreign spy operations in the U.S. are continuing long after the end of the Cold War.

Prosecutor Gordon Harvey described the couple as "traitors." If they loved the Cuban people so much, Mr. Harvey said, why didn't Mr. Myers just donate his wealth to the underprivileged there? They admired the Castro revolution, but didn't defect because they only wanted to admire the revolution "from a safe distance," Mr. Harvey said.

Sounds like a typical American "socialist." They talk a big game about social justice and equality, but they know deep down that they wouldn't last 5 minutes under real socialism.

Myers was a child of privilege: a grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, graduate of Brown, and an employee of the State Department. In other words, he was a member of America's high minded progressive ruling class. What's really damning about him and his cohort is how little difference there is between Myers and his fellow leftists. Absent the Cuban spying, Myers was a Prius-driving, Amerikkka hating, privileged WASP. We've all met guys like him, and plenty of them are inordinately fond of the Cuban revolution. "Progressive" to the end, Meyers offered this as a sort of apologia:

"We acted as we did for 30 years because of our ideals and beliefs," he said. They weren't motivated by "anti-Americanism," he said, but rather their objective was "to help the Cuban people defend their revolution."

Mr. Myers's voice broke twice—when he described his devotion to his wife and his friendships with African-American prisoners, whose oppressed life he said he came to know behind bars. Mr. Myers quoted from Nelson Mandela as he vowed to help make a difference by tutoring fellow prisoners.

Jeez, this guy really puts the "simp" in Com-Simp. The sentencing judge, who is African-American, was having none of Myers' pitiful attempts at racial solidarity:

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton noted Mr. Myers's background and contrasted it with his own family's American beginnings in slavery. He said he was "perplexed" by Mr. Myers's claims of trying to help the Cuban people, given the regime's human-rights record. Judge Walton said that despite his ancestors' own experience in America, "America is not the devil that you may believe."

Finally! Someone talks back to a hectoring American leftist. Is it so hard for conservative and GOP leaders to do the same?

(Judge Walton, btw, is "one of us," a "tough on crime" jurist appointed to the bench by George W Bush during the judge wars of 2004/2005. Elections do matter, so make sure you register to vote!)

The best part of all this is that, while Myers will die in prison, his wife will be out in about 4 years. Reports indicate that she was the more stridently leftist of the two and no doubt urged on Myers espionage (a similar dynamic was at work in the Hiss and Rosenburg marriages), yet when the time came she was able to take advantage of one of the perks of her sex and obtain a lesser sentence. You didn't really believe all that crap about equality, did you Myers?