Snark

I like a good snark as much as the next guy, but what was Kevin Drum thinking when he wrote this?

END OF THE ROAD….We’ve finally apprehended Bobby Fischer. Thank God our long national nightmare is finally over.

Yes, that’s the entire post.

In case you don’t remember, Fischer is wanted in the US for breaking the economic embargo against Serbia in 1992:

Fischer spoke arrogantly to the press about the irrelevance of the sanctions, and practically dared the United States to keep him from playing. Annoyed, Washington decided to make an example of him; the Department of the Treasury issued a cease-and-desist letter to Fischer, stating that if he played chess in Yugoslavia, he would be in violation of Executive Order 12810. The penalty for defying the order was a $250,000 fine, ten years in prison, or both. Fischer appeared untroubled.

Fischer has spent the last 12 years on the lam, but it’s not like we’ve been out there hunting for him big-time, wasting assets better used to identify some smear on an Afghanistan cave wall as “something which once might have been a bit of Osama’s spleen.”

Nope, Fischer stayed under the radar mostly because it was hardly ever aimed at him.

In fact, “we” didn’t apprehend him at all. Japanese authorities did, for trying to leave the country with a bad passpot — and even so, we’re not exactly pushing Tokyo to turn him over:

A spokesman for the State Department, Richard A. Boucher, said Friday that it had not yet been determined whether the United States would ask that Fischer be turned over to U.S. authorities. He said only that Fischer, who has expressed virulently anti-American views since the warrant was issued for his arrest on Dec. 15, 1992, had been visited in detention by a U.S. consular officer.

So what’s with Kevin’s snark? You got me.