REALITY WINNER’S PARENTS: SHE’S AFRAID SHE’LL BE DISAPPEARED, Ed Morrissey writes:

No one wants to denigrate the Davises, who are clearly in pain for their daughter, and who are trying to demonstrate loyalty to her in a crisis, but most of this is sheer nonsense. The US does not “disappear” criminals; that’s something that regimes like Iran do on a regular basis. Perhaps Winner should have kept that in mind when pledging her own loyalty to Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif on Twitter. Her stepfather claims in this interview that Winner’s a “patriot,” but pledging support to a regime that regularly declares “death to America” and exposing top-secret material to serve one’s own petty political passions are not the acts of patriots.

Disappeared? “Au contraire,” Jonah Goldberg tweets. “Most likely outcome is we’ll know **exactly** where she is for 5-10 years.” And that’s a good thing, Morrissey adds:

As for making an example of Winner, that’s precisely what the government needs to do, especially in this instance. There may be times when a whistleblower needs to go outside the chain of command with classified information to expose a specific instance of government wrongdoing, but Congress is still a much more legitimate option than the media. Even if that is true in principle, that has nothing to do with what Winner did. She wasn’t exposing government wrongdoing after trying to raise red flags internally — she exposed Top Secret information to satisfy her own sense of outrage over the results of an election. If Winner goes unpunished for that, we’ll have a deluge of leaks for similar reasons in every administration from here on out, and every president will serve at the whim of 25-year-old extremists in the intelligence agencies or their contractors. That’s not just untenable, it’s undemocratic — and at its core, un-American.

Read the whole thing.