Larry Franklin and Sandy Berger - Who benefits?

Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin has been arrested for passing classified information to Israel regarding the Iraq war. Michelle Malkin hopes that " . . . fellow conservatives will be as tough--if not tougher--on Franklin as they were on Sandy Berger."

Let's compare.

Espionage is bad no matter who does it. But we can learn a lot about the left by comparing the motives of Franklin vs. Berger. Franklin hoped, assuming he is convicted, to benefit Israel. That is no excuse, but at least there was an actual beneficiary of his espionage. He wasn't simply committing treason for treason's sake.

Who benefitted from Sandy Berger's espionage? You might say Bill Clinton benefitted because Clinton's malfeasance during his term in office was buried by Berger's destruction of government documents. Expand the question. Who benefitted from Bill Clinton's failure to confront the growing terrorist menace? Who benefitted from the Gorelick "wall of separation" that prevented law enforcement personnel from sharing information with intelligence personnel? Who benefits from the continuing MSM/DNC attempts to undermine our defenses, undermine the war effort, whitewash Islam as a religion of peace and undermine our borders? While Berger isn't personally responsible for all of those items, his espionage can be understood only in the context of the greater MSM/DNC goals. Berger would have had no need to destroy documents for Clinton had Clinton and the MSM/DNC not governed as if they had America in their crosshairs.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is no point to the left's anti-Americanism or to the left's destructive foreign policy. The Soviet Union, the chief beneficiary of the left's policies for so many decades, is gone. There remains no leftist ally for the MSM/DNC to aid. While it was plausible to imagine the left in bed with its Soviet co-idealogues during the cold war, the left has nothing in common with our current enemies, the Islamists. The left has nothing to gain from helping the Islamists except its own destruction alongside the rest of us.

I don't have the answer to this puzzle, but some clues may be found in the essay of Nelson Ascher, entitled the "Berlin Wall Orphans" and quoted here at length.

When we cannot definitively identify a reason for widespread destructive behavior, of which espionage is only a small part, we must remain focused on that behavior. Such behavior, including Sandy Berger's espionage necessary to hide the facts, should remain the focus of our inquiry.

Yes, we must prosecute Larry Franklin and assess his guilt, if any. But the Franklin and Berger cases are not comparable. We trivialize the MSM/DNC movement by comparing the work of its functionaries to isolated spy cases.