"Absurd," Snowden told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker yesterday. Also:

It won’t stick…. Because it’s clearly false, and the American people are smarter than politicians think they are.

It's not just certain politicians who are pushing for a different narrative around Snowden. In The New Republic, Sean Wilentz looks at Snowden's political beliefs (and at the beliefs of Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange) in an attempt to suggest that people don't really know who they're cheering for.

Among the items in Wilentz's dossier: Snowden gave money to Ron Paul, as a lot of people already know, and allegedly (under a chat room username) pined for a return to the Gold Standard, spoke of his "NRA compatriots," and suggested he wouldn't mind if Social Security disappeared. But, Wilentz writes, none of these old chat room posts depict "a man with a master plan." The master plan, he suggests, came when Snowden linked up with Greenwald and Assange—whose "connections to Putin’s regime," Wilentz contends, "would appear to have something to do with... how and why Edward Snowden came to seek asylum in Russia."