Dear reader (and Todd Frumplemeyer who sits at his cubicle staring at the G-File, fake laughing to hide the shame of his illiteracy),
Risking the painful barbs of Jim “I’m jolting every morning” Geraghty’s mockery, I’m going to let you know up front that this will be a short G-File today. It’s my second-to-last day at the beach, I have a weird chest cold, and last evening, I celebrated the ninth anniversary of the day I successfully Jedi-mind-tricked the Fair Jessica into marrying me. It will be one ugly conversation when she finally shakes off the brain spell, let me tell you. I’m afraid I’ll have to make like Saddam Hussein or Lord Humungus and use my daughter as a human shield when she comes to.
“How could you do this to me?”
“But look how adorable our daughter is.”
“Don’t change the subject. And don’t tell me these aren’t the droids I’m looking for either.”
Why this requires a short G-File, is an excellent question – for a longer G-File.
The thing I want to know now is: Why hasn’t the CIA assassinated Julian Assange? Indeed, why didn’t the CIA or the DIA or the NSA or the phone cops that came for Johnny Fever take this guy out with a poisoned umbrella or an exploding cigar long before we ever heard the name of the WikiLeaks founder? Hell, why have we even heard of Wikileaks in the first place?
I’m not necessarily advocating that we take him out. First of all, even if it were a good idea, it’s too late now. But think about it. If you go by nearly every Hollywood treatment of the CIA or the NSA, Assange is precisely the sort of guy who should have been garroted in his French hotel room years ago. He’s setting up a website – a series of websites, really – that will allow whistleblowers, traitors, cranks, and misguided morons to publish the government’s most closely kept secrets. Some of these disclosures are guaranteed to damage American national security and put U.S. interests and lives at risk. What are super-cool CIA assassins for if not stopping this sort of thing in its tracks? Whether you think the CIA is an honorable and unfairly maligned outfit that does democracy’s dirty work, or if you think it’s a hotbed of lawless evil setting back human progress at every turn, you would still expect the spooks to off this guy quietly before anyone had heard his name.
What I think is interesting about this is that the Wikileaks case is a perfect illustration of how not just outfits like the CIA and NSA but also the far more powerful entity most commonly known as “The Man” aren’t nearly as powerful as many think they are.
Wikileaks threatens not just national interests but corporate interests, so not only could it potentially out the CIA agents who sold crack in the inner cities, invented AIDS, and killed Kennedy, but it could reveal the secret chemical Colonel Sanders puts in his chicken to make you crave it fortnightly. It could blow the lid off the upholstery business and divulge the locations of the 100-year lightbulb, the working prototype of the electric car, the Bush family’s huge stockpile of Nazi gold, and, of course, the formula for the everlasting gobstopper.
How many movies are based on the idea that governments, corporations, the Catholic Church, the United Nations, and rogue billionaires are all deploying teams of assassins, cleaners, fixers, and editors-at-large to keep the lid on this and limit our exposure to that?
But here comes an outfit that threatens to expose everything, out everyone, and the global Powers that Be are powerless to stop it?
That’s a pretty amazing indictment of a lot of paranoid worldviews.
Unless, of course, Wikileaks is in on the whole thing!
Blame the Right for Left-wing Killers
Late in the day yesterday, I got a call from the folks at the New York Post telling me they desperately wanted me to update my column on “Islamophobia” to take into account the cabbie-stabber in New York. My e-mail box was filling up with asinine taunts from lefties about how stupid I looked given the attack. By the time I revised the column, however, it was becoming clear that this Michael Enright guy wasn’t the right-wing bigot lefty bloggers clearly hoped he would be.
Needless to say, it’s not a great argument to say that conservatives need to stop opposing the Ground Zero mosque lest mosque supporters continue their bloodthirsty rampage against peaceful, law-abiding Muslims – Muslims who oppose the mosque!
Who knows what the story with Enright will turn out to be? But I do think this is a fascinating area for further exploration. I honestly believe that there are a small number of leftists who are so convinced of their Manichean worldview that they are willing to take matters into their own hands to prove it true. I also know that some young people are desperate to gain stature or authenticity by casting themselves as victims. There is something so attractive about being anointed as a member of the Coalition of the Oppressed that young people often fake being attacked in order to gain entry into the fraternity. Indeed, it’s something of an epidemic on American campuses (John Miller did a great peace for the magazine years ago on the problem of hate-crime hoaxes on college campuses).
A third factor is how the professional Left is organized to seize on martyrs. As I’ve written at considerable length elsewhere, the Left’s rhetoric and orientation is fundamentally religious, so it only makes sense that it would organize around people who died or suffered for our collective sins. Sometimes, as in the case of Martin Luther King, the martyrdom treatment is largely deserved. In other cases – JFK, RFK, Matthew Shepard, Horst Wessel, Pavlik Morozov et al. – the stories are more complicated. I’m always intrigued to hear liberals, the supposed champions of empiricism and rationality, invoke ghosts to defend their preferred policies, as if preserving FDR’s legacy were a strong argument for opposing social-security reform, or Teddy Kennedy’s “memory” were a great reason to socialize medicine.
Anyway, more to ponder another time. I’ve got to go.