President Obama Unhappy, Feisty, Angry at Press Conference Explaining Tax Compromise with Republicans

The president was an unhappy animal addressing his public at the press conference today where he tried to explain why he could no longer dictate Progressive rule.  Feisty, defensive, angry, he did try to explain to his Left why he had to compromise. 

I am not at all confident the more extreme right wing zealots are much different from the demanding Marxists in the Democrat ranks forgetting  that our forefathers in their profound wisdom intended to keep government from dictating its will over the people by forcing the elected to compromise within legislation and among legislation.  

If president Obama had a sense of humor he could have made his performance today easy and entertaining for everyone to  enjoy.   But, he is cold, tense, seething under the skin of control.  He accused Republicans of holding hostage the American people pretending his opponents opposed tax cuts for the middle class….a lie, of course.

He blabbed and blabbed and repeated and repeated.  Every once in awhile when he occasionally subdued his seething, he seemed normal, almost friendly.  

He read off the names from a list of reporters he kept at the podium of reporters who were to ask him questions.   All seemed leftists, pressing  the president against tacks.  He wasn’t smooth in his answers.  “Look at what I promised during the campaign!”   He insisted that the polls were on his side.  He was “happy to be tested.”

He clearly made reference to John Boehner, the incoming Speaker of the House replacing Nancy Pelosi.   The president snottily claimed Boehner now “has the responsibility to govern”. 

No, that isn’t the way America’s government is organized.  Mr. Boehner’s job is to organize the legislative process in order to pass laws…..The “executive”  duties belong to the president and his adminiatration…..to execute the law.

Click here to view some of the president’s remarks.

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/12/07/angry-obama-on-tax-cuts-gop-are-hostage-takers-liberals-are-sanctimonious/

Journalism “Saboteur” Julian Assange Explains “Scientific Journalism”

The following was written by Julian Assange who seems to be offering his mea culpa throwing internet bombs at America because he has invented Scientific Journalism.   He explains:

“In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain’s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

► The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

► King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.

► Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran’s nuclear program stopped by any means available.

► Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.

► Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

► The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.”

Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

Comment:  I am looking for anything in Assange’s collection of words above to discover what anything American has to do with his present anarchy.   If this Julian would have placed a bomb at some State Department building, how would his being Australian keep him from being hunted down by any or all Americans?   He has detonated an information bomb.   We hope no one will be physically harmed…….but, if someone is, why does this anarchist believe he  should be above being a terrorist?

It would seem to me that a strong media is far less important media than an honest and rational media. 

 ”NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single  person who needed protecting”.     How realistic is this statement?   Who in any city, especially someone living in “peaceloving, peaceful, sweet and kisses” Kabul doesn’t need protecting?   

God Bless Sweden for being in a partnership of some kind with NATO.   So what?

To use the Assange model it should be ‘kosher’ then for  police while hunting down an extortionist, learning  he is Christmas shopping at Macy’s, call in the air force and have the building bombed.

One thing is certain in this Assange affair.   Narcissism is a world-wide disease, especially among the flaky of the West.   If this Assange is responsible through his Wikileaks adventure, he should be charged in a military court as a terrorist, and if found guilty should be offered his choice of demise…..by hemlock ala Socrates, which might satisfy his romance with his ego, or a  by firing squad,  a momento from  Nazi and Soviet society to remind him what real corruption might be like, or commit  him to Iran.

A Globe and Mail Review of Assange’s Evil…..”He’s Made the World a Far More Dangerous Place”

Yet, isn’t that what anarchists want to do?   Denude the nation of its ability to conduct business and safety concerns?

Julian Assange is an enemy of the United States.   He opposes private enterprise.   Dennis Prager describes the Toronto Globe and Mail as Canada’s New York Times.  The following article by Margaret Wente, “The Dark Side of  the Web”, published today.

“Julian Assange has all the makings of a 21st-century folk hero. He has single-handedly humiliated a great power by exposing its dark secrets and hypocrisies. He steals secrets from the rich and powerful and gives them away to benefit the rest of us. Lots of people want to take him out. But he’s not cowed. Every day or two, he grants another interview from cyberspace. Now, he warns that he can unleash a devastating information bomb any time he wants.

There’s just one problem with this heroic picture. Julian Assange has made the world a far more dangerous place.

“I am a former British diplomat,” wrote one person in an online Q&A session with Mr. Assange the other day. “In the course of my former duties I helped to co-ordinate multilateral action against a brutal regime in the Balkans, impose sanctions on a renegade state threatening ethnic cleansing, and negotiate a debt relief program for an impoverished nation. None of this would have been possible without the security and secrecy of diplomatic correspondence … Diplomacy cannot operate without discretion and the protection of sources.

“In publishing this massive volume of correspondence, WikiLeaks is not highlighting specific cases of wrongdoing but undermining the entire process of diplomacy. … My question to you is: why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function?”

For once, Mr. Assange had no answer.

No wonder lots of people think Mr. Assange should be taken out. Alas, it wouldn’t make a difference if he were. The digital genie is out of the bottle. Any ultra-smart young hacker can steal top-secret information – and anyone can publish it. Not all of them are as discriminating as the editors of The New York Times, who only spill the secrets they deem to be of public interest. The information gatekeepers are gone. This is a liberating thing, we’ve been told. It’s also a terrifying thing.

Some of the secrets that WikiLeaks has spilled deserved to be revealed. But the bigger story here is the new ability of thousands of unaccountable, independent actors to expose state (and corporate) secrets on a vast scale. This development is the digital equivalent of the IED. Their data bombs are cheap, plentiful and indiscriminately deadly.

Even Larry Sanger, a Wikipedia co-founder, believes Julian Assange is an enemy of the people. In a tweet to WikiLeaks last week, he said, “What you’ve been doing to us is breathtakingly irresponsible & can’t be excused with pieties of free speech and openness.” He blasted the idea that WikiLeaks is a positive force for openness and transparency, pointing out that a great deal of democratic government – especially matters dealing with privacy, public safety and defence – is necessarily conducted behind closed doors. Anyone who thinks this shouldn’t be the case is dangerously naive.

Ironically, Mr. Assange doesn’t really want to encourage free speech and openness. Just the opposite. His real aim, as he freely explains, is to paralyze the U.S. government, which he calls an “authoritarian conspiracy,” by forcing the authorities to restrict the flow of information so severely that they themselves are rendered powerless. “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it’s our goal to achieve a more just society,” he says. “An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself.”

So much for Julian Assange, folk hero. More like an information terrorist, with a sack of IEDs.

Comment:  And, of course, he is also committing extortion.  Yet, I haven’t become too excited yet about what has been leaked and become public aware.   Some juicy stuff, some deceit here, pretense there and a lie or two in between…..well that is what State Departments have been doing for centuries.   Openness, however, should never be decided upon by an anarchist warring against  a society.

Final Score: Classics 45 Moderns 3 ……Concerto Defeats Rap!

One of the most spectacular routs in organized team sports in our American scene occurred last evening when the New York Jets travelled   to battle the New England Patriots.   I bleed purple for our Minnesota Vikings, but my next super favorite team to follow is anything   Bill Belichick, the Patriots man, might coach.  I have followed his teams since midway through the 2000-1  professinal football season, when nobody Tom Brady appeared from nowhere to replace injured star, Drew Bledsoe at quarterback.  Brady,  Bledsoe and Belichick went on to an upset win in the 2001  Super Bowl.

A few years earlier   Bill Parcells,   while   still basking in the sun of success coaching  the New York Jets surprisingly retired.     Everyone assumed he was leaving ’his’ team  to assistant coach Bill Belichick .    Belichick shocked everyone when he signed up with the Patriots instead.    This Belichick guy seemed different to me, so I found myself  following  up on what he was doing with his new team.   When he and quarterback Brady maneuvered a victory over the “Greatest Show on Turf”, the St. Louis Rams,  in that  2001 Super Bowl, I have absorbed whatever I can about the Bill Belichick-Patriot’s saga ever since.  I admit,  I think he is a genious.

I have followed many sports ‘mentally’ and visually over my entire life……even remember Sammy Snead and Claude Passeau and Eddie Waitkus…..how about Nelson Potter?  Marion Motley?  Johnny Mayasich?   George Mikan??  Ken Rosewall?  Ben Hogan?   

By far, by every measure possible, there is no one I know of in the entire world of American sports  who has ever had a more complete command of all aspects of ‘coaching’  his sport and getting results from all aspects of the sport he coaches than Bill Belichick.   (I think this is commonly accepted but is only  hinted at , even carped at, but everyone in the know, knows it is a fact.

I watched this game last night observing  a master craftsman,  Beethoven  like,  carving out his art creating perfection  in the world of athletic competition.  His goal was to defeat a good team headed by a devoted, in your face, boastful  and domineering coach, Rex Ryan, to whom the Patriot’s had lost to earlier in the season at the Jet’s home turf.  They competed for domination in their division.

Ninety per cent of me expected Belichick to sculpt a rout.   I have never been a betting man, but on this one I surely would have been tempted.  Both coaches had ten days to prepare.

Quarterback Tom Brady was a kid star back in 2001.  He became  a super star since and last evening he became a super conductor  in the sport.  But, the bigger scene belongs to Belichick who positions his players as a chess master uses his pieces and has the advantage of selecting the pieces he wants to fit the position.   He picks up rejects no one else seems to want, including a 5’8″ Danny Woodhead from the Jets earlier in the year.   He ran 104 yards in 3 plays.  No one can find where the scat back runner is. 

After the game Woodhead, just a kid,  was interviewed…..Bright, articulate, good sense of humor, exaggerating his height claiming he is 5’9″…..a smart fellow.  Since he had been earlier coached by Rex Ryan, he was led  on by a reporter  to compare the style of the two coaches.

He wisely declined and appropriately lauded both.  I’d bet he told it the way it is.

The styles between the two couldn’t be more different…..I view the difference as the ideals of the classic past versus the realities of  modern times.

Rex Ryan is a bloated, in-your-face, foul mouthed, coarse and openly vulgar bully type who believes strongly in self esteem both his own  and  his players’.   He dares someone to oppose so he can yell back at them.   I believe much of it is show, but he comes from good stock of bully and brain brawn, his dad, Buddy Ryan who actually engaged in fist fights with colleagues while coaching on his profootball  sidelines.   Rex Ryan is modern.  As coach the noise he displays seems quite like rap.

I have no real  idea what kind of a person he is in private.  I’d guess a fun guy, but tiring.   I am simply a spectator who enjoys figuring out what makes folks tick and how they tick.   I guess  it is from the high school teacher gene in me.

And then we come across from my amateur view of things in sport, the  quiet, busy, consumed by the science and art of football, Bill Belichick,  the best coach ever  in the sport business in collecting his chess pieces, or in this case, last evening, his musicians , having trained  them both mentally and physically to advance their personal mental and physical  skills to become a symphony, to hide the weaknesses and exploit the strengths of each to create beautiful harmony to work together  as an orchestra…..Each is to play his own part as if in a trumpet   concerto…..with the trumpet  featuring  Tom Brady at quarterback.

So, last evening, in my point of view, I saw (heard visually, so to speak) one of the most beautiful orchestral performances I have ever seen in sports…..A Classic, filled with harmony and beautiful, and not at all modern, ugly, noisy but without melody.

Beauty won over vulgarity………(but, I have to admit, there is a bit of me which likes Rex Ryan.  He is so crude, but I think a good coach.)

It is that Bill Bellichick is alone as the sports very best “composer”.

(By the way, the final score:   Patriots 45   Jets  3

It Is Reported Fritz Mondale Has Written A Book About Himself

Jeremy Lott has written the following article, “Stagflation’s Veep” about Walter Mondale’s Memoirs, “The Good Fight:  A Life in Liberal Politics” in the American Spectator:

“Every career has a low point: a time when things go so badly that you begin to wonder, what am I doing in this line of work again? For me, that point came while I was serving as the Warren Brookes Journalism Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. On one particularly galling spring afternoon, I took to wandering the halls of the think tank’s old headquarters on Connecticut and K, muttering to myself, looking to the world like I’d just had a near miss with a Japanese bullet train. When concerned colleagues asked what was wrong, I half yelled, “I got stood up by Walter Mondale, that’s what!”

It was part of the research for my book on the vice presidents, The Warm Bucket Brigade. I’d set up an interview with Jimmy Carter’s veep only to have the rug yanked out from under me at the last minute as work demands from Dorsey & Whitney, his 800-pound gorilla of a law firm, proved more pressing. Eventually we rescheduled and I rediscovered my sense of purpose as a writer of words and phrases. But it was touch and go there. I nearly cried uncle to a man who has lost statewide elections in all 50 states.

As readers will see in Mondale’s memoirs, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics, that took determination and real hard work. The Carter-Mondale ticket lost 27 states and still squeaked out a victory over Gerald Ford in 1976. In 1980, they lost 44 states to Ronald Reagan. In 1984, as the bomber-in-chief of a kamikaze Democratic ticket, Mondale managed to improve on that historically awful performance, but not quite enough.

In 1984, Mondale stood for a nuclear freeze, the unpopular and never ratified Equal Rights Amendment, and raising taxes. He picked a running mate with the personality of a salad shooter. Her husband had tax troubles and mob ties. And they still only managed to lose 49 states. In the final weeks, the Reagan campaign could have taken steps to win Mondale’s native Minnesota but decided it would be ungentlemanly to not at least let him have that much.

A lesser man might have conceded victory, but Mondale refused to let that small win stand. In 2002, Minnesota’s “magnificent progressive” Senator Paul Wellstone had been heading toward likely reelection when he died in a plane crash. Mondale agreed to jump into the race with 11 days to go but couldn’t really “launch the campaign immediately” because there was still the small matter of the Wellstone memorial.

“The story of that event…is now well known,” writes Mondale. “It drew a huge turnout: Bill and Hillary Clinton were there, as were Bob Dole and about half the U.S. Senate, Democrats and Republicans.” In other words, this was not the best time for partisan speechmaking.

To Mondale’s chagrin, members of his party refused to take the hint. While the memorial “started off as a beautiful tribute to Paul and the people who died with him,” insists Mondale, “speech by speech it gradually began to take on a political tone, and by the end it had turned into an unintentional rally for Democrats.” As a result, “The Republicans who had come to honor Paul felt tricked and abused, and one by one they began to walk out.”

In the former vice president’s telling, they took a lot of voters with them as they left. Mondale neglects to relate that he called for the repeal of the Bush tax cuts in his debate with St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, though he does admit that “Even in Minnesota, the message of the unfettered market had a lot of resonance.” He admits that Coleman also managed to use his age against him, which would mark the second time the age issue stung him.

In the second Reagan-Mondale debate in 1984, the septuagenarian president did an expert bit of political jujitsu when he announced, “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Nearly every American with a healthy sense of humor laughed at that line, Mondale perhaps loudest of all. It is credited as the turn of phrase that got the “Morning in America” campaign back on track. But in all the laughter, many people have missed the razor-sharp jab at the Carter-Mondale administration Reagan followed it with: “I might add that it was Seneca or it was Cicero, I don’t know which, that said if it was not for the elders correcting the mistakes of the young, there would be no state.”

THIS IS NOWHERE MORE EVIDENT than in Mondale’s discussion of the Iran hostage crisis. He’s honest enough to concede most of the things that critics charged against the Carter administration. Yes, they first refused any assistance to the Shah and then refused to allow him into America once he was deposed. Yes, they refused to help because they were worried about looking bad. Yes, they dithered. Yes, they had to abandon a military rescue attempt when they decided to go with the smallest possible force and there was an accidental collision. And yes, Iran refused to release the hostages from the U.S. embassy until the minute Reagan was sworn into office, but that doesn’t mean that the Carter administration did the wrong thing.

Oh, no, says Mondale: “Some will say it made America look weak and emboldened our enemies. Some have said it revealed a pattern of poor decision-making in the Carter administration. But I take a different lesson, one I think is more important than ever: a caution against the belief that the easy answer — the emotionally satisfying response — is the right answer to every crisis.”

Some might look at that evaluation and charge that Mondale here elevates diplomacy over national honor, which made him the perfect choice for ambassador to Japan during the Clinton administration. Some might dissect this for the first glimpse of how America would mismanage its relationship with radical Islamists the world over. Some might see in the White House back-and-forth an indictment of moralistic liberalism on the world stage. But I take a different lesson, one I think is at least as important as it was last November 2: thank God Democrats nominated this man in 1984.”

Comment:   What Mr. Mondale also doesn’t mention here is anything about the nastiness he carried throughout his  campaign for Senate in 2002.  He had become bitter, mean and shallow and carried an  ugly mouth to go with it.   He has shrivelled up into a smelly rag.  

I had spent a number of hours campaigning for him in the early 1970s, a candidate one could be deeply proud of.  It was good to be a Democrat in those preObama days.  They may have called themselves progressives, but they were still Americans and believed in the country’s traditions.   They supported free enterprise and had not yet developed their particular kind of racism and other disagreeables emanating from their victimhood alliances yet.  They did curse the Twin Cities and similar cities throughout the nation with forced busing ‘for racial equality’ and had spent billions by now buying black votes and destroying the black family at the same time.   Walter Mondale was a good salesman for every liberal welfare program he could think of.   But, he was a good person who attracted good people around him.

I watched every minute of the  television coverage of the memorial for Wellstone that evening.  Yes, the politics of the evening was repelling, so much so, then Governor Jessie Ventura sitting and enduring, could take it no longer, dramatically stood up and exited the building……and it was totally appropriate for him to do so, for the politics was not only ill mannered but bordering on a diatribe  against  all who weren’t on the same political moonbeam as  pixieish  lefty, Mr. Wellstone, the last Democrat, I confess,  I  ever voted for.

I was so upset the very next day I sped over to Norm Coleman’s campaign office and over the next several days distributed about 60 of his campaign signs.  Ironically that last political volunteer job I had was distributing campaign literature for the same Walter Mondale when he ran for his first Senate seat thirty or so years earlier.

That event also was the last time I ever listened to Lake Wobegon stuff by Garrison Keeler.  He turned nasty also and at the time of Wellstone’s accidental death, he inimated in the newspaper that many Minnesotans thought that Norm Coleman’s people had murdered him, although he, himself,  thought it unlikely.

Minnesota Democrats had sunk quite lowly as a responsible group and have not been able to recover since.   Al Franken and Mark Dayton are further examples of its decay.

I do remember an interview with Mondale about ten  years  after his humiliating defeat for the presidency in 1984 in which the interviewer asked him “How long did it take for you to get over that defeat in 1984, Mr. Vice President?”

Mondale hesitated and then blurted out, “I don’t know but I’ll let you know when it happens.”    It was good to see there was at that time a bit of humor left in him.   It was gone by 2002.

Christopher Hitchens Writes about Julian Assange and Valerie Plame

Ill though he may be, it appears Christopher Hitchens hasn’t changed his spots of writing one bit.  I have nearly always found him a must read and a must listen, no matter how much I agree or disagree with him.  He is most foolish for his atheism, but he is better defending it than most.  

He recognizes our president, Barack Hussein Obama well, as I would have bet he would.  I hope he continues his review of our man from LaMancha for a long time.

Christopher Hitchens recognized our man in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein early and  also well and has often written and spoken about it as he does in his article here.    Christopher Hitchens seems alert and well in analyzing the White House’s foolishness and weaknesses regarding the Assange blackmail.  The Wikileaks thus far seem to be hardly more than fascinating gossip about what often is said and done “diplomatically”.  

Christopher Hitchens wrote  the following article, “Turn Yourself in, Julian Assange” at Slate:

“In my most recent book, I reprint some words from a British Embassy cable, sent from Baghdad to the Foreign Office in 1976. The subject is Iraq’s new leader. His quiet coup d’etat is reassuringly described as “the first smooth transfer of power since 1958.” It is added, as though understatement were an official stylistic requirement in official prose, that although “strong-arm methods may be needed to steady the ship, Saddam will not flinch.” It’s not absolutely certain whether these words were used just before or just after the “smooth transfer” had been extended to include Saddam’s personally supervised execution of half the membership of the Baath Party’s ruling political bureau.

I  came across this cable after it had been declassified a few years ago, and I reprinted it because it very accurately reflected the tone of what I’d been told by British diplomats when I was visiting Iraq at the time. And I ask myself: What if I had been able to get my hands on that report when it was first written? Not only would I have had a scoop to my name, but I could have argued that I was exposing a political mentality that—not for the first time in the history of the British Foreign Office—chose to drape tyranny in the language of cliché and euphemism.

But what else, aside from this high-minded ambition (or ambitious high-mindedness), ought I to have considered? A democratically elected British Parliament had enacted an Official Secrets Act, which I could be held to have broken. Would I bravely submit to prosecution for my principles? (I was later threatened with imprisonment for another breach of this repressive law, and it was one of the reasons I decided to emigrate to a country that had a First Amendment.) The moral “other half” of civil disobedience, as its historic heroes show, is that you stoically accept the consequences that come with it. Then there is diplomacy itself. One of civilization’s oldest and best ideas is that all countries establish tiny sovereign enclaves in each other’s capitals and invest these precious enclaves of peaceful resolution with special sorts of immunity. That this necessarily includes a high degree of privacy goes without saying. Even a single violation of this ancient tradition may have undesirable unintended consequences, and we rightly regard a serious breach of it with horror. We found out everything we would ever need to know about Ayatollah Khomeini and his ideology when he took diplomats as hostages.

The cunning of Julian Assange’s strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy. Unless you consider yourself bound by the hysterically stupid decision of the Obama administration to forbid all federal employees from downloading or viewing the WikiLeaks papers, you will at the very least have indulged in a certain amount of guilty pleasure. In a couple of major instances, the disclosures are of great value to the regime-change die-hards among us. More Arab regimes want Washington to take on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and more urgently than anyone had guessed; I would very much rather know this now than 20 years later. Iran was able to acquire some missile capacity from North Korea; so would Saddam Hussein have been if we had left him in his so-called “box.” We already know that his envoys were meeting North Korean missile dealers in Damascus before the threat of the coalition’s intervention caused the vendors to return hastily to Pyongyang. The latest leaks complete an important part of an important case.

As for the public’s right to know and the accountability of our covert or confidential agencies, it is only a short time since the entire American liberal consensus was witlessly applauding a clumsy and fruitless prosecution, directed entirely at the hopelessly overdramatized exposure of a relatively minor CIA official, married to a monster of conceit who makes Assange look bashful. It then turned out that Valerie Plame’s job description had been made public by Robert Novak and Richard Armitage, who also had in common with Assange a rooted opposition to the administration’s Iraq policy. Elements of the left and the right appear to have switched positions on full disclosure since then.

Attempts to prosecute Assange will, I predict, be either too little or too late, or both, or worse. There is a good reason the Espionage Act of 1917 has such a rusty and unused sound to it. It was a panic measure passed during a time of Wilsonian war hysteria, and none of its provisions will serve in the cyberworld. Meanwhile, the very word Interpol has been a laughing stock for decades in law-enforcement circles, and, though I find it easy to picture Assange as a cult leader indulging himself with acolytes, the sex charges against him don’t appear to amount to rape and have a trumped-up feel to them. They also give him an excuse to recruit sympathy and stay out of sight instead of turning himself in.

And that, of course, prosecution or no prosecution, is what he really ought to do. If I had decided to shame the British authorities on Iraq in 1976, I would have accepted the challenge to see them in court or otherwise face the consequences. I couldn’t have expected to help myself to secret documents, make myself a private arbiter of foreign policy, and disappear or retire on the proceeds. All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is “to end two wars,” one knows at once what he means by the “ending.” In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him. This Monday, in two separate news reports, the New York Times described his little cabal as an “anti-secrecy” and “whistle-blowing” outfit. Such mush-headed approval at least can be withheld from the delightful Julian, even as we all help ourselves to his mart of ill-gotten goods.”

Comment:  Hang in there, Mr. Hitchens.