Monday, November 29, 2010

WikiLeaks: The Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good

...with the Good being us, the American people, and the Perfect being one Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. Assange explains below why the United States is the most recent (and perhaps consistent) target of WikiLeak document dumps:

This document release reveals the contradictions between the U.S.’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors — and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.


Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington — the country’s first president — could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the U.S. government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.


And what have those exposures been? That Libya's Qaddafi likes busty Russian chicks, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi likes wild parties, most of the world is scared shitless of an Iranian nuke, and that Barack Obama's foreign policy has been one big epic fail. Big deal. Tell me something I don't know...

What pisses me off is the scolding we are getting from WikiLeaks for not living up to George Washington's cherry tree fable. Julian Assange is apparently willing to destroy the national security of the United States and weaken its diplomatic powers because somewhere, a diplomat is snarking off about the leader of France. Are you kidding me?

More likely, of course, is this pathetic excuse for a massive document dump is a cover for Assange's deep-seated hatred of the United States. Most of his "successes" noted on the WikiLeaks "about" pages are of the US/UK/Israel "gotcha" type that are common to most so-called "human rights groups". No uncovering of North Korean concentration camps, Chinese secret prisons, Iranian torture chambers, Taliban rapists, Hamas killing floors....just reams and reams of documents showing the failings of the West. And how does Assange justify this war against the nation that has done more to promote freedom, prosperity, and peace than any other in the history of civilization? Why, for blaming us to not living up to the legend of George Washington...


We are good, but we are not perfect, so we must be punished. However, the evil, never claiming to be anything but, are let off scott-free, because there is little hypocrisy to be found in self-confessed killer's personal notes. Or maybe because it is just a little scarier to publish information from a regime that could retaliate by poisoning you with Uranium 231. Or maybe these regimes are perfectly evil, and thus are fit to be left alone, in the eyes of Julian Assange.

Whatever. But should he show his face in the United States, let's make sure he never tells a lie. Of any sort. Or else we should execute some 18th century justice on the man who uses 18th century myths to rationalize his 21st century attacks on the people of the United States...

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