Rightbloggers on WikiLeaks: Kill Julian Assange, But Not Till We Use His Stuff Against Obama

[Blue_Tires]

This weekend we got another fat load of WikiLeaks, based on purloined diplomatic cables to and from the U.S. State Department. As happened when Julian Assange's muckraking endeavor leaked U.S. military data from Iraq earlier this year, conservatives are outraged, and some call, as before, for the expeditious arrest of Assange, or fantasize about his assassination.
Rightbloggers generally take a two-pronged approach to the leaks: They believe the new document dump is an unpardonable breach of U.S. security -- except to the extent that it may be used to denigrate the Obama Administration, it which case they feel it deserves wider dissemination.

It's not as if rightbloggers have been alone in denouncing Wikileaks, as mainstream media outlets from the New York Times on down have attacked Assange from all directions -- while sopping up his revelations on the basis of their newsworthiness.

But that is an old, time-honored form of journalistic hypocrisy: Using hot news to draw readers with one hand, and tut-tutting its shameful provenance with the other. Rightbloggers have added a few new wrinkles to the game.

Back when Assange leaked the Iraq War data, for example, they dismissed the revelations of bad behavior by our Iraqi allies ("they appear to illustrate the inherent -- and forseeable -- problems with the nation-building strategy we pursued in Iraq and are still pursuing in Afghanistan," soothed The American Spectator), and cheerfully plucked the bits that supported their own interests.

The documents suggested to them that a previous, speculative accounting by The Lancet had overestimated real Iraqi casualties of the war, and that the discovery of some old chemical weapons proved that Saddam had WMDs after all. Counter-arguments could be made that The Lancet was measuring different kinds of casualties than the leaked documents addressed, and that the discovered chemical weapons did not constitute a real threat to the United States ("Later investigation revealed those contents to be vitamins"). But for rightbloggers the message was clear: "... the two biggest scoops from the latest document dump are that the infamous Lancet study was bogus, and that WMDs were found in Iraq in quantity."

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/11/rightbloggers_o_12.php

[Joanne98]

1. So much for transparency in Government! Conservatives are LIARS!

[Blue_Tires]

2. kick