Fortunately for Donald Trump, Mike Pence is not the only weapon in his arsenal. Trump can always hold out hope that WikiLeaks will drop a so-called October surprise on Sec. Clinton. Yet, if Trump and his Trumpanzees were hoping for such an October surprise this week, they were disappointed. WikiLeaks poobah Julian Assange, still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in craven flight from sexual assault charges in Sweden, kept Trump supporters up all hours of the night for what amounted to a self-serving infomercial for Assange’s book. So much, at least this week, for a deus ex WikiLeaks that would rescue the Trump campaign from its own contradictions and apparently inevitable failure.
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Julian Assange promised a YUGE document dump this week that the Donald Trump campaign eagerly forecast would be the end of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Trump spokesslime Roger Stone tweeted about the possibility with all the excitement of a schoolgirl about to intentionally lose her virginity, and enthusiastically contract herpes in the process.
Of course, Clinton’s opponents have been hoping against hope for some campaign-ending revelation from WikiLeaks for some time. Indeed, the extreme Japanese-holdout-stranded-on-Pacific-island-after-the-end-of-the-Pacific-War militants in the Bernard Sanders campaign, the twentysomething Bernie-or-busters who could not reconcile themselves to Sec. Clinton’s primary victory, had for months been hoping against hope, salivating at the prospect, that Julian Assange would “save” America from the prospect of That Woman.
Hopes of both the Sanders holdouts and the Trump campaign for a deus ex WikiLeaks keep being raised and then dashed on the all too obvious rock of Julian Assange’s multitudinous character defects.
We know, from the public record, that Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice, wanted in the kingdom of Sweden on charges of sexually assaulting at least one, and possibly additional, underage girls. Assange, one of those Nietzschean creatures who fancies himself some sort of superior man, and thus, above the law, did not see fit to meet with Swedish authorities, even accepting for a moment the possibility that his doing so might corroborate his denial of the charges. Instead, Assange fabricated a paranoid conspiracy narrative that the Evil Swedes had Made It All Up and were acting as a stalking horse for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Now Assange may be right to believe that DOJ would very much like to speak to him about his plundering forays into American intelligence, in which he was aided and abetted by Bradley-who-wants-to-be-Chelsea Manning. The DOJ will certainly like to speak to Mr. Assange about a number of those issues, not least of which, of course, is how and why Julian Assange, that self-appointed, self-righteous Tribune of the Downtrodden, that self defined Moral Paragon, could have so cowardly abandoned Bradley-who-wants-to-be-Chelsea Manning to his/her fate.
Of course, the indisputable facts are the Assange IS a coward. Instead of presenting himself in Stockholm to answer the Swedish charges, Assange broke bail and fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Relying upon the fact that Ecuadorian Pres. Rafael Correa is, like like Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, a reflexive hater of the United States, Assange believed, and rightly it has turned out, that the Ecuadorians would give him, a notorious fugitive from British, Swedish, and American justice, sanctuary within their Embassy. From there, Assange has been free to throw bombs, unsettling the political life of the West while identifying himself and WikiLeaks as an eager, uncritical supporter of Russia’s long-standing Kriegßpiel against the West.
Certainly, Assange and WikiLeaks have acquired an unsavory reputation for acting as an uncritical, un-curatorial laundromat for phony emails emanating from Russia’s powerful and sophisticated disinformation operation. Indeed, so serious was the problem of WikiLeaks un-curated data dump that even Edward Snowden -of all people- felt it necessary to criticize WikiLeaks’ complete lack of sophistication or discrimination in determining what they would release. And indeed, WikiLeaks has been so promiscuous in its un-curated data dumps that it has, for example, intentionally, recklessly, or negligently, outed queerfolk in backward countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.
All this in the name of some so-called virtue of “transparency,” which, when parsed, actually means revealing information that harms the West while advantaging Russia. Is it any surprise that a number of Western intelligence agencies, and a number of Western media outlets as well, characterize WikiLeaks as being essentially a propaganda arm of the Russian government, a part of Russia’s disinformation apparatus operating in and against the West? Is it any wonder that the patriotism and loyalty of Trump campaign supporters, Jill Stein zealous, and some of Bernie’s Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island “Bernie-or-bust” people should be questioned when they begin to hyperventilate and salivate with anticipation that WikiLeaks might release something harmful to Hillary Clinton.
Yet, to date, none of the much ballyhooed WikiLeaks data dumps have been what Assange claims they are. Every “this will finish Hillary Clinton” data dump has proved, in the words of one media commentator, to be “a whole lot of nothing,” or a “nothingburger” with a side of Russian dressing.
Thus, when Trump’s spokesslime Roger Stone began hyperventilating last week that Assange’s latest disclosures would be “the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Democrats understandably began preparing preemptive damage control against the possibility that some part of Assange’s data dump might require explaining and contextualizing. But, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the Breitbart people notwithstanding, Assange’s much vaunted data dump was another nothingburger: essentially a narcissistic infomercial plugging the tenth anniversary of WikiLeaks and pitching Assange’s new book.
Indeed, arguably the only beneficiaries of Assange’s ridiculous infomercial will be HM Crown Prosecution Service and the United States Department of Justice. Because it goes virtually without saying that self-made, self-righteous, self-important people like Julian Assange and Donald Trump will always destroy themselves with the most powerful instrument available, their own mouths and what emerges therefrom. Ninety percent of criminal defendants who take the stand for themselves convict themselves out of the words of their own mouth.
The Trump people, who had been up all night waiting for the revelations that would “end Hillary Clinton’s campaign” found themselves reduced to stuttering, sputtering, spluttering, apoplectic, vein-popping, friendship-sundering, lawsuit-inducing, bowel-evacuating, psycho-guano rage. The tweet storm that followed was breathtaking to behold. The great deus ex WikiLeaks moment for which the Trump supporters, the irreconcilable Bernie-or-busters, and the Jill Stein anti-vaxxer-anti-science aging hippies had been eagerly waiting, with bated breath, came and went with a sales pitch. Not with a bang, but with a tawdry tease.
Even Julian Assange, smarmy, want-to-take-a-skillet-to-his-smug-mug, narcissist that he is, must truly realize that one can only raise and dash expectations so many times before one’s credibility begins to run short. As the fable puts it, Julian Assange has cried “wolf!” once too often.
There is a virtue to institutional openness and transparency. But that openness and transparency must come from within the institution in question. Assange, and the Russian government for which he works, don’t accept that proposition. For them, transparency is a concept that is useful only to the extent that it can be weaponized in the service of the Russian State. That, of course, is NOT how transparency is supposed to work in a liberal, Western, democracy. And because Julian Assange is such a coward and so obvious a water-carrier for the Kremlin, we may, with justification, wonder what will happen to him in future.
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and his ambassador in London should be confronted with a simple choice by HM Foreign and Commonwealth Office: give up Assange or be expelled from the United Kingdom for actions inconsistent with the ambassador’s diplomatic status. This is not the equivalent of Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty taking refuge in the United States diplomatic mission in Budapest in 1956 and remaining there for the next fifteen years.
For Mindszenty, for all the rumors have swirled about him, had at least been, for a time, the courageous voice of Hungarian resistance to fascism and communism. By that token, Mindszenty represented the authentic voice of a persecuted church and people. What does Assange represent? He represents nothing but his own ego, pressed into the service of the Russian State and the anti-American hatred of the Rafael Correa/Evo Morales/Nicolas Maduro breed of anti-American caudillos for whom anti-Americanism is nothing but a convenient device to deflect attention from their own failures of leadership.
Julian Assange is a coward, and he will meet, in due course, a coward’s end, dying not from a drone strike, as the Hillary haters fondly imagine and like to accuse her of plotting, but alone, probably in a dismal council flat in a depressed neighborhood of South London with no one to mourn his passing, having spent his declining years cadging charity from a dwindling number of supporters and besieging the Australian High Commission in London for assistance.
And that is how it should be.
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