"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Click here to listen to Barbara Espinosa’s “Hair on Fire” program tonight at 9 p.m. ET.
Barbara is a tremendous Tea Party activist and has been a great friend since I first met her in August 2009. (See “Grandma Is an Angry Mob.”) I’m not sure what we’ll talk about tonight, but I expect to discuss the incredible ass-whupping the Democrats took in the mid-term election. You can call-in at (347) 857-4081.
“The dissolution of the distinction between the private and public spheres was one of the great aims of totalitarianism.”
— Theodore Dalrymple, “What’s Really Wrong with WikiLeaks”
Coincidentally, last night I was thinking along very similar lines not only in regard to Julian Assange’s info-terrorism, but also in regard to what Betsy Rothstein does at FishbowlDC.
Those who delight in prying into the privacy of others are shocked when the tables are turned. The feature on Rothstein points out that she — who played a key role in the “Journolist” revelations — becomes quite flustered when people want to make her life the subject of inquiry:
By the next campaign season she had left [a congressional staff position] for The Hill, where she worked for a decade until leaving abruptly for (highly un-salacious) reasons about which she did not want to elaborate on the record. Before I learned most of this I gleaned that, despite the Adams Morgan residency, she spends many days blogging from a coffee shop in Bloomingdale. When I asked if she had a boyfriend in that neighborhood, it caused a mild freakout. . . .
This elusiveness only serves to reinforce Rothstein’s “agenda vacuum,” the unexplained motivations behind her posts that rankle her critics the most.
Exactly: What ax is she grinding? What’s she all about? What makes her tick? The kind of curiosity that drives Rothstein’s exposure of other people’s secrets feels distinctly uncomfortable to Rothstein when it’s directed at her.
And likewise, as Dan Riehl pointed out, while Julian Assange is subjecting massive amounts of U.S. national security materials to total disclosure, the details of Assange’s own operation — Who’s paying the bills at WikiLeaks? Where’s he getting these leaks? What’s his motivation? — are unknown.
What would we discover if somebody hacked Assange’s e-mail account? What would happen if someone tapped his phone and released the recordings? What might be concealed in the financial records of WikiLeaks?
Dalrymple’s observation about the totalitarian impulse to eradicate privacy is relevant here because, of course, totalitarian governments are always intensely secretive about their own activities. And this inherent double-standard of totalitarianism was something that crossed my mind last night, as I pondered the WikiLeaks revelation of State Department secrets.
During the Russian Revolution, a major propaganda claim by the Bolsheviks was their repudiation of “secret diplomacy,” which they portrayed as the “imperialist” cause of the World War:
[I]n an attack on imperialism, [the Congress of Soviets] called on the nations of the world to abolish secret diplomacy. It promised that the Soviet government would conduct all negotiations in the light of day before the people. And it promised to publish all of the secret treaties to which Russia had been a party.
As the historic record shows, as soon as Lenin’s Bolsheviks gained power, they entered into secret negotiations with Germany that led to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. With similar secrecy, the Kremlin sent Comintern agents everywhere to subvert “capitalist” governments and foment labor unrest in an effort to spark revolutionary uprisings. The U.S. and other governments for some years refused to grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government, in part because of the concern — entirely warranted, as subsequent events proved — that Soviet embassies would become hubs of espionage and subversion.
Most notoriously of all, in 1939, after years of Communist propaganda about the need to maintain a “common front” against the fascist menace, Stalin reached a secret treaty with Hitler that provided for the partition of Poland and the liquidation of the Baltic states — the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that was the necessary and immediate precursor to World War II.
So now, while the democratic government of the United States finds its diplomatic messages turned into front-page news through the crimes of Julian Assange and his accomplices — and this action is defended by some who call themselves “libertarians” — WikiLeaks seems to pose no threat to the secrets of North Korea, Cuba, Iran and other terror-states.
As the communists used to say, “This is no accident.”
Jimmie Bise calls this process “clearing the browser tabs.” Just some things I saw in the past day or so and wanted to link:
Dan Calabrese has had it up to here with the anti-Palin crowd:
it seems that just about everyone else is obsessed with Palin’s presidential prospects, and that includes a certain Ed Rollins, who holds forth today on CNN.com with a piece titled, “Palin, I knew Reagan. You’re no Reagan.”
Well.
There is much to mock about a piece on Gov. Palin’s supposed lack of presidential qualifications, especially coming from a man who once tried to help win the presidency for H. Ross Perot, who was not only unqualified but also insane.
Jennifer Caballero at Liberty Pundits asks the all-too-obvious question:
“Why is Huckabee’s ex- campaign manager
telling us who’s worthy of Reagan’s mantle?”
Bingo, Jen. Whatever your opinion of Sarah Palin, the problem is that nearly all her most prominent critics are professional operatives of one sort or another. If they are not already on the payroll of some prospective 2012 GOP presidential candidate, then they are presumably seeking such work. And they know they can get headlines and ingratiate themselves to those prospective employers by publishing anti-Palin rants.
The real danger here, as I’ve said before, is that this relentless Palin-bashing from within the GOP can have no good result. Either (a) Palin wins the nomination anyway, in which case the GOP 2012 nominee will have been damaged by all these friendly-fire attacks, or (b) someone else will win the nomination as the beneficiary of a none-too-subtle “Anybody But Sarah” campaign in the primaries. And then good luck getting those people energized for the general election.
Rush Limbaugh did a great segment Wednesday on the anti-Palin crowd, featuring this quote from GOP operative Nicolle Wallace:
Only Sarah Palin can beat Sarah Palin. And let me tell you why no one will take her on. Her defenders and supporters, the likes of Rush Limbaugh and people I admire, are so powerful on the right that nobody wants to anger any of those people, nobody wants to end up in the crosshairs, and nobody wants to look like they are unwilling to let her do her thing. I don’t think people should be, you know, uptight and angsting about Sarah Palin. I think she’ll reveal herself, and people will love her or hate her. I really believe that if it looked like she were about to become the nominee, or, heaven forbid, the leader of the free world, a whole lot of people would stand up and say a whole lot of things.
Understand one thing: Nicolle Wallace is Team Bush all the way. She is speaking for, and serving the interests of, the Bush wing of the GOP. I’ve long warned that there is a Jeb 2012 bandwagon geared up and ready to roll at a moment’s notice, if Jeb decides to take a shot at it. If that doesn’t happen, the Bushies are trying to keep their thumb on the scale, to make sure that whoever gets the 2012 nomination, it’s someone acceptable to them.
But the Bushies know that, whatever else happens, it’s all over for them if Sarah Palin gets the 2012 nomination. Establishment phonies like Nicolle Wallace will be persona non grata to a Palin-led Republican Party.
Just keep that in mind. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes of the GOP than most grassroots conservatives suspect.
P.S.: Ed Rollins? Dude worked on the Huffington ’94 Senate campaign.
. . . for those pathetic slobs who are merely “long-term unemployed“:
The longer people stay out of work, the more trouble they have finding new work. . . .
This country has some of the highest levels of long-term unemployment — or joblessness lasting more than six months — ever recorded. . . .
[T]he legions of long-term unemployed will probably be idle for significantly longer than their counterparts in past recessions, reducing their chances of eventually finding a job even when the economy becomes more robust.
“I am so worried somebody will look at me and say, ‘Oh, he’s probably lost his edge,’ ” said Tim Smyth, 51, a New York television producer who has been unable to find work since 2008, despite having two decades of experience at places like Nickelodeon and the Food Network. “I mean, I know it’s not true, but I’m afraid I might say the same thing if I were interviewing someone I didn’t know very well who’s been out of work this long.”
Read the whole thing. Advice for Tim Smyth: Dude, you’re going about this the wrong way. Just create a Web site and keep doing what you would be doing if you actually had a job with a paycheck.
Make some YouTube videos or something. Print yourself a card that says, “Tim Smyth, independent producer” and, if anybody asks what it is you’re producing, give ’em some mumbo-jumbo about “projects” and “clients.” You don’t have to tell them that your client is your brother-in-law and the project is a DVD highlight compilation of his home videos of his kids’ softball season.
Alternatively: “I’m negotiating a development deal.”
Every other bartender and convenience-store clerk in L.A. is “negotiating a development deal,” which translates to “calling up producers to ask them to take a look at my crappy reality-series proposal,” or whatever.
The important thing is to convey the impression that you’re a hot property, with plenty of offers to choose from, just waiting for the right deal to come along.
By the way, this is probably a good time to remind readers that it’s “Make My Wife Happy” Week here at The Other McCain, so please hit the tip jar pay those “consulting” fees.
UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. All joking aside, we are talking about a couple of related problems:
“Financial analyst at a real estate firm, age 54 . . . people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who though they’d done everything right . . . too young to retire and maybe, too old to rehire . . . fiber-optics engineering manager . . . today, nearly 20 percent of the unemployed in America have college degrees. . . . Doug [Francone] was a $200,000-a-year personnel executive . . . Claudia Bruce . . . was an office manager making $70,000 a year.”
There is a similarity to these people, you see. Although short-term prospects are grim for young people — unemployment for those under 25 is very high — they at least have the hope of getting on with their careers once the economy recovers.
For the middle-aged and (formerly) middle-class unemployed, however, the wrecked economy has devastated their lives in a way that is genuinely irreparable. Even if they manage to find new careers in new fields, there will never be a “recovery” for these people whose careers were permanently derailed — savings drained, homes lost — as a result of the Great Crash.
The “winners” of this grievous misfortune are those who recognize the reality and stop deluding themselves with the false belief that their next job will be like the jobs they lost.
When companies begin to re-hire financial analysts and office managers, they won’t be looking for 55-year-olds to fill those jobs, will they? No, they won’t.
You can yell “age discrimination” at the top of your lungs, but it’s not going to change that reality. You’re going to have to find some new way to earn a living, and the sooner you start figuring out what that “new way” is, the better off you’ll be in the long run.
PARIS- The Swedish Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder and guiding spirit, must appear before a magistrate in Stockholm to answer accusations of rape and sexual harassment brought by two Swedish women. . . .
Read the rest. Like I said, four words.
Philip Klein at The American Spectator reports on a contested GOP primary that may be developing:
Yesterday, Sarah Steelman, a former state treasurer and state senator, has announced plans to challenge McCaskill, setting the stage for what could be a hard fought primary. The Club for Growth came out this morning to applaud Steelman’s entrance into the race, with Club president Chris Chocola calling it, “a welcome sign for pro-growth conservatives.” By contrast, Chocola fired a preemtive strike against [former GOP Sen. Jim] Talent, who is believed to be considering a rematch against McCaskill. “With a record of support for government expansion and outrageous earmark spending, it would be more difficult for Jim Talent to successfully contrast his record with Claire McCaskill’s,” he said. You can already see the conservative outsider vs. establisment RINO narrative forming.
Democratic polling firm PPP has conducted an early poll of the race, and confirms that McCaskill is vulnerable, essentially tied with prospective challengers. She has a one point edge over Steelman, while trailing Talent and Lt Gov. Peter Kinder, another possible candidate, by two points each.
Although Jim Talent is certainly an “establishment” Republican, I don’t think anyone would accuse him of being a “RINO” of the Crist/Castle variety. There may be some specific reason the Club for Growth prefers Steelman over Talent — various measures Talent voted for during his congressional tenure that the Club opposes — but I see no need to throw around a slur like “RINO” against a guy whose reputation is as a loyal conservative Republican.
Kudos to Phil for the reporting — as I said last week, conservatives need to focus on the key Senate races for 2012. Let’s hope we have lots more contested Republican primaries like this one in Missouri, and hopefully some Tea Party candidates — businessmen, homeschooling moms, military veterans, county sheriffs, etc. — will throw their hats in the ring.
That’s Allahpundit’s description of the biggest celebrity anti-American since Cindy Sheehan. Assange is like John Kerry, Bill Ayers and Alger Hiss rolled into one great big ball of adorable subversion. He’s as sexy as Che Guevara.
Julian Assange is to liberal journalists what Justin Bieber is to 11-year-old girls. He’s Sinatra at the Paramount, Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles at Shea Stadium.
Pathetic, is what it is.
This guy is the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the Internet. Kim Jong Il with a blog.
The appropriate U.S. response to Julian Assange could be summarized in four words: Predator drone. Hellfire missile.
And then let all these damned journalistic apostles of “transparency” try to get an exclusive interview with the smoking crater.
Yeah. I wrote that. And put it on the Internet.
UPDATE: Does Assange face arrest in Britain?
UPDATE II: The noose tightens.