THE WIKILEAKS FREAKOUT (AND THE USUAL RIGHTWING HYPOCRISY)

Although when it comes to personal "truth" and "honesty" I'll go with my late great friend Hubert Selby's admonition that "Honesty without love is attack"—when it comes to governments and the media, the more transparency the better.

Unless people's lives are truly at stake. The brouhaha over the Wikileaks US government cable disclosures has reached the level of mini-mass hysteria, with rightwingers calling for the execution or assassination of the man behind the leaks. But so far, no one has been able—as far as I have read or heard or seen—to link one death or any physical harm directly to these leaks. Even the political damage doesn't seem to have been all that serious. Unfortunately in many cases.

But the hysteria over the man behind Wikileaks and now a worldwide household name—Julian Assange (or however you spell it)—is pretty transparent as well. Rightwingers who didn't make a peep when Valerie Plame was outed by the right as a CIA agent, something that has been linked to deaths and physical harm, or else defended those who outed her, suddenly are outraged by the exposure of diplomatic and military cables that don't disclose anything the liberal and leftwing press hasn't been pointing out for years, though the mainstream media with its right-leaning owners or manipulators has of course been ignoring (so therefore now acts like these are incredible revelations, like The Saudis don't want the Iranians to get nuclear weapons—I'm shocked, schocked!) though the media has mostly ignored other cables making it clear the Saudis also funded Al Queda while pretending to be our allies and we respond by selling them our weapons etc.

(And speaking of the mainstream media and it's right-leaning bias, Nancy Pelosi pointed out in an interview in a recent New York Times magazine what I've been posting here for awhile, that John Boehner has been on the cover of Time magazine twice already, even before he officially becomes the Speaker of the House. But Pelosi, who was THE FIRST FEMALE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES TO GAIN THAT POSITION—and under her leadership was able to not only win a huge majority for her party against a sitting president of the other party, but twice pulled off wave elections, for which Boehner and his party are now being celebrated in the media—AND YET SHE HAS NEVER BEEN ON THE COVER OF TIME!)

All the media outlets I watched last night also talked about how Interpol had announced they're looking for Assange because of "rape" charges brought against him in Sweden, but it turns out those charges have not been sustained, the actual charges are of sexual harassment, charges that came out when Assange made his first big Internet "dump" of the communiques from the U.S. government, mainly the military, about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hard to dispute his claim that the charges are meant to stop his web leak enterprise.