If you go to Daniel Ellsberg's web page -- http://www.ellsberg.net -- or his Twitter feed -- http://twitter.com/#!/danielellsberg -- it is virtually wall-to-wall an ardent defense of WikiLeaks, most recently ditching and attacking Amazon following their pulling the plug on WikiLeaks. Yet, this morning on CBS's (Viacom) Face the Nation, Sen. Dick Durbin cited the nobility of Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers as a contrast to the hideous actions of Julian Assange. Like many, I've for several years been lulled into watching The Daily Show and Colbert Report (both also Viacom, btw) as a less painful way of following what the establishment media are doing. Humor was supposed to make it all go down easier. But change is overdue. This is far funnier than Stewart and Colbert's "intentional humor" (there's also their unintentional humor), and with Schieffer and Kyl a nice microcosm of the media insanity over WikiLeaks, emphasis added in bold:
BOB SCHIEFFER: Yeah. I want to ask both of you about this whole WikiLeaks mess. I mean, we’ve had another huge dump of information, these confidential--some of it classified information that’s been made public by this group called WikiLeaks headed by this man named Julius-- Julian Assange. What-- what’s going on here? How bad is this, or is it something we ought not to be worried about? And why aren’t we trying to find this guy or are we?SENATOR RICHARD DURBIN: In this case, Mister Assange is doing a dump of information across a broad spectrum of things. It is not about any particular issue and whether you agree with Ellsberg or not, his is a much different case. First question is, how did he ever get access to so much-- BOB SCHIEFFER (overlapping): Yeah. SENATOR RICHARD DURBIN: --information? BOB SCHIEFFER: So what-- what’s you take?SENATOR JON KYL (overlapping): And-- and we need to find that out because this is very damaging. What troubles me is this is the third dump. And the administration didn’t seem too concerned about the first two dumps. It’s only when it starts to embarrass the State Department, because they have cables that are very relieving-- excuse me, revealing about what some of our diplomats have said about other world leaders that we appear to be all that exercised about it. This-- this guy could have been, it seems to me, we could have gone after him a long time ago. BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you think as a terrorist, could he be charged with espionage? I mean what-- what do you think he’s up to here?SENATOR JON KYL: Well, he’s up to publicity and I presume making money as to the exact statute under which he can be charged I’m not sure that-- that gets into a very complicated-- Dick and I serve on the same committee. We had a hearing about exactly what kind of statutory framework we need for this kind of phenomenon in the future. And Ben Cardin and I are going to be working up some legislation, I think that would enable us to more broadly be able to charge people even if they’re not handing over information to a -- to an enemy, for example.
