Open diplomacy

Juan Cole has the best line on the Wikileaks avalanche: Now that the government has decided all our e-mails and telephone calls are fair game, he says, it can hardly complain if we return the favor by reading theirs! HAHAHAHA.

That said, I think the leakers could have approached the revelations differently and set up a better line of defense from what we can anticipate will be a ferocious counter-assault. That would be to do the hard, slogging donkey-work of poring over the documents and writing up the significant findings themselves rather than just dumping the raw sewage onto the Internet. Of course, this is like asking my aunt to have a pair of cojones—Wikileaks is not a traditional journalistic enterprise, and they have chosen this course.

I fear, however, that the end result may be further attempts to chill the worthy cause of official de-pantsing and whistle-blowing, which the Obama Administration seems to hate worse than being de-friended by Mitch McConnell. How long will we have to wait for some sort of Draconian new federal law condemning Wikileaks-type behavior with public stoning?

Or worse. There have been no shortage of calls for Mr Assange to be handled extra-judicially, and no one can argue that the precedents are lacking.