Andrew Breitbart's Dangerous Dipshits

The single greatest disappointment I have about the political blogosphere is that it never lived up to its potential. When I started, I hoped that it could be a place to find unique and interesting perspectives on the day's events that you wouldn't find in the dreaded mainstream media. Unfortunately, what ended up happening is that too many bloggers decided that they wanted to be media stars and started emulating what they see and hear in the mainstream. Because of that, the blogosphere is even dumber than cable news ... it's talk radio stupid.

With some exceptions, the biggest political bloggers tend to be lying, crazy, stupid, or all three. Like talk radio hosts, you never see them argue against the passions and convictions of their audience, or challenge them in any way. They reinforce what their readers already believe and let the hits roll in. Some get their wish and actually wind up with book contracts or radio and TV gigs. I'm not going to say that it isn't incredible marketing, it's just deeply cynical.

Most cynical of all is Andrew Breitbart, a blogger who wound up being a big deal in the Tea Party movement, despite the fact that he doesn't appear to know or believe in much of anything. He pretends to be an outsider, but he's about inside the big media world as any blogger is likely going to get. And if you trust anything you see on his zillion blogs after the ACORN and Shirley Sherrod incidents, I don't know what to tell you other than I hope you enjoy your stay here, because you're likely to believe anything.

Anyhow, Breitbart's lunatic "foreign policy" blog, Big Peace, has a number of people posting there that have no idea what they're talking about. I find it funny, so I make it a daily stop. Foreign policy is a major interest of mine, and seeing people mangle it beyond recognition always makes me smile. There are any number of foreign policy journals that comprehensively address the subject in a serious way. Big Peace isn't one of them. But if you like your analysis childish and factually incorrect, I can't recommend Big Peace highly enough.

This morning, the Breitbart minions are prattling incomprehensibly on and on about WikiLeaks, which I wrote about on Friday. There are no fewer than three posts on the topic at Big Peace, and it's some of the craziest shit I've ever read. There's something about the combination of ignorance and insanity that always makes my day. You can read the posts here, here and here.

Peter Schweizer kicks things of by missing the point completely. I haven't personally gone through everything in the quarter of a million documents dumped yesterday, nor am I inclined to. But there are two stories here and not very many people are paying attention to either of them.

First, you'd think that the U.S government would know by now that nothing stays secret for very long. After all, the 1970s existed for no other reason than proving it. That being the case, you would expect the State Department to be more careful about what they do and say. They haven't.

Second, the government seems determined to see their dirty laundry become public, given the way they protect it. Between the Iraq and Afghanistan papers, combined with yesterday's State Department leak, the government has lost around a million documents in about a year. Who has access to that amount of sensitive stuff and why? This is about a lot more than inter-departmental information sharing, this is rank carelessness and amateurism. WikiLeaks might be exploiting that, but they certainly aren't the cause of it.

Mr. Schweizer, of course, wants WikiLeaks stopped, by means fair or foul - a common thread on Breitbart's and other Republican blogs when Julian Assange and company publish things that they don't like. He misses another point regarding diplomatic secrecy when he says "If we can’t keep these discussions secret, even our closest friends will no longer be candid with us."

That's not the problem as much as bad-mouthing America's friends and allies in diplomatic cables after these discussions is. Some of the characterizations of sitting foreign leaders in these papers are stunning and would themselves tend to minimize the trust of those leaders in America.

Brad Schaeffer, a derivatives broker, simply wants Assange killed. That's something else I see a lot of on "conservative" blogs and undercuts the conservatism of those bloggers dramatically. Expanding the interpretation of an already questionable legal theory regarding unlawful combatants to the outer realms of logic is a lot of things, but it tends to be more liberal than conservative. Having said that, these people believe that the U.S government can assassinate American citizens extra judicially, regardless of what the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution actually says.

Mr. Assange is an Australian citizen. If you're looking to shore up the trust of close American allies in the U.S government, may I suggest that not murdering their citizens is a great place to start? Murdering him on the streets of Europe, where he is known to live, might also prove to be diplomatically problematic.

Most importantly, when everyone is designated as an unlawful enemy combatant, the term loses all meaning quickly. It also sets a precedent for foreign governments to kill American citizens that they don't like absent the protections of due process. Another common Bretbart lie is that the United States can do whatever it wants without consequences. Life, as I'm sure you know, doesn't work like that. Given the number of foreign nationals and leaders that the Kennedy administration plotted to assassinate, I'm surprised that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't forced to wait in line to assassinate Kennedy. There is such a thing as blowback, you know?

More importantly, if leaks of this sort are major threats to the national security - a dubious proposition at best - why stop at killing Assange? By the looks of it, the American government is riddled with "traitors" who pass the material on to WikiLeaks. Why not kill them without trial and waterboard anyone that might have helped them? And why do the newspaper and TV news editors that disseminate the information get off so easily? Shouldn't they be targeted for death? If not, why not? The information either poses a national security threat or it doesn't.

James Carafano wants to try a whole bunch of folks for treason, thereby proving his unfamiliarity with the Constitution. There hasn't been a treason prosecution in the United States since World War II because Article III makes them impractical. Since treason is one of two crimes specifically mentioned in the Constitution (the other is bribery) and the only one to be legally defined by it, one can assume that the Founders took it pretty seriously. Article III, Section 3 reads as follows;

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

As you would imagine, most traitors don't perform their deeds before an audience that could later testify against them at a trial. Fewer still are prepared to confess in open court. Besides, the Espionage Act of 1917 became a catch-all for crimes that could otherwise be defined as treason. But it's amazing that Mr. Carafano is either utterly ignorant of his own national Constitution or so willing to ignore its binding requirements.

Carafano also wants American allies to attain U.S legal aims for them by prosecuting any of their citizens associated with WikiLeaks, which is almost too silly to bother commenting about. Under which laws? As a Canadian, I somehow doubt that if I were to be peddling American documents, I would be violating Canadian law. There are likely exceptions to that, but they would be almost exclusive to Canadian intelligence or military operations. Moreover, why would foreign countries go to the time and expense of launching prosecutions because the United States is singularly unable to keep its own secrets secret?

What Mr. Carafano seems to want is an end run around the Supreme Court's decision in New York Times Co v. United States. As a result of that ruling, WikiLeaks itself probably couldn't be prosecuted, just as no other media outlet that published the story could be. So he wants trials in jurisdictions where New York Times Co doesn't apply. However, I don't suppose that he would support the foreign prosecutions of American bloggers or journalists who write things that violate the laws of other countries.

Yesterday's Wikileaks dump hurts American national security only because the United States was so careless in what it said in diplomatic cables and because it was so lax about the physical security of those cables. For the most part, the material was classified because it was embarrassing. From what I've seen, none of the information poses a security threat by itself. Andrew Beitbart and his Big Minions just want to pretend it does.

I read Breitbart so you don't have to. Chances are that you might have actually learned something that way, which I can guarantee you wouldn't happen otherwise.


Update: This post hasn't even published yet, and another Breitbart dipshit put up something factually wrong. This one is named Diana West, and she's determined to prove that she doesn't know anything about Syria.

Here's what she has to say;

Another example: Leaked cables confirm that Syria supplies Hezbollah. This not only underscores (again) Syria’s status as a jihad-terror-supporting state, but deals yet another blow to the canard that Sunnis (Syria) don’t connive with Shiites (Hezbollah) against infidels (the rest of us). Then there’s Pakistan, which, we now learn, isn’t cooperating with our (formerly) secret plan to secure its nuke materials. (Which should make us wonder what $18 billion in “aid” to a sharia state really buys these days.)

While Syria is a predominantly Sunni country, the ruling Assad family and most of the upper echelons of the military and intelligence services and the Ba'ath Party are actually minority Alawites. The Alawites are actually an offshoot of mainstream Shia Islam.

Not only is that widely known, it's easy for anyone to check. If you're going to comment on the religious inclinations of a given government, it might be a good idea to know what they are. If the Breitbart crew are getting things like that wrong, what in the fuck are they getting right?