On Palin and the Ongoing Wikileaks Dump

I'm getting ready to go through some old photos and videos from the 1990s, hoping to help some people making a documentary on aspects of Sarah Palin's real real Alaska. Summer parade, school event pictures and so on. At the same time, the radio, the web radio, emails and blogs are commenting on the ongoing Wikileaks dump.

Less than 1% of the current crop have been released. They seem to be targeted on several countries' views of Iran. This morning in Tehran, two Iranian nuclear scientists were attacked by motorcyclists, who attached bombs to the engineers' cars, pulled away, and then the devices were remotely detonated. One scientist was killed, another injured, and both men's wives were badly hurt. It wasn't a big news item.

Palin tweeted and facebooked away as she signed book after book in Texas and Louisiana. Talk about multitasking.

She was being filmed by the TLC crews as she did all this. I can't wait until Palin allows TLC to sit through the entire process between when Palin cooks up one of those terse facebook missives and then posts it, cameras rolling the whole time.

Palin has supported every single government measure that seeks to be able to look into every aspect of Americans' electronic lives. She's never spoken out about the immense growth in automatic information gathering on all Americans, which flourished under Bush II and seems to be accelerating under Obama.

The government can look at us, but we can't look at them. That theme is consistent through her political and celebrity careers.

She has complained every time someone wanted to legally look into any aspect of her performance as a public official, even though she grew to state prominence by hacking a colleague's computer while he was out of his office. She continues to secretly support Joe Miller, who tried to oust the same guy Palin hacked - Randy Reudrich. That's the same Joe Miller who illegally hacked into a bunch of colleague's computers to try to oust Reudrich from his last bastion, state GOP chair. Probably at the behest of, or in attempt to curry favor with, Palin.

Has Palin condemned Miller for his illegal hacking? Of course not.

Hackers. It's OK to be one, if you are Palin or Miller.

Hack Palin's emails though? Go to jail.

Hack her book? Get sued by Harper-Collins.

Hack her book and ask questions about TriG? You get a pass.

At least until she becomes president. Then it's "find the nearest bunker" for bloggers like the ones at Palingates.

Some on the right, and on the neoliberal left want Obama to send a hit squad, like the ones who attacked in Tehran this morning, off to Sweden to deal with Julian Assange, the face of Wikileaks. Others are fitting Palin's Wikileaks rant into a more complex, baffling narrative:


Here's Palin on what to do with Mr. Assange, who lives in the neutral country where my wife's ancestors came from:

He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban.

Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?

Palin called Assange a "traitor" in one of today's tweets, no doubt twitted out between rows of books. Assange isn't an American citizen. Someone should ask her what she thinks of Jonathan Pollard, a real American traitor.

I doubt Palin has Daniel Ellsberg on her "to do" list. Yet.

The Wikileaks case is just a harbinger of what is to come. Not only have we only gotten 1% of the current document dump, but other Wilileaks copycats are sure to emerge.

If Palin gets elected, we'll be running out of drones to fire at Stockholm, London, places that aren't in "the real America," towns that didn't vote heavily enough for Bristol, Paul Jenkins' office, Taproots, Levi Johnson's workplace ("they hired him - collateral damage, you betcha") and Joe McGinniss' car, before you can say "I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism," or "I think it's appalling and a violation of our freedom of the press."

image - Palin's City of Wasilla City Council portrait, reading a John Birch Society-linked newsletter in her official binder