More leakblogging
The identity of the leaker was divulged after my post from last night as one Mary McCarthy. While I actually need sleep in order to function, fortunately there are bloggers who don't. A good example is Curt at Flopping Aces who has 10 updates about the different small details about Ms. McCarthy that are coming out. Much of the speculation is about connections between McCarthy and prominent administration officials during the Clinton years and campaign donations to Kerry and the Dems.
I refuse to get caught up in too much of this. Politics tends to be very tribal, and some of these connections will likely turn out to be a natural manifestation of that. Time will tell. However, the hints that there will be more leakers taken to task is heartening and an indication that this is becoming a much bigger and more interesting story. Other good reading on the CIA firing is at A.J. Strata, who also functions well without sleep. A.J. points out that the left is crying foul over the firing.
The hinge-less side of the blogosphere is being predictable in the wake of the news from yesterday. Some examples:
FireDogLake: "the campaign against whistleblowers has just begun."
The "poor, innocent whistleblower as a target" meme seem to be the predominant view on the left. Considering this somewhat distorted view of justice, it's a very good thing indeed that we don't treat terrorism as a law enforcement matter as they would wish.
Glenn Greenwald: "This has nothing to do with national security or with safeguarding classified information. It is about punishment, vengeance, and deterrence..."
It should be no surprise that Glenn has an aversion to punishment - he endorsed a guest poster on his blog who feels that the drug dealer who wants to sell crack to your children should be let out of prison because prisons are, well - bad. I still can't figure out how he reconciles that view with his support of the lunatic-fringe idea of scrapping article III of the constitution in favor of having guilt assigned by legislative decree. I guess it depends on who you like...
Nearly all on the left have tried to draw the comparison with the declassification of historical data to dispute Joe Wilson's lies. None will admit that there is a significant difference between declassifying historical background data and leaking details of ongoing operations to keep Americans safe.
The award for hinge-lessness goes to Larisa Alexandrovna, who writes:
Imagine for a moment that during WWII, a German whistleblower was privy to plans for the building of concentration camps and made those plans known to the world. Imagine if this person also provided information that the German leadership, under the sadistic madness of Adolph Hitler, was abducting countless innocents who where then transported to undisclosed locations, never to be heard from again.
If that person risked everything for neither fame nor money in order to get this information out, would you - as a German citizen of that time - have considered them a national security threat, in violation of the law, a criminal? Or would you have wanted to know what was being done in your name? What is national security in this context?
The intellectual and moral disfunction displayed here is stunning. Of course none of the bleaters of the "whitleblower" meme have any excuse for selectively ignoring another story from yesterday that exposes their hate-based fantasies as fabrication.
I expect lots more in the coming days. The talking heads shows on Sunday should be especially interesting.
Update: Tom Maguire and Ace have some good reading as well.
Update 2: It appears that Flopping Aces is down - it's not a bad link.
