Mike Huckabee, a follower of Jesus Christ and a presidential candidate, says Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, should be tried and executed. Others, like Tom Flanagan, a former aide to the Prime Minister of Canada, says that would take too long and Assange should just be assassinated. "Take him out!" is the correct vernacular, I believe. Sarah Palin wants him hunted down like an al Qaeda dog.
The same surely goes for Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of the 250,000 diplomatic cables. And since The New York Times and virtually every other major newspaper in the world has run some of the cables, presumably Times Editor Bill Keller and the other editors should be "taken out" as well.
The Specialized Class and the Bewildered Herd
The famous meta-journalist Walter Lippman was of the school only a "specialized class" of "responsible men" could handle reality and the rest of the nation's population -" those Lippman called "the bewildered herd" -- were to remain spectators fed soothing information, a situation akin to the Roman's notion of "bread and circus" to appease the citizenry. The art of public relations and propaganda grew to fill this need.
The devoted anti-imperialist Noam Chomsky says this arrangement "has a very close resemblance to the Leninist conception that a vanguard of revolutionary intellectuals take state power ... then drive the stupid masses toward a future they're too dumb and incompetent to envision for themselves."
No doubt, Chomsky should be "taken out" too. If I'm worthy, I might be put on the list as well.
In Chomsky's view, one gets into the "specialized class" by reading the tea leaves and figuring out where the leverage is. It's a calculus not about Truth or even what's best for the nation. "It's just a matter of assessing where the power is." Figure out where the Power is and ingratiate yourself into it.
Our current President was quite good at this kind of calculus, and he got himself elected and into the White House. He's not an ogre as some on the left suggest, but he has not rocked the Bush boat at all. He seems to understand Lippman's scheme and fully subscribe to the notion of a "specialized class" of people, in his case himself and appointees like Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, David Petraeus and Timothy Geithner.
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