Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Mistermix at Balloon Juice has an important observation about the Village and Wikileaks:

What really scares a lot of establishment types is not Wikileaks itself, but that a group of soldiers or civilians with access to information have started to work against the war from the inside, and that they have a secure conduit to get that information to the outside world.

And that's certainly the truth.  Wikileaks is taking the romantic notion of the hard-boiled Washington journalist, the Woodward and Bernstein affairs that motivated our own Villagers when they were younger, and putting it inside a bunch of servers.  It's gotten them rather depressed, especially when it reminds them of just how tight they've been with their "adversaries" over the last 15 years or so.

The Village is scrambling then to become the gatekeepers of this affair.  That's why they are slinging around the references to the Pentagon Papers every five minutes.  Only the great Village Oracles can be trusted to interpret all this information.  They will tell you what it means and what you should think about it!  Hence, that's why with one hand they are blasting Wikileaks as irresponsible and crude, while the other is eager to offer "what their sources are telling them" about the 92,000 documents.

The fun part is that those in the media that have been doing their jobs have already covered most of what these documents are revealing.  It's not new information if you've been paying attention to the actual acts of journalism perpetrated by the few who have been motivated to do so.  The war has been going badly since 2003 or so, and that's not news.

The Village getting their hackles up when yet another new media outfit shows them up on the responsibility that they've abdicated?  That's not news either.