Labour's lying, bullying, hectoring self is back

In the UK, the party conference season is rather curious, as all three major parties present themselves to themselves and the nation as offering solutions, answers and a critique about what is wrong with Britain.

The Liberal Democratic Party - the party without any coherent purpose - was patronising in it presenting itself as "In Government, On Your Side", as if the Conservatives are not.   However, it was more curious to watch senior Lib Dem MPs be reminded that they advocated Britain joining the Euro some years ago, as did the entire party.  None of them are willing to confess how wrong they were, and although there was a plea that the relationship with Europe cannot be abandoned, they all know they are on the wrong side of history.  Neither the party of economic responsibility, nor the party (anymore) of spending promises they need never consider having to keep, they face oblivion.

However now it is Labour - New New Labour.  The Labour of Ed Miliband, the unions' choice for leader.  The party that on the one hand opposes every single cut in growth of spending of the current government, has its Shadow Chancellor say "we wont promise to reverse any of the cuts".   The party that blames "the banks" for budget deficits, yet was running structural (non recession based) budget deficits every year after the 2001 election.  A small fraction of the government's public debt is attributable to bank bailouts, most of it is due to overspending over many years.   The party that in government loved the high tax revenues from a thriving financial services sector, now declares open war on it - even wanting a discriminatory company tax rate on that sector alone.   The party that in government happily schmoozed the entire news media, now declares war on one firm that owns two daily newspapers and one TV news network, calling it, bizarrely a "monopoly" (ignoring its ever beloved compulsorily funded dominant national broadcaster - the BBC).

A series of speeches have revealed more about how nasty, vindictive and utterly specious and false the British Labour Party is, and how willling it is to lie about the past and create a simplistic binary culture of "us and them" to fire up its drones, and those who it has nurtured to suckle on the state tit.

Ed Balls said that Britain entered the financial crisis with lower public debt than the US, France, Germany and Japan.  He picked those carefully.  The US, which had ballooning debt due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Bush's legacy of bribing the electorate with money.  France, which has not run a budget surplus for two generations.  Germany, which has had a legacy of reunification that it is addressing through growth, and Japan, which has been stagnant for well over a decade.  The UK actually had a higher budget deficit than all of them.   However, Labour likes to mix up the words debt and deficit, because too many journalists are too stupid to know the difference, but some are not.   Ed Balls pointedly refused to engage with Channel 4 journalist, Krishnan Guru-Murphy about why Labour ran a structural deficit for so many years.  

Like a vampire, Ken Livingstone, good friend of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's authoritarian socialist President, made a speech making promises to cut public transport fares, with no money to pay for it.   He wouldn't dare discuss raising council tax, which is his main source of income.  Then he dares compare the obnoxious antics of the Bullingdon Club of Oxford, which Mayor Boris Johnson once  belonged to, to the rioters.  Given Ken blamed the riots on spending cuts before, he is a dirty politician, an apologist for criminality and an opportunist.

Then Labour rolled out Rory Weal.  A fifteen year old.  Who pleaded about how the welfare state saved his family, about the family home being repossessed, with childish hyperboles about how the welfare state is being "destroyed" by the "vicious Tories", not noting it remains the highest item of state spending.  He went on about what would be done if he couldn't afford to go to school.  Well the Daily Mail has revealed what a ruse that was.  Rory is the son of a millionaire property investor whose business went bust, and the homes repossessed went for £359,000 and £500,000 each, now he lives in a 4 bedroom home with his mother and sister.   Hard life I think not, but good propaganda while it lasted. 

Less publicity was given for Ivan Lewis, Labour's shadow culture secretary, who called for licensing of journalists.  Continuing to claim that News Corporation is dominant in a market where others have the vast majority of readers and audiences, he wanted a system to "strike off" journalists who commit "gross malpractice".  Of course before that he said free speech was "non-negotiable", except it obviously is?  What happens to a journalist struck off who write a story for a newspaper, or a blog, or a broadcaster?  Rupert Murdoch was told that he cannot "assert political power in the pursuit of your commercial interests or ideological beliefs", how about the owners of the Guardian, or the Independent, how about the state as owner of dominant broadcasters BBC and Channel 4?  As Allister Heath said today:

journalism is a trade, not a profession; the idea that its practitioners should be licensed, that it should be a closed shop that only people who have passed a test can enter; and that a politically created quango can determine who is “right” and who is “wrong” and should therefore be banned is appalling and dangerous. It is a sure route to eliminating free speech and ensuring that only “approved” views can be aired.

However, it was Ed Miliband who has topped it off.  Talking about "good" and "bad" businesses, about "predators".  After citing only one example (a care home firm bought by a private equity fund that sold properties off), he and his acolytes couldn't name others.   He talks about a "a something for nothing culture" yet it was Labour that celebrated the growth of the welfare state, that never questioned allowing people from across the EU to come to Britain to suckle from the British taxpayer for a free home, income, education for the kids and healthcare.  He talks about the "the people who don’t make a fuss, who don’t hack phones, loot shops, fiddle their expenses, or earn telephone number salaries at the banks"... "the hard-working majority who do the right thing".

Who stood up for phone hacking, or looters?  How many Labour MPs fiddled expenses?  How are people who earn large salaries at banks NOT hard working?

Labour's new scapegoats are people who work at banks.  Ed Miliband's attitude is effectively to let the City of London go, to gut the financial sector of the country. 

He talks of "An economy and a society too often rewarding not the right people with the right values, but the wrong people with the wrong values.  Who are the right and wrong ones Ed?  Who is going to tell?  You? What are you going to do about it?  What is a "fast buck"?  What sort of regulatory environment will you create to make sure the economy and society reward "the right people"?  How do you know best?  He says "we must punish those who do wrong".  What is "wrong" to you Ed?  Given you support a 50p top tax rate, presuming earning more than £150,000 is "doing wrong".

He said "You believe rewards should be for hard work. But you’ve been told we have to tolerate the wealthiest taking what they can."  Taking?  Is it taking when you get paid a salary for hard work, or get a profit from a business that is thriving? 

Well here are presumably bad businesses "Big vested interests like the energy companies have gone unchallenged, while you’re being ripped off."  Unchallenged Ed?  You mean like how when YOU were Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change for 1.5 years?  You mean when you implemented policies that force electricity customers to pay extra to subsidise the uneconomic renewable energy programme you forced on the energy companies to meet your fatuous commitment to hindering Britain's economy to let China grow unchecked and not address climate change. "

"So let’s break the dominance of the big energy companies. Let’s call a rigged market what it is. And get a fairer deal for the people of Britain." The six Ed?  The "rigged market" you were happy to support as Secretary for Energy?  Are you going to the Competition Commission about this, or just making up accusations again?

He claims Sir Fred Goodwin was paid too much when RBS collapsed, so will he be in favour of laws restricting executive pay?  How many businesses will want to stay in the UK after that?

He says "Are you on the side of the wealth creators or the asset strippers? The producers or the predators".  Who wants to wait until they are accused of being the wrong sort of business? What does that even mean?  Does it mean that when a factory shuts down, nobody should sell off the remaining assets for what they are worth?   Rory Weal's father was a speculator, he presumably wasn't a "producer" or "wealth creator".  He got loans to buy lots of properties and when the market turned, the bank foreclose and sold the properties for much less than he had paid for them.  The bank lost out because of his foolishness.   He was exactly what Labour opposes.

He cites "good businesses" which happen to be dependent on state contracts like "companies like Bombardier and BAe systems. Being sold down the river by this Government."  So Ed wants more defence spending?  He wants to break EU rules on government procurement and competitive tendering, to destroy a system that Labour set up for it to buy railway rolling stock in government?  He implies that Nick Clegg should intervene - parochial politics should win out over economic rationalism.

He said of the next Labour government "That we will manage your money properly".  Why?:  Whose money is it?  Who asked you to manage their money?  Did you fail to do so over the previous 13 years?

Finally, he tops it off with his worship at the altar of Britain's greatest religion.  The NHS, the biggest health authority in the world, and the second biggest government agency in the world that is not in China. He loves the religion so much he would sacrifice everything for it by saying:

"no greater public interest than our National Health Service" So if Hitler had won the war, but set up the NHS it would have been the top priority?

"Cherished by all of us". Bullshit

"Founded by Labour. Saved by Labour. Today defended by Labour once again" Ignoring the Tories are spending the same as you promised to spend. 

"Why does Britain care so much for the NHS?" Because you treat it as a religion that anyone who attacks it should be pilloried as a blasphemer?

"Because, more than any other institution in our country, the values of the NHS are our values. It doesn’t matter who you are. Or what you earn. The NHS offers the highest quality care when we need it" Bullshit.  I know of several who would have faced months of pain and agony on the NHS who went private.  It is not the highest quality, it does not have people coming from overseas to pay for it.

"And nobody asked me for my credit card at the door" What other public health systems do Ed? 

So let's really lie profoundly Ed "Hospitals to be fined millions of pounds if they break the rules of David Cameron’s free-market healthcare system. The old values that have failed our economy now being imported to our most prized institution: the NHS."  Free market healthcare system?  Really? So I can stop paying for the NHS and buy healthcare from whoever I like?  Oh no.  It's not.  It is like claiming North Korea has a free press.  The reforms, as little as they are, are not free market, but they are about putting accountability into this institution of centralised socialism, this monolith of bureaucracy, buck-passing and producers' interests.

You see the NHS exemplifies the "something for nothing", "vested interest", "cartel", "unaccountable" culture Miliband talks about, but it is his cherished state entity.  The NHS can do no wrong, it should just get hundreds of billions of money to just keep doing as it does, allocating health care by bureaucratic/political fiat, giving people health care regardless of who they are or where they came from, whether they are taxpayers, illegal immigrants or criminals.  It exemplifies Labour values - an international class centrally planned taxpayer funded monopoly dominated by strong professional unions, with no ethos of efficiency or customer service.

You might wonder if Ed has dreams of the same for journalism, energy, the financial sector or other parts of the economy.

Ed Miliband and his team have shown themselves for what they are.  A bunch of leftwing authoritarians, who want to label businesses as "good" and "bad",   Who talk of fiscal responsibility, but oppose any cuts in spending.   He wants rules on executive pay and rates bankers who earn large salaries alongside looters.   He wants to break up a "cartel" in energy and regulate prices, while (ignoring that he was once in charge of this sector) celebrating the health cartel of the NHS and lying blatantly about the severely cauterised reforms being implemented.  He wouldn't know a free market if it danced in front of him.  He talks of good businesses who are being let down, because the government didn't spend enough money it doesn't have, on them, or rig the rules to favour them.   

Most astonishingly, he almost completely ignores the global economic crisis.  One that was not saved by the pseudo-Keynesianism embraced by his party, one that the EU is mismanaging and which he is clueless about.

Labour's lying and spinning was legendary under Tony Blair, it continues with aplomb.  Lying about the budget deficit, lying about NHS reforms, lying about the "monopoly" and "dominance" of Rupert Murdoch (which was just great when NewsCorp papers loved Labour) and finally having a kid lie about his family's "poverty", when the kid's father exemplified exactly what Labour (now) despises in business.

It is a party of authoritarianism.  It likes to spend other people's money, like to tell businesses what to do.  It likes having a punitive tax on the financial sector.  It damns private equity firms generically, because it neither understands them, nor does its drones of envy dripping supporters.   The latter was perfectly exemplified by a chap from "the North" on BBC's Newsnight angrily demanding money from "the bankers who created this recession" and blaming everything bad on the Tories.  Angry, vacuous, intellectually dishonest.

I'll leave the end once again to Allister Heath:

Liberalism is dead in the Labour party: it believes in telling people who can and cannot be journalists, what is and what isn’t morally acceptable, and levying arbitrary double and triple-taxes on people it doesn’t like. Unfortunately, it has also lost touch with economic reality. The only good businesses Miliband mentioned were “real engineering” companies and those who “train, invest, invent, sell” (anybody knows a single firm that doesn’t do at least two or three of these?). The only “good companies” he mentioned by name were Bombardier and BAE Systems; the only business leader he name-checked was Sir John Rose, ex boss of Rolls-Royce. All three are long-established, manufacturers and sell lots to governments; I have nothing against them but it says a lot about Miliband’s priorities. What about the dominant services sector? And aren’t all firms that follow the law, create jobs and thus fund HMRC “good”? The only other firms he likes are small businesses “who can’t get a loan” (what about those that can?).

Labour has abandoned Blairism and is once again a party of the old left. Miliband has no credible plan whatsoever to boost the UK’s growth and competitiveness. How incredibly depressing."

Sloppy Dominion Post

I don't know Bronwyn Torrie, but her article called Councillor headed for North Korea demonstrates once again my point that journalism in New Zealand is hard to find.

She should be ashamed, the article should be withdrawn and rewritten.

The story is about how the Deputy Mayor of Porirua City Council has been invited to North Korea by the regime.  She is going paying 40% of the cost of the trip herself, the rest paid for by North Korea's useful idiots in New Zealand, the wholly sympathetic Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)- New Zealand Friendship Society.

Bronwyn's first faux pas is in calling it the "Korea-New Zealand" Friendship Society, as if there is one Korea.  Her second one is failing to do any research on it, otherwise she would have found out that the Society is very pro-North Korean.  Its own website admits this with the vapid comment "We were impressed by the DPRK position of forming an independent political philosophy and system which was Korean".  Impressed by the Orwellian pseudo-Stalinist ultra nationalist, ultra-militarism behind the most pervasive and absurd personality cult ever known?  Oh please.  Wouldn't have taken long to find that gem Bronwyn.   I can excuse that she didn't do the research to reveal that Society Chairman Don Borrie (who has visited North Korea many times) praised Kim Il Sung publicly in the 1970s in a book published in North Korea a copy of which resides in the Victoria University of Wellington library.

However, it is after she has reported the basic "ins and outs" of the story that she makes the biggest and most embarrassing amateur mistakes:

She said "Relations between North Korea and New Zealand have been cool since Kiwi troops fought to prevent South Korea falling to communism in the 1950s.

Relations became more frosty when North Korea began testing nuclear weapons in 2006."

What? So New Zealand's relations with North Korea were worse when it had diplomatic relations (which it did in 2006) than when it was fighting with the UN Police Action to overthrow the DPRK after it invaded the south.  How could it be MORE frosty when New Zealand had diplomatic relations from 2001 (which were suspended in 2006) compared to fighting a war?

"The North Asian country has been largely closed off from the rest of the world since it became a communist state in 1948."

Well Bronwyn, it didn't exist before being a communist state in 1948.  There was no "DPRK" or "North Korea", there was Korea, indeed the north was claimed by the Republic of Korea which was declared weeks beforehand.  Better to say that "after it was formed as a result of the division of Korea by the Soviet refusal to recognise the government in Seoul" beforehand.

Other statements were correct, but then she comes out with this banality:

"foreigners have to gain permission to enter the country"

Wow, amazing.  Like getting a visa?  Like you need to do for China and Russia?  Like permission you get at every single border control point?  With the exception of the Schengen area in Europe and the British-Irish border, this isn't unusual.  Do you really expect to enter most countries without visas?

Finally, she finishes with this awful statement:

"Although the New Zealand Government opposes North Korea's regime, politicians have made visits there".

Bronwyn.  Where did you get this from? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade?  The Minister of Foreign Affairs?  Your own laptop? How does the government "oppose" the regime? Do you think the DPRK would maintain relations with a country that "opposes" it?  How do you think the Ambassador from the DPRK accredited to New Zealand would take this report?

This article is best when it is reporting the basics, but it falls apart when Bronwyn tries to write about history or politics.  It has mistakes akin to a high school newspaper.

It's just another reason why New Zealand newspapers are NOT world class, indeed articles like this are simply unprofessional.

Shame on you Bronwyn Torrie, shame on the editors for letting this get published.

Brash and cannabis UPDATED

I voted for ACT, once, in 2006.  It has disappointed me consistently since.

In 2006 I suggested to Rodney Hide to invite Don Brash to stand in 2008.  Well Don is standing now, without Rodney.

In 2005 I suggested Rodney Hide campaign in that election on legalising cannabis.  I was ignored.  Now Don is doing it.

The arguments in favour of it then are still valid now:

"ACT needs to be more than the party of Business Roundtable economics - sound though that is.

It needs to sell freedom...

Why?

Because there is nothing more fundamentally liberal, than asserting that adults own their own bodies, and have the right to ingest a substance on their own private property without the state criminalising them for it...

The Economist called for this two years ago - hardly a newspaper of the lunatic fringe."

As I said then, this move changes the political landscape.  A position monopolised by leftwing authoritarians (the Greens) is now taken by a party that has long purported to believe in freedom.   ACT can advocate for a change in cannabis laws based on principle as well as pragmatism.

It may risk a loss of conservative votes, but they will go to National anyway.  Brash can minimise it by being himself.  Hardly a dope-head, he can argue, convincingly, that the status quo has failed and that the problems of cannabis are better addressed by:

- Employers retaining the right to require testing under employment contracts;

- Drug testing as part of road safety legislation;

- Strict enforcement of laws against supplying to minors;

- Encouragement of educational and health measures warning of the health risks.

Don Brash in recent weeks has come out in favour of replacing the RMA with a property rights based approach, including putting such rights in the Bill of Right, ending Auckland's experiment with US style "new-urbanism", which is about restricting the supply of housing that people want, to encourage people to buy the housing the planners want, to use the transport they are making everyone else pay for.

These are great leaps forward for ACT in terms of being a party that believes in individual rights and individual freedoms.   I look forward to more!

UPDATED:  Unsurprisingly, ACT's replacement for Rodney Hide -John Banks - is having none of it.  It raises the obvious point, that for ACT to return to Parliament and actually be in favour of freedom, it is far better for North Shore voters to elect Don Brash and for Epsom voters to not vote for John Banks.   If ACT is going to have a purge of its anti-freedom factors then the man who left Auckland with huge public debt, and who voted against the legalising of consensual adult homosexual acts is hardly going to be any help.

Why is the left scared of the Tea Party?

Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Chris Huhne, is a Liberal Democrat Minister. He has presided over policies that inflate electricity prices (by forcing power companies to spend money on highly expensive "sustainable" power stations and charging consumers for it) and constrain the British economy so that China, India and the Arab oil sheikhdoms can increase CO2 emissions as much as they want. A month after the general election last year, when he campaigned with leaflets showing him with his wife and family, he was found to be having an affair. His estranged wife has claimed he pressured people to take penalty points for driving "for him", this matter is still with the Police. So he's quite a character.

Now he has attacked the "Tea Party tendency" in the Conservative Party, and so is calling up the demons painted by many others on the left, assisted by the left-leaning media (The Guardian, The Independent, BBC, ITN), that the Tea Party is a group of racist, theocratic, gun-toting nutters.  What he says he means is opposing those who want to renegotiate the UK relationship with the EU.  Yes, astonishing stuff - especially given the Labour Party in the early 1980s wanted the UK to withdraw completely.  That's called the Tea Party to the Liberal Democrats!

There are many Tea Parties, but their common theme is not racism against Barack Obama, it is not religious fundamentalism, it is not ultra-conservative views about sex, sexuality or religion. It is a belief in small government, fiscal responsibility and lower taxes.

Daniel Hannan, rightly identifying himself as the most like "Tea Party" oriented elected Conservative, says:

The Tea Party, perhaps more than any other contemporary movement, brings out the 'Yeah, but what they're really saying…' tendency...Many Lefties pretend – or perhaps have genuinely convinced themselves – that the Tea Party is clandestinely protesting against immigration or abortion or the fact of having a mixed race president; anything, in fact, other than what it actually says it's against, viz big government. The existence of a popular and spontaneous anti-tax movement has unsettled the Establishment. They'd much rather deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a libertarian one. Hence the almost desperate insistence that the Tea Partiers have some secret agenda

You see to argue against smaller government and lower taxes would require some thinking, and justification as to why government is better at doing some things than the private sector, and why politicians and bureaucrats are better placed to spend your money than you are. That requires arguing on a point of principle. Far easier to just engage in scatological rhetoric, just make things up, or to claim it is some sort of corporate conspiracy that has fooled the stupid (or rather the poor bedraggled working classes the left love - when the vote correctly).

A solid argument between more and less government, more or less taxes would be healthy, and would involve challenging status quo politics.  It hasn't been had in the US, as Ronald Reagan was severely limited about what he could do, as he had a Democrat House of Representatives, and both Bushes have been decidedly uninterested about shrinking government. 

So the left should embrace that debate.  Give up its cheap empty and childish shots of racism and jingoistic smears and their own form of bigotry against ordinary people (many with limited education) who actually want to be left alone by the government.   Their patronising disdain, and unconcealed hatred for those trying to change the terms of political debate (the Vice President called them "terrorists" for wanting to constrain government spending), shows fear about engaging with the fundamental point.   It should be the core issue about politics in any liberal democracy.  It isn't minutiae about education or environmental or health or transport policies.

It is - what should be the role of the state?

From that, come the question about whether there is too much or too little involvement in specific areas.  However, that is the debate that is the nexus dividing politics in the US today.

It is about time that it became the very issue that politics elsewhere was based upon as well.

Time for Assange's defenders to apologise

You've been backing an evil, self-aggrandising cunt.

Time for Keith Locke to resign, and for the Green Party to apologise, for their sycophantic embrace of this vile little man.

Time for the vapid conspiracy theory making tabloid scatologist Bomber Bradbury to apologise, and the smug Idiot Savant to do so as well.

Julian Assange had his moment in the sun about a year or so ago, when he was heralded as a hero by his publishing of stolen US diplomatic communications.  

Of course Assange has an agenda, I made that point late last year.  It is avowedly contrary to that of US and Western foreign policy, so like the vacuous kneejerk activists as they are, the hard left feted him as a "freedom fighter".   He fitted their world view beautifully. He was fighting the power, he was showing up how arrogant the US is, about its plans around the world, about its private meetings with diplomats, politicians and businesspeople.  Good old Julian, fuck the USA right?

Well I said a few weeks ago that he has published the names of anti-government activists in Iran and China, and informants from the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Now it looks a lot worse.  Nick Cohen in the Observer has written further about how vile Assange really is.  He talks of the David Leigh/Luke Harding book Wikileaks with this story.

"A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths."

See for Assange, members of the TALIBAN are more moral than people who oppose them and support the US in opposing them.  Think about how much blind hatred is behind that view of his, how the worshippers of the dark ages, of totalitarian terror, of misogynistic tyranny are better than their opponents.

Then there is Assange's relationship with Israel Shamir, a friend of the Belarus dictatorship:

"On 19 December 2010, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the "organisers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones" who had protested against rigged elections."

Nice that, of course this shouldn't surprise you.  Israel Shamir  (not his real name) was appointed as the Wikileaks Russian/Eastern European representative.  Shamir collaborated with the Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus - Europe's last dictatorship, one that is little different from the USSR.   Shamir is anti-semitic, moving among such groups in eastern Europe.   Nice touch, means Israel can be so much easier to attack when you ask if you can get everything the State Department has "on the Jews".

Cohen says it goes further, as Wikileaks endangered opposition journalists in Ethiopia:

"Argaw Ashine fled the country last week after WikiLeaks revealed that the reporter had spoken to an official from the American embassy in Addis Ababa about the regime's plans to intimidate the independent press. WikiLeaks also revealed that a government official told Arshine about the planned assault on opposition journalists. Thus Assange and his colleagues not only endangered the journalist. They tipped off the cops that he had a source in the state apparatus."

Freedom fighters? No. Assange is uninterested in political freedom.  It's far from clear that he even understands it.  He is a the small town boy desperate for attention.

Cohen demands that his supporters be confronted and held to account:

"First, there needs to be relentless pressure on the socialist socialites and haggard soixante-huitards who cheered Assange on. Bianca Jagger, Jemima Khan, John Pilger, Ken Loach and their like are fond of the egotistical slogan "not in my name." They are well-heeled and well-padded men and women who know no fear in their lives. Yet they are happy to let their names be used by Assange as he brings fear into the lives of others."

Some are empty heads, others are typical left wing no thinkers.  However, it's hard to beat Bomber for the utterings of hyperbolic vacuity:

"Assange and wikileaks will be seen as a threat that needs utter annihilation because he disrupts the balance of power in a way no person ever has".

Bomber's an idiot, but Assange is a vile evil little prick who revels in his celebrity status, whose kiddi-socialism has gained him lots of sycophantic followers with similar levels of adolescent simplicity in their beliefs.   The types that attack the West, while living in it, because they like to be rebels, they want to believe that politicians don't tell you everything, that there are grand conspiracies between business, government and media to make sure you don't know the truth.  They ignore real dictatorships because that's not counter-establishment enough, after all the US, Europe and other Western countries already oppose Syria, Belarus, North Korea and the Taliban. 

I hope Wikileaks goes under, I hope Assange loses it all and has to get a real job, and I hope his vapid sycophants apologise for supporting this monster.  Then I hope they give donations to Reporters Without Borders to atone for their stupidity, and start supporting people who do support freedom.