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Atrios admits to being puzzled by the lynch-mob mentality the establishment press is displaying toward Wikileaks and Julian Assange, but I don't know why. He knows as well as anybody that all mainstream media types, especially broadcasters, are paid to act as stenographers for the Empire and corporatocracy, and that the last thing they want or need is somebody like Assange butting into their precious little world and reminding them of what they'd be doing if they actually did their jobs.

Glenn Greenwald, whom Atrios links to, describes how he has "done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable -- identical -- are the political figures and the journalists. There's just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they've ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, 'Assange = Saddam' script. So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a 'high-tech Terrorist,') that you're viewed as being from another planet if you don't spout it. It's the equivalent of questioning Saddam's WMD stockpile in early 2003."

What neither Greenwald nor Atrios understand is that whether something is true or not is irrelevant; what's important is that if it's orthodoxy, everyone is required to believe it, and expressing disbelief makes you a heretic, a nut, and possibly dangerous to yourself and others. Such is the price for insisting that people be real, i.e., acknowledge reality in political debate.

Photo: numbered bodies in an Afghan mass grave. Click on the image for a larger view.