The Julian Assange Coloring Book

Forget cat videos. THIS is what the internet was invented for! The Julian Assange Coloring Book, an online place to go and create your own colored Assange images.

Here's mine:

And here are my past thoughts on Wikileaks.

RELEASED AT LAST: The Wikileaks Files on Me

Now that Wikileaks has announced its intention to release its "whistleblower" files on me that were stolen by a former employee, I figured it was time to preemptively deal with the fallout.

Italian Prime Minister and Chief Partier Silvio Berlusconi is overheard on some tapes referring to me disparaging "the entire cast of Jersey Shore" and wondering aloud "how people so stupid could walk and breath at the same time." That is completely wrong. I never said that about the cast of Jersey Shore. I said it about Silvio Berlusconi.

Yes, it is true that while I was negotiating the release of the U.S. embassy hostages in Iran in 1980, I told my Iranian counterpart that Jimmy Carter "is very unlikely to win re-election. Mark my words, John Anderson will be the next man to occupy the White House." In my defense, I was wrong.

I like to use the British word "swingeing," as in "swingeing cuts to public transportation." However, I do not like "swinging"; that would be something completely different.

Okay, I was caught on tape while staying at the Russian ambassador's residence in Kabul telling him that "I don't know who Jennifer Carpenter is or why Michael C. Hall married her, much less why he's divorcing her." I consider sharing that information with our Russian friends to have been an international courtesy intended to further our shared global agenda and not at all reflective of my increasing confusion when staring at supermarket tabloids in the checkout lane.

I was nowhere nearly as deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal as the tapes and videos and satellite tracking and extensive witness corroboration would suggest. I merely mused aloud in a National Security Council meeting that the Iranian mullahs should "just eat cake." I was making a little Marie Antoinette joke, okay? Only much later did I suggest sending them an actual cake with a Bible and some weaponry. You can read that so many ways, and my enemies are trying to twist it to their own devious ends. I suggest you look into their motives for doing so.

Oh, boy. This is the big one. To be clear: I told NBC to "give Leno his show back," I never intended to slight the fine work of Conan O'Brien, which I have never seen. I simply meant that Leno's work was better than Conan's work, which I have never seen. I watch Jon Stewart.

And, finally, I did indeed send the president of Micronesia my complete collection of One Day at a Time on blu-ray. But it was not a gift intended to sway his actions; it was a loan. And the jerk still hasn't returned it.

More Stupid Moves by China

And the award for overacting and tin-eared political moves goes to ... the People's Republic of China.

China continues its scorched-earth campaign against the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to activist Liu Xiaobo, this time banning some major Western news web sites in the lead-up to the Nobel ceremonies. The country is also boycotting the ceremonies, as to be expected; what's disgusting is the rogue's gallery of countries that are joining the boycott: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Russia, Venezuela, Pakistan, Iraq, Morocco, Iran, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Egypt, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Some of those countries just want to maintain good ties with their powerful new business overlord, China, and others want to protest the award of the prize to dissidents – after all, they don't want their own dissidents to get the crazy idea that their authoritarian governments might not be universally loved. Some, of course, are both worried about their economic overlord and about dissidents. Either way, it's a disreputable list to be on.

This is good timing in that this is happening as Julian Assange's arrogant Wikileaks attack on the West (and it is mostly an attack on the West and the way the current Western leader, the United States, exerts influence in the world) is getting some push-back from governments; we are seeing the true colors of the Assange movement, as techno-anarchists are attacking anyone who disagrees with them. If you don't like the look of American influence around the world, take a look at China's actions and its list of pals above, and envision what the world will look like as American influence wanes. It ain't pretty, and it ain't democratic.

Let's not forget the ridiculous competitor to the Nobel Peace Prize that China's communist government dreamed up, the Confucius prize, which was immediately rejected by the first awardee. At least Taiwan continues to be a bright spot of democratic brazenness. Through a mixture of free expression and open media, they are giving China the black eye that Wikileaks could only hope to give it:

The Julian Assange Wikileaks Poison Pill

Supposedly Wikileaks provocateur Julian Assange – now languishing in a UK prison on suspicious rape allegations from Sweden – and his fellow Wikifreaks have a "poison pill" of information that gets automatically released if anything serious happens to them.

That might be true and it might not. Maybe we'll find out. But if this organization has some bombshell of information, why won't it just release it already? I thought the whole point of that group was to make secret information public, to take down what it sees as evil manipulative governments regardless of the cost.

So some information is worth keeping secret by Wikileaks, but governments don't get to keep information secret? And Wikileaks is the arbiter?

Governments have millions of shortcomings, but at least they are more responsible to their citizens than is Wikileaks.

Wikileaks Does Its Damage

I sit here writing this in San Francisco, which is pretty much ground-zero for people who believe that technology has revolutionized life so much that old rules, old ethics, old ways of thinking don't apply – and in so doing, they prove that old ways of thinking never die.

We're in Day Two of the latest Wikileaks caper. As everyone – and I mean everyone – knows by now, numerous news organizations around the world have sifted through about a quarter-billion private (and many secret – some even extremely secret) communications from the U.S. State Department.

I think of this caper as Project Open Drawers. Many people seem to be approaching it as if it's a delightful opportunity to root through the private filing drawers (yes, those were the drawers I meant, what did you think I was referring to?) of the government to learn juicy secrets.

Some of what we're learning from these illegally obtained communications is mundane, such as the world-shocker that German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle is considered a foreign-policy lightweight. Well, Inspector, it took a secret diplomatic cable to tell you that?

Other tidbits are likely to be world-shakers. For example, the information that Eqypt, Saudi Arabia, and nearly every other Middle Eastern country's leaders are scared witless about Iran having nuclear weapons and many of them have been urging the United States to attack Iran to destroy the nuclear program.

Now, anyone who has followed Middle East reporting for years knows that the governments there are privately much more supportive of American aims in the region than they let on to their people. Their people, on the other hand, tend to be much less supportive of American policies than are their governments, yet the people tend to be much more positively disposed to Americans themselves (perhaps because the Middle Easterners know all too well that a government's policies don't necessarily reflect the will of the governed). Naturally, if the leaders let on to their people how much they want stable oil prices, U.S. military protection, and Western bombs falling on Tehran's military facilities, their streets could explode with popular outrage. The world might not weep too much for some of the region's authoritarian regimes being swept aside by popular outrage, but as we learned in Iran, these thugs could easily be replaced by something even worse.

The short-, mid-, and long-term fallout from the release of these is likely to be significant, and all bad.

Over at German public news service Deutsche Welle, the negative impact was put mildly:

Ruprecht Polenz, the chairman of Germany's Foreign Committee, was of the opinion that "considerable damage" had been done. "The partners of the United States are under the assumption that what is discussed with them remains confidential. Now, certainly, doubts have been raised. Our American partners will have to work to dispel these doubts," Polenz said on German public television on Monday.

Former U.S. ambassador to NATO Rober Hunter put it, well, the most diplomatically: "[H]ere I think is the most serious problem: Many foreign leaders will be more reluctant to say things to U.S. diplomats if they worry that these things will show up in public. And as a result, the methodology of communication may have to adopt different ways and means in order to minimize the risks. That's the real problem that people will perhaps be less candid in the future and the way of communicating that back to Washington will have to change."

Foreign leaders will not trust that their most candid statements to American diplomats will remain confidential. If you were a foreign leader who had important opinions or suggestions you wanted to pass along but knew that it could lead to your overthrow or death if they were known, would you talk candidly to an American diplomat anytime soon? I sure as hell wouldn't.

And if you were an American diplomat at any of the thousands of places around the world where you are supposed to be asserting American interests and passing information back to Washington, are you going to think twice, maybe thrice before writing something controversial?

As a result, American leaders will get less candid information about the rest of the world in an era when the international situation is moving rapidly – and not necessarily in our interests. Even the parts of diplomacy that involve petty spying are crucial to learning the true motives of other countries. In the Cold War, having spies in Soviet countries did much to decrease tensions, because they mostly helped us understand the real motives of Soviet bloc leaders and undercut the wild fantasies of paranoiacs in Washington think tanks and in government.

As I've said before, America has never suffered from too much information and knowledge. Now we'll have even less – plus we have a lot of angry and distrustful allies around the world. Way to go, Wikileakers.