Anthony Slessor

Wikileaks

To the irreverent many Julian Assange has managed to retain the moral high ground. Yes, there’s lots of governmental huffing and puffing and there are even the ridiculous few who, with hyperbolic rhetoric, say he has blood on his hands and want him hunted down and killed – probably quite a number of them in quite a few countries, although it takes rabid American red neck politicians actually to voice that blood lust without any sense of irony.

But Assange’s call for the resignation of Hilary Clinton has seen him slip down the slope from his journalistic and idealistic pedestal. It looks too partisan and it clouds the boundaries of his, until now, clear territory. It is one thing for his audience to applaud the revelations of political misdemeanours, it is another to accompany him into the gutter of political scrapping. And BTW, whatever the law, it would have been negligent of Mrs Clinton not to have issued those directives tasking her subordinates to gather information.

As for Assange, best to stay low for some time to come. But, if he disappears completely we will never know whether he has been effective at concealment or has been whisked away to a US black site and his family and friends will never hear of him again. Mmmm….not very subtle is it – perhaps he’ll die of a drug overdose in an obscure hotel room surrounded by hookers (or rentboys – even better!).