The only organization with which I associate myself is the United Methodist Church. Even there, it gets troubling because there are many things about the denomination I do not like.
Hopping on the internet, I discovered, four years ago, a burgeoning network of progressive Christianity. At first I affiliated myself with it. Now . . . no. For one thing, it is far too closely associated with Jim Wallis, who isn't really all that progressive, and whose main goal is to keep his name and face before the public.
I was happy enough to associate myself with the progressive political movement, insofar as it represented disparate interests united around one goal - ending the Republican majority in Congress and getting some solid legislation passed. I have had to put up with the anti-Christian sentiment among many progressives, much of which is as brainless as some Christian fundamentalism. The price you pay.
Over the past year or so, however, I have felt it necessary to distance myself even from the broader progressive movement. For one thing, there is a general sense among many further to the left of the political spectrum, that Barack Obama is not only a weak President. They are falling in to the same ideological nonsense one heard in 1999 and 2000. It is summed up best by the claims that there are no differences between the Obama Presidency and what we might have expected from a President McCain. Just as they were wrong when they said there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush, they are wrong on this score, too.
With the document dump from Wikileaks still out there; with all sides making all sorts of claims, it is difficult to whisper through all the shouting that this entire episode is filled with pitfalls. The right, for example, has managed to take a Wired magazine article based on some of the Wikileaks documents and made it say the exact opposite of what the article - and the documents themselves - say. On the left, we have stuff like this.
When a tyrannical government cannot argue with the information posted which in this case is actual US and Pakistan Military documents, they attack the messenger.This is just part of the comment. Needless to say, there is no justification for any of the claims made here. Beginning by describing the United States as possessing a "tyrannical government" - even as he posts quite freely on the internet, without interference, without fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night or his family never discovering what has happened to him - is not a way to endear oneself to folks who might think that, while bad, ours is hardly a tyrannical government.
Wikileaks has already saved numerous American and NATO soldiers lives in exposing that US Military commanders did not tell the helicopter pilots and flight crews that the Pakistani ISI had acquired heat seeking shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles and gave those to the Taliban fighters. NOW thanks to Wikileaks US and NATO pilots are staying alive by changing their flight paths and carrying defense tools to offset that previously unspoken threat.
Wikileaks has already brought closure on NATO soldiers familys in Canada who were lied to about how their son's were killed in action. They were as the documents revealed killed by their own men!
As long as vital need to know information is not being shared to the US and NATO troops as well as the world at large, there is a prevailing need for a Wikileaks to post the truth, to reveal what is actually going on and saving many lives as they do.
While the US Military propaganda machine might act like they are laughing about not telling the US and NATO helicopter pilots and their flight crews that the Taliban had recently acquired heat seeking shoulder fired missiles, the multiple DEAD pilots, flight crews and dozens of passengers were not among those laughing.
Wikileaks exposed that utterly corrupt lapse of judgement by the US Military and SAVED PILOTS LIVES.
Yet, having access to all these documents makes everyone sudden experts. Whether it's journalists at the big papers and news magazines, or bloggers of this or that political persuasion, or commenters at Media Matters for America, we find ourselves in the midst of folks who think, "This isn't so bad, right?"
Except, it really is. I'm no fan of the war. I'm no fan of the overuse of the classification system. There is plenty of evidence the military has lied to folks, not just in Iraq but in pretty much every war we've been in, about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of various individuals. The matter of Pat Tillman isn't unique by any means; it just shone a spotlight on the simple reality that battles are messy things, bullets fly any which way, and sometimes Americans die at the hands of other Americans. It is difficult to understand. The military does no one any favors by lying about it, but it is, to say the least, embarrassing. It seems to render a battlefield death less meaningful if it is the result of friendly fire. At least, if killed by the official enemy, the death may have furthered some purpose; dying at the hands of one's comrades strips it of even this onion-skin-thin sheen of dignity.
This is just a sample, I am sure, of all sorts of nonsense from the fringes of the left, a direct result of people with neither the training nor the knowledge nor the simple wisdom to ask fundamental questions concerning the Wikileaks cache excited over the prospect of reading secret documents.
