Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Peter King is a jackass.

But then you knew that. Everybody who has ever heard this schmuck take his usual bizarre, twisted, surrealistic positions, on practically any issue that you can think of, is well aware that he’s an undercover member in excellent and appropriate standing of the Jackass Party, regardless of what he may claim.

Peter King (he wants you to call him “Pete”—exactly the way Charles Schumer wants you to call him “Chuck”) claims to be a conservative, I believe. I’ve meant for some time to write about this vile creature, but there were always many more important things to write about than a brain-damaged Congressman from the brain-dead state of New York. I’m doing it now strictly in the defense of justice (real justice not “social justice”) because of some particularly idiotic things I heard him say on television this morning.

Julian Assange is a dangerous criminal, King asserted (emphasis on “ass”) because his organization, Wikileaks (which some of King’s ilk are now accusing of being Russian founded, funded, and directed), made public certain embarrassing information about the United States government’s illegal activities. People will die, the Drama King proclaimed hysterically, because of what Assange has done. But I ask you, name three: who is going to die because you and I now know what many of us have suspected all along, that the Central Intelligence Agency, a state entity lacking any standing at all under the United States Constitution, can watch us, listen to us, without a warrant, through our smartphones or television sets? And if, by some peculiar twist of fate, somebody does die, isn’t that an easily foreseeable consequence of signing up with an organization every bit as criminal as the Cosa Nostra?

By my libertarian standards (and they are very high, indeed) Julian Assange is a genuine hero, along with his associates Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Anybody who courageosly reveals the truth about a runaway government that claims a right to rule over us is a hero. No allegedly democratic government has any right to keep secrets from its people or to tell them lies.

This King putz wants to extradite Assange. He carefully didn’t call the man a traitor, as many others have in their ignorance, because he’s an Australian citizen or subject or whatever. The poor guy has been pent up for four and a half years in two small rooms in the Equadorian Embassy in London because every other government in the world wants to kill him. The Swedes tried to phony up some sexual assault charges against him, but the effort didn’t play. He has a wife who presumably misses him, He has small children whose growing-up he doesn’t get to watch. The only company he has had is Pamela Anderson and a cat. Now King wants to use economic pressure, “leverage”, on Equador to force them to throw him out in the street where he can be killed. All of the dozen or more covert wet-work agencies are sharpening their silencers.

I have heard Donald Trump talk about Assange. The Donald doesn’t seem to be aware (which I find hard to believe) that without Assange exposing Hillary Clinton’s guilty e-mails, he wouldn’t be President today. The three Wikileaking heroes deserve greater gratitude than that, Donny. They all deserve immediate, unconditional pardons and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 1977 (or thereabouts—forty years ago, anyway) as a member of the Libertarian Party’s National Platform Committee, I helped to write a plank calling for total abolition of the C.I.A. as well as the F.B.I. (which is every bit as unconstitutional). Later, lily- livered platforms extruded by cowardly “moderate gradualists” backed away from that prinipled provision. The country deserves a Constitutional Amendment forbidding government secrets and lies—as well as spying on a single one of us.

As long as we can be spied on, and lied to, we can’t be truly free.