WAITING FOR THIS TO BLOW OVER

Wikileaks III is the kind of story that makes me regret I ever started blogging -- everyone's talking about it, which means no one wants to read anything you might want to post about anything else, even though everything that can possibly be said about Topic A is being said by other people.

And the Wikileaks dumps have the striking ability to paralyze us with monomania even though there's really not all that much in them that would attract the attention of the non-pros and non-wonks among us if it showed up in conventional news stories. Purloined documents seem to be to the blogosphere what captured video is to TV news -- on TV, you know that a number of stories are aired not because the facts in them are what people want or need to know, but because really cool video is available. That seems to be how we all feel about dumped documents. The dumpedness is what draws us.

So, sorry, I'm not the go-to guy for smart, informed comment on this. I will note that, as an old guy who remembers the 1990s, I'm still conditioned to expect certain knee-jerk media reactions to stories involving the Clintons -- and yet here we are, learning that Hillary Clinton signed a directive ordering American diplomats to spy on representatives from other countries at the UN, yet no one is fitting the news into the old narrative of Hillary as an evil, sinister, power-mad behind-the-scenes schemer. Really? No one? Emmett Tyrrell? David Horowitz? Sally Quinn? Hello? I know, I know -- the right-wingers who establish the terms of the debate in this country hate furriners and the UN, so this isn't a bad thing. Still, she was the original Big Sis, right? She was Hitlery, dammit! They told us she terrorized a nation! And now nothing?