BuzzFeed correspondent Michael Hastings joins the Up w/ Chris Hayes discussion on Julian Assange, the leader behind WikiLeaks, who caused a diplomatic standoff this week in part for challenging extradition to Sweden for alleged sexual misconduct.
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Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.
How did we get here? With "Twilight of the Elites," Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.
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Constructive criticism, Chris Hayes was awful at moderating this discussion. Michael Hastings never asked Michelle Goldberg's basic question and made some pretty wild claims based on little "it could happen" or "happen to others."
I support Wikileaks, but that Julian Assange, who everybody knows where he is for the last couple of months, has a reasonable fear of having extraordinary rendition if he sets foot in Stockholm is not only nonsense but massively insulting to the actual victims of extraordinary rendition and rather cowardly on JA's part to use that to get away with date rape.
Point blank, Julian Assange isn't above the law and can't get away with date rape because of "eventually blah-blah would happen."
I noticed that Chris asked Michael Hastings to pipe down and let Richard Belzer and Josh Barro make their points/finish their questions, but he didn't do the same for Michelle Goldberg even though she was getting talked over by him at least as much if not more.
I'm not prepared to make a sexism charge here, but seems Michelle Goldberg was more differential to Michael Hastings then she ought to have been.
The whoopla yelling "Bradley Manning" and "Extraodinary Redition" to just try to get around the idea that JA has lost a lot of respect for acting like he has any principals when he take refuge with a nation with a pretty awful freedom-of-the-press record while his supporters drag Swedes as well as Miss A and Miss W's character through the mud.
Watching it again, and Michael Hastings making this JA's-such-a-charming-guy and he-is-so-valuable-to-journalism stuff as if he won't just say "thereford the date rape stuff is bogus" yet clearly implying it is rather sick.
I thought I'd already posted; what a nuisance. I wrote something along the lines of praising msnbc and 'UP' in particular for generally first rate work. But the Assange discussion was woeful - and demonstrated, yet again, that the American has no idea how he looks to those of us from outside the so-called 'world's greatest democracy'. Check out this 'Four Corners' look at the topic, and then try again:
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Four Corners url:
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