Short ‘n’ Stubby: The Wiki, she just keeps on leakin’…

Good evening! I’ve given the stump-tailed cyber-mascot a break from the head of the post, so that I can bring you other things germane to the Wikileaks issue. Case in point: The video above. Watch it, I command you.

And when you’re done that, Ms. Manx, who has been busily operating the telegraph in the background, would like to draw your attention to the following. Ptttttteeeep eeep eeeep…

Ms. Manx thinks it’s a crying shame that Wikileaks is not the newsmaker for the year at Time when it’s just such an obvious no-brainer. (“Mark Zuckerberg?” she says, with a snort of disbelief.) She’s not so fussed on Julian Assange; her real newsmaker is Bradley Manning, who is believed to have supplied all that incriminating material that Assange is now being persecuted for publishing. And Glenn Greenwald has broken a huge story on him. Credible sources say that Manning is being mentally tortured in custody pending trial, without charges as yet. FREE BRADLEY MANNING, cries the Manx.

Fidel Castro’s take is that Wikileaks “has brought the empire to its knees.” Ms. Manx nods sagely and says that sounds about right. Which is why this rape charge smells less like a prosecution than a persecution. (Embarrassing Cablegate revelations that the US is full of shit about the nuclear doings of Venezuela and Iran don’t help them much, either.)

And if you don’t believe the Manx, Naomi Wolf has some good points to make–namely, that this so-called rape charge trivializes all rape cases, and will end up ultimately hurting women. Writes Wolf: “Here is what I mean: men are pretty much never treated the way Assange is being treated in the face of sex crime charges.” Further to what she previously wrote, which was widely criticized–and falsely–as mocking rape, Wolf knows from personal experience that the average accused rapist does NOT have Interpol on his tail, even if he flees the country. For most men who do that, it means the end of all charges against them. Not a massive and showy global manhunt. Wolf’s closing lines are excellent, and have the wholehearted approval of the Manx:

Anyone who works in supporting women who have been raped knows from this grossly disproportionate response that Britain and Sweden, surely under pressure from the US, are cynically using the serious issue of rape as a fig leaf to cover the shameful issue of mafioso-like global collusion in silencing dissent. That is not the State embracing feminism. That is the State pimping feminism.

And on a related note, one of Assange’s Swedish attorneys says the police record may actually clear Assange.

Meanwhile, Amy Goodman notes that character assassination has been going on nonstop since those weak charges were miraculously resurrected, just in time for Cablegate. She notes, in particular, the real feminist angle to all this…which may surprise some of you:

Since the principal, public reason for Assange’s arrest relates to questions about potential sexual crimes in Sweden, Katrin Axelsson, from the group Women Against Rape, wrote in a letter to the British newspaper The Guardian: “Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. …. Women don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.”

(Ms. Manx just let out a meow that sounded remarkably like “BINGO!”)

And speaking of character assassination: Stay classy, Jezebel. Whatever happened to presumptions of innocence, anyway? Or is it not character assassination when self-proclaimed feminist websites do it? If we’re going to be fighting against double standards that work to the invariable disadvantage of women, shouldn’t we practice what we preach, ladies, and keep our tits out of the rumor mill? You’re all acting as if you already knew Assange to be a date-rapist extraordinaire, based on a skanky dating website profile that may or may not be his. Ms. Manx looks down her nose at you, and remarks that she thought summer was the silly season for news.

Finally, Ms. Manx says (with scratchy tongue planted firmly in furry cheek) that if we’re going to deal in weird rumors regarding Wikileaks, someone should fact-check and see if this Cablegate RickRoll is real. (This weird architectural item has already published a mini-retraction at the bottom of its page. No, Wikileaks is NOT living in a Cold War-era bunker in Sweden. Sorry.)