Saturday, June 08, 2013

Culture of what?

I was watching Amy Goodman talking to Glenn Greenwald on Democracy NOW! and I noticed Dianne Feinstein complaining that we've become "a culture of leaks".

Of course, the United States is supposed to be a culture in which the whistle is blown on corruption and law-breaking by public officials and large institutions. It's an interesting sleight-of-hand to make it sound like "leaking" is some unsavory bacterium that has infected this, uh, culture, rather than a necessary ingredient in a democracy. I think it's called "transparency", isn't it?

Whenever I hear a politician ask me to trust him, I remember the devil saying, "Trust me, Winslow."