Daniel Ellsberg's Legacy: 40 Years of Prejudice by the Press

After stealing 7,000 secret documents from the Pentagon and giving them to the New York Times, Daniel Ellsberg was popularized into a national hero and let off the hook on legal technicalities. Whistle-blowers have been attacking Republicans ever since, often manufacturing evidence to create stories that are completely untrue ala Dan Rather with the Bush documents in 2004.

Because the media makes celebrities of these people, and then major universities give them a lasting voice as professors of journalism and other nonsense, an artificial campaign has been waged against the security of this country.

Ellsberg's contention is that LBJ and McNamara concocted the incident in Tonkin as justification for the war in Vietnam, but strangely, Ellsberg was not compelled to come forward with information he knew from day 1 until he had an opportunity to take down Nixon. He claims it just didn't occur to him to come forward until years later when he was working for Kissinger.

I think it is very likely that if he had come forward while LBJ was pushing his Great Society, the Old Gray Lady would have turned him away, or at the very least they would have sat on it until they had a a more desirable target.

Ellsberg has been screaming to anyone who is forced to listen - his students - for the past eight years about the Bush White House's case for the war in Iraq. His only evidence, like almost all liberals, is that a) almost none of the WMDs have been found (they're in Syria), and b) Valerie Plame was outed as an act of political vengeance against Joe Wilson.

No one has ever seriously questioned Joe Wilson about anything - the press had everything to gain in their agenda to destroy Bush's credibility by just broadcasting all his outrageous statements without a single serious examination of his story. Wilson clearly went to Africa with the express purpose of not finding evidence to support the White House's claims. Surprise - he didn't find any. All accounts were that Joe hardly left the hotel when he was there. He did not prove that Powell lied, only that Joe Wilson had no particular interest in the truth. That's the real story, and the one we were never told.

Here's the thing - outing Plame, a desk jockey who did not have anything even remotely secret to do that would have justified her clearance, does not hurt Wilson, and it doesn't even hurt Plame. From start to finish, this was a manufactured story with the sole purpose of embarrassing Bush. It has zero credibility, and yet the media made a hero out of this guy. Meanwhile, national security is damaged not by some lie told by Bush (that didn't happen), but by the purposeful destruction of the credibility of our intelligence agency and of our president.

Nixon was right about Ellsberg, the guy was nothing more than another opportunist making a name for himself at the cost of the security of Americans abroad and at home.