Sign O' The Times?

Well, just you think things in RightWingWorld couldn't get any more unhinged, the entire gasbag population launches a coordinated series of screeds aimed at criminally prosecuting the New York Times. The Weekly Standard outdoes itself with this little piece of bizarro-world logic:

"Such leaks cause harm of a more general but no less consequential sort. In waging the war on terrorism, the United States depends heavily on cooperation with allied intelligence agencies. But when our own intelligence services demonstrate that they are unable to keep shared information under wraps, international cooperation grinds to a halt.

This is a matter not of idle conjecture but of demonstrable fact. During the run-up to the Iraq war, the United States was urgently attempting to assess the state of play of Saddam Hussein's program to acquire weapons of mass destruction. One of the key sources suggesting that an ambitious WMD buildup was underway was an Iraqi defector, known by the codename of Curveball, who was talking to German intelligence. But Washington remained in the dark about Curveball's true identity, and the fact that he was a serial fabricator. Why would the Germans not identify Curveball? According to the Silberman-Robb WMD Commission report, they refused "to share crucial information with the United States because of fear of leaks." In other words, some of the blame for our mistaken intelligence about Iraq's WMD program rests with leakers and those in the media who rush to publish the leaks."

There just aren't enough keystrokes - or minutes in my day - to go into this mess, but Glenn Greenwald ably dissects the issue, which ought to put to rest any rational concerns about national security. But then we're not talking about rational concerns, are we?