Speaking of mean, this may be a particularly mean thing for me to say, because it may cause some politically polarized brains to explode, but I’ll say it anyway: Narrative Isn’t Everything. The world is split into people who thrive on clicks, views, likes, shares, reposts, ratings and other such nonsense; for them, narrative does seem like everything. After all, people like being told stories, and a lot of the simpler people don’t see the point of drawing a sharp line between fiction and nonfiction. [..]
Just because a certain narrative has become more popular than another doesn’t mean that it has won; it may just mean that the sad, insane people whose minds it has infested have lost. The replacement of the popular narrative “Clinton is a crook; that’s why she lost” with the popular narrative “Trump is a Russian stooge; that’s why he won” has not changed the underlying reality.
What it did was produce a pocket of stark-raving feces-flinging insanity. Helpful Russian clinicians in white coats are standing by with straitjackets and syringes of lorazepam while the rest of the world watches nervously. All hope that this bout of mass insanity will eventually run its course without requiring major medical intervention. Meanwhile, the denizens of the insane asylum obsess over the color of flower petals to scatter over the cesspool of their national politics in 2020. [..]
And it is rather questionable whether the British government has legitimate grounds to hold him: he jumped bail by entering the Ecuadoran embassy, but the arrest, and the bail, had been granted in connection with the Swedish extradition request, which is no longer valid, making the entire matter null and void. [..]
From this point of view Assange’s liberation from the Ecuadoran embassy and imprisonment in a British jail on charges of violating bail for an arrest grounds for which have since been dismissed starts to look like a major success. He is once again in the public eye, with numerous supporters throughout the world. If all goes well, he will be released and reestablish himself as a media personality of great stature. And if everything goes badly and the Americans do get their hands on him and torture him to death, he will die as a martyr and live in public memory forever.