Sara(h) Smiles, Part 35: Keeping Americans Safe From Australians

As one who fights tirelessly in this journal for the restoration of our precious liberties and the preservation of tax cuts for the wealthy, I, as all other common-sense conservatives, am very much in favor of freedom of speech on the Internet. But the WikiLeaks unpleasantness of the past couple of weeks reminds us how easy it is to abuse that freedom. Julian Assange, a known Australian, has gravely embarrassed the American government, revealing, for instance, that our brave men and women in uniform continued to torture Iraqis even after Abu Ghraib, and that their commanders understandably got sick and tired of writing detailed reports about the atrocities some of our soldiers, crazed with homesickness, committed. Naturally, I’m no fan at all of that rhymes-with-which Hilary Clinton, but when I learned that WikiLeaks’ publication of sensitive State Department cables will make it difficult for our diplomats to spy effectively on the countries to which she’s dispatched them, I was as incensed as the next patriotic American.

I couldn’t agree more with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — the handsomest man in Congress, by the way — whose view is that Assange “is a high-tech terrorist. He’s done an enormous damage to our country, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law." We must bear firmly in mind that the law is a living thing, written not by God, but by man, and therefore subject to revision. A law that doesn’t protect decent, God-fearing Americans from Australians does indeed call out for revision.

Naturally, I’ve been disgusted with the ObaMao administration’s typically effete, ineffectual response to Assange’s treason. They've blocked his access to his financial assets, frightened the likes of Amazon.com and his Internet service provider out of doing any business with him, frozen funds earmarked for his legal defense even as they were encouraging our Swedish allies to charge him with sexual improprieties, gotten our friends in high places Down Under to threaten to revoke his passport (Julia Gillard may be no one’s MILF, but she knows on which side her toast is Vegemited), and even threatened him with assassination.

They stopped short, though, of advocating that he be hunted down like any other terrorist; it fell to mama grizzly Sarah Palin to summon the moral fortitude for that. And here she showed herself to be very much more circumspect than her fellow former governor and Jesus-lover Mike Huckabee, who wants to see hanged the American soldier thought to have passed documents to Assange. Well, in Sarah’s America, we’re not going to be so quick to hang those who’ve fought to protect our precious liberties, buster.

In other news, results from this year’s Programme for International Student Assessment, announced this week by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, show Asian, and especially Chinese, 15-year-olds to be the world’s best-educated. Ours, meanwhile, placed 23rd in science, 17th in reading, and 31st in math.

We must bear in mind here that while those in the Third World are spending 16 to 18 hours per day studying, our own youngsters are out enjoying precious freedoms of which the Chinese, for instance, can only dream — “cruising” in their own cars, sending each other text messages, listening to iPods the Chinese couldn’t hope to afford, binge-drinking, and getting each other pregnant — just generally having the sort of fun God put American teens on earth to enjoy. Would we really want our youngsters to be as hard-working as those in the Third World? Would that not jeopardize their God-given feeling of entitlement?

So Belgium, Estonia, Iceland, France, and the Slovak Republic all finished ahead of us; so friggin’ what? My guess is that they cheated; honestly now, have you ever met an Estonian you trusted? Be that as it may, in your face, Turkey, Mexico, and Greece, three of the five countries whose kids ours did better than. If we can kick the butt of the so-called cradle of civilization, the birthplace of geometry, I don’t think we need to apologize to anybody.