The Keller Files 1:2 Julian Assange is a Stateless Person

Occasionally people try assert that Julian Assange is not only homeless, but stateless, like one of those people who lives in an airport because he can't enter the country in which the airport is located, and can't go back to where he came from .

Bill Keller's spy thriller stops short of actually calling Assange a stateless person (because Keller is big on facts, and that is obviously not a fact), instead referring to him as "an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence", and describing him as a "bag lady" and a "derelict". The end result is the same - leaving the reader with the impression that Assange is a person with no home and no country.

But what could the point of this characterization be? Why spend so much time and sacrifice so many adjectives for the purpose of making certain that everyone understands that Julian Assange is a passport orphan??? 

hmmm... well... a great deal of Keller's piece of shit is about how not-Assangian Keller and his colleagues are, so maybe calling Assange "stateless" is intended to set up a contrast between a drifter who is unburdened by fealty to any state, and people who have a home that they love and are completely devoted to.

Keller, as it turns out, is Captain America as evidenced by the following:

• He spews the right rhetoric (" in Europe ...there is often a certain pleasure in seeing the last superpower taken down a peg"; "We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here" ),
• He parties with the right people (he gleefully relates story about a party given by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan),
• He admires the approach taken by the Obama administration with respect to redacting the leaked documents, carefully detailing the cooperation between the NYT and the Obama administration in deciding what to release, and how best to ensure no one gets killed as a result of the leaks, all the while using language that evokes thoughts of a placid lake in the sunshine, the scent of baby powder, and music by John Tesh.  
• He outs Assange as anti-American, and makes it clear that he does not approve of such things.  

All this leaves me wondering if Keller may have leadership aspirations beyond the NYT, having , as men like to say "shot his load" at that job. Maybe he'd like a nice diplomatic post somewhere pretty. He does, after all, know how diplomacy "works" now. Or maybe his aspirations are higher, and more OVAL!!

In any case, Keller, just remember that while you're wrapping yourself in the flag, I can see right through it, and I see that your balls are shrinking, while my man Julian's grow ever larger.