And The Award For Pompous, Preening Pop-Culture Douchebag of The Decade Goes To. . .

Julian Assange, the Wikileaks archgeek, radical-chic avatar, the Chinese Communist Party's nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, Michael Moore's joint-venturer, absconding debtor, American celebrity pornographer Larry Flynt's fair-haired boy, darling of Cindy Sheehan, Medea Benjamin, Bianca Jagger, and of Heather Mallick, for "lo, he hath made truthful information available unto citizens of the planet."

Lo, Assange hath now been found to have released more than 1,000 cables outing individual political activists - several thousand tagged as sources who could be placed in danger - and more than 150 cables outing whistleblowers, people persecuted by their governments, and victims of sex crimes.

Such is his courage in speaking truth to power that Assange had already prompted Zimbabwe's chief executioner to set up a commission to pursue treason charges against the dissidents so bravely outed by Wikileaks. Assange had already equipped the Cuban regime with evidences to mount investigations of that poor country's subversive youth. In the police state of Belarus, where hundreds of journalists and opposition activists were already languishing in prison, Assange's official "gatekeeper," a holocaust-denying antisemite, was happy to meet with officials of the regime after boasting of being in possession of documents proving ties between Belarussian democrats and the foul American imperialist aggressor.

To his grovelling fan base, none of this mattered a damn: Hands off he who sticks it to the man! Neither was the fawning glitterati bothered in the least by such such small matters as the pleadings of Amnesty International, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Kabul office of the International Crisis Group, each of which begged Assange to desist from recklessly endangering the lives of scores of the most brave and innocent of our Afghan comrades. All they got for their trouble was a warning from Assange that if they didn't shut their gobs: "I shall issue a press release."

Now, Assange's enablers in the mainstream media, the corporations Assange's supporters relied upon to cloak their hero in a patina of muckraking legitimacy, are frantically bailing. In an unprecedented joint statement issued by the Guardian, the New York Times, El Pais, Der Speigel and Le Monde, we read: "We deplore the decision of Wikileaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk. . . We cannot defend the needless publication of the complete data – indeed, we are united in condemning it. The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone."

Fair enough. Should death come to any one of the innocents, the brave dissidents, the journalists and rape victims and democrats to have been exposed by this vulgar spectacle of onanistic avante-garde exhibitionism, perhaps a not-guilty plea to the charge of accessory to murder might have some merit. Count yourself lucky. Should anything so remotely absurd as "our own Arab spring" of celebrated elite Senate page fantasy come to pass, you'd be swinging from the gallows. The lot of you.