“I can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange” - Michael Grunwald, Twitter, Aug 17, 2013 He regrets having tweeted it on Saturday. According to TIME Magazine, Michael Grunwald’s endorsement of assassinating WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange via a drone strike was “offensive.” While Twitter is a notorious medium of unreliable guff, its spontaneity, its allowance for rawness, can be a window on the mind. The mind here was particularly disturbed, and disturbing. What Grunwald, senior national correspondent for TIME has been doing is glossing the language of murder with “statist” hygiene, showing in turn a fascination for pro-establishment rhetoric. In other words, killing Assange would be, in the manner of killing Anwar al-Awlaki, a matter of state endorsement for the broader good.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 02:00:00 +0000