Savages

You know, in the interest of fairness I wanted to take a minute and remind everyone that the Neanderthals on the right are by no means the only ones willing to claim that there are varying degrees of rape -- that some rape is really rape while other rape is, I don't know, like a warm bath on a cool autumn evening.

There are those on the left just as comfortable engaging in inexcusable and repulsive semantics when it comes time to defend someone they happen to think is serving the greater good.

To wit, Michael Moore, who, along with the equally offensive Oliver Stone, penned a long-winded op-ed in yesterday's New York Times that once again attempted to cast the rape case against the almost farcically pious Julian Assange as a conspiracy to quash free speech.

Adrian Chen over at Gawker shows Moore, Stone and their ilk the appropriate respect.

"That Assange is holed up in the embassy after seeking asylum in Ecuador to avoid two-year-old Swedish rape and sexual molestation accusations, not a U.S. government investigation, proved no obstacle: His supporters are now seized by one of their periodic spasms of delusional op-ed writing, blogging and tweeting in the hopes of throwing up a screen of bullshit thick enough to hide the fact that this is a very straightforward case of a dude allegedly being a sex creep...

Julian Assange's sex crimes case has nothing to do with free speech, or Wikileaks. Swedish prosecutors are not handling this case differently because it's Julian Assange. In fact slavish supporters like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone are the ones holding Assange to a different standard, one where it's OK to bend and break international law to aid an accused rapist's flight from justice, as long as he embarrassed the U.S. government once. "

By the way, the opening line of the op-ed, in which Moore and Stone immediately assert their hallowed cultural position as filmmakers, sounds far too much like another recent case of a bunch of pompous members of the self-appointed liberal intelligentsia rushing in to defend an Important Man from the ignorant heathens unjustly gathering at his doorstep and calling him a rapist.