The Curious Case of Sean Hannity and Julian Assange.

Sean Hannity recently interviewed Julian Assange. In the interview Hannity closed by hoping for the best for Julian Assange. This is all pretty cheeky coming from partisan hack like Hannity.  Here is Hannity from 2010:

SEAN HANNITY: "All right. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will make an appearance before a British judge tomorrow. Now the appearance is related to sexual assault charges that he's facing in Sweden. Now this news comes just as there's word that Assange is apparently not done waging his war against the U.S., at least not yet."

"Revealing their identities, helping us and cooperating with us in our battle against the Taliban. These are real lives that are now in jeopardy and in danger. That was step one."

"Then 390,000 other documents were released. Many of them classified documents. And now we have this. What is -- why? Why didn't they go after this guy and why didn't they arrest him? Why didn't they stop this from being published when we had so much time to do it?"

"Why can't Obama do something about the WikiLeaks? We got this four months ago. You know, we can stop pirating a music and Hollywood movies, but we can't stop this guy from stealing highly classified documents that puts people's lives at risk?" 

During Hannity’s September 6, 2016 interview with Assange, it was all praise and applause. “I do hope you get free one day.” Hannity said moistly. 

Julian Assange must have been chuckling to himself at the spectacle of the now fawning Hannity, and indeed the entire FoxNews machine.  Fox News is built on the idea of American Exceptionalism, America First, provided its Republican lead of course.  Fox News, largely a propaganda are of the worst of US conservative politics champion essentially all the things that the narcissists Assange detests about the US. This isn’t to say that Assange likes much on offer by the Democratic wing of US politics either. Assange’s end game seems to be a destabilized US, or at least not a return to Bush II style politics. Assange likely views Hillary as a hawkish, Bush-lite. Assange is no friend of the US. 

Hannity is probably not the only pundit to switch sides on the issue of the infamous Julian Assange. No doubt many highly liberal democrats are now castigating Assange as an enemy of the state now that Assange has switched ideological targets. I am not one of these. I’ve always distrusted Assange and thought his methods were incredibly dangerous. He may be an ideologue, or a narcissist or some combination, but he is no friend to the idea of a stable US.