Nec lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoo

You know, I was going to write in some detail about the inconsistency and incoherence of David Sanger's positions as articulated in this painful interview with Terry Gross, how within a space of minutes he goes from claiming that the virtue of the Times reporting on the leaked diplomatic cables is its striving for their "responsible" release to claiming that as a "journalist" he entirely lacks "political motivation, or how he says that if the Times had not published it in redacted form, someone else would have published it unredacted, and then the Times would not have been able to determine what to redact, and so on and so forth. And I was going to write about the gaudy preening of this self-declared journalist who, like so many of his professional peers, sees fit to look down his nose and dismiss the man who, oh, by the way, provided all of the material on which David Sanger is now reporting, who undertook at great personal risk all of the fundamental legwork necessary to the endeavor of journalism, only to have Sanger and those like him deride that work, and moreover, to have them take on the mantle of that work, a switcheroo as crazed as a student writing a paper on Housman and claiming, upon getting back his B, that he is, in fact, and personally, Horace. I'll leave all that to Glenn Greenwald. I was going to point out that David Sanger's self-righteous claim that the Times went to the extraordinary step of going to the government with a few hundred cables to do the--here is the word again--responsible thing and get additional help redacting sensitive names and places is something that Julian Assange and wikileaks did with all 250,000, only to be rebuffed and rejected.

Instead, I just want you to draw up the image of the Times staff and editors hauling ass down to Washington to make sure that they were only reporting what the government felt they ought to report.