Reproduced with permission from Business Insider.

On Dylan Ratigan today Cenk Uygur asked Julian Assange how he felt about all the American cable hosts/potential presidential candidates (Uygur namechecks Huckabee and Palin, in particular) calling for his head.  In many cases literally.

Said Assange:

Just another idiot trying to make a name for himself.  It’s a serious business.  If we are to have a civil society you cannot have senior people, making calls on national TV, to go around the judiciary and illegally murder people.

Indeed.

On the one hand one wonders if Julian Assange is simply a cable TV neophyte.  On the other he has a serious point: you shouldn’t call for people to be murdered on national TV.  Sadly, the nation appears to have released the cablesphere from any expectation that they should act seriously and as a result Assange’s remark (“they should be held to account, they should be charged with incitement to commit murder”) ends up sounding almost as over-the-top as the people he is complaining about.

He goes on to say that this sort of behavior is cause for international concern.

Is the United States a country that obeys the rule of law, because Europeans are starting to wonder… is it going to descend into an anarchy that doesn’t have due process?

Probably not.

Later Assange reiterates that he has never had any contact with Pfc Bradley Manning and therefore doesn’t know that he is the leaker but if he is he is a “political prisoner” of the United States.

Video below.  One suspects the time is probably nigh for Assange to begin to dial back on his own exposure.

Reproduced with permission from BusinessInsider.com.