Daniel Ellsberg – another lefty who never has to say he’s sorry.

One of the reasons I love listening to my local NPR affiliate is because every so often they trot out some long forgotten iconic lefty dinosaur and serenade them with love and beatifications.

WNYC’s On the Media resurrected the decrepit anti-Vietnam hero Daniel Ellsberg this weekend to lecture us on the hopelessness of Afghanistan and why we have to surrender there as well .... just praying that some “courageous” DOD functionary will leak the goods to seal Afghanistan’s fate.

For those of who don’t know the whole story, Ellsberg’s claim to fame is that in 1971 he leaked a top secret Rand Corporation assessment of the war in Vietnam to the Washington Post and NY Times. He was later tried on charges relating to espionage but the case ended in a mistrial, due in part to revelations that his shrinks office had been broken into by Nixon’s plumbers.

Ellsberg has spend the past 35 years milking his 15 minutes of fame for all its worth. While a minor player in the Vietnam saga, he portrays himself as one of the vanguard members in the anti-war effort, without whom we’d still be fighting there today. That’s not unusual. Some people who get accustomed to the limelight are unwilling to go quietly into the night and do whatever they have to stay in front of the cameras. They become comfortable with the narrative they construct about themselves and repeat it so often they come to believe it. Think of Lauren Conrad. But the public grows tired of hearing the same story time after time so Ellsberg had to get creative with his message and his audience.

He befriended Jim Jones, and spent time preaching the gospel of why America sucks at the People’s Temple a few short years before the bloodletting in Guyana. Ellsberg claimed that UN Ambassador Andrew Young told him that Martin Luther King jr had actually been assassinated by the FBI. So willing to sacrifice his reputation to get back into the limelight, Ellsberg actually wrote and signed an affidavit to this effect and submitted it to lawyer and crackpot extraordinaire Mark Lane (bosom buddy and legal consul to Jim Jones). He, along with hundreds of other useful idiots, signed a declaration calling for a investigation into the Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines flight 007 after some shit head at The Nation Magazine alleged that the civilian airliner was actually a USAF reconnaissance flight and the passengers were sacrificed by Reagan to stoke anti-Soviet sentiment. Not to be out done, he also believes that “hardliners” within the Chairmen of the Joint Chief’s along with the CIA had JFK killed.

More recently Ellsberg has tried to maintain his relevance by hopping on board the 9/11 truth movement and by calling on “patriots” in the DOD to reveal any information about a potential military strike on Iran.

Ellsburg self righteous desperation to remain relevant has led him down a path that would assure, if he were a conservative, that no self respecting person would have anything to do with him … most definitely not one of the beautiful people over at NPR. The shameful allegations, relationships and outright lies, bordering on blood libel, should have guaranteed his relegation to the darker corners of American political life.

But like so many on the left who swim the waters of dark conspiracy, being a good left means never having to say you are sorry.