GETTING IT STRAIGHT – AT 8:34 P.M. ET:  Writing this from Maryland, a state that insists on remaining Democratic.  Teams of mental health workers are being rushed to Baltimore and will be available on mobile vehicles.

It's bizarre, but the administration is continuing to downplay the importance of the Wiki wickedness.  Small potatoes, major bigshots say.  Investors Business Daily, in an editorial, points out that foreign nations aren't seeing it quite that way:

"We should never be afraid of one guy who plopped down $35 and bought a Web address," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, taking the cake for absurdity. "Our foreign policy is stronger than that . .. . We're not scared of one guy, with one keyboard and a laptop."

On that logic, as wags from Lucianne.com noted, atomic particles wouldn't worry him either, and Joseph Goebbels was merely a man with a microphone.

And now for a more mature, post-freshman view:

The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. sources abroad are drying up, with WikiLeaks only erratically redacting source names.

How this could not amount to a crisis for U.S. diplomacy is beyond us. Pretending there's nothing to be alarmed about might work if the U.S. were dealing from a position of strength. But Assange is sitting on thousands of stolen documents he has yet to release. He already knows from his letters that the U.S. wants him to stop.

Now that he sees U.S. officials pretending there's no problem, he can chalk it up to their political game-playing. But Assange himself is an enemy, not a political opponent. He is not playing games.

COMMENT:  Well said.  The administration's assurances are embarrassing.  Foreign nations now know that they can't trust the United States with their comments and their secrets.  And some foreign leaders now know what our government really thinks of them.  Great way to get results.

The president himself should come forward and admit what the mess has caused.  And he should outline what his administration is doing to make sure that this kind of security breach never happens again.  But we haven't heard from Mr. Obama.

December 2, 2010