To be fair, when Ron Paul said yesterday that it was completely awesome that Julian Assange was spreading our classified secrets across the internet for the entire world to see, he probably couldn’t have foreseen that the information would contain this:

A long list of key facilities around the world that the US describes as vital to its national security has been released by Wikileaks.

The US State Department in February 2009 asked all US missions abroad to list all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security.

The list includes pipelines, communication and transport hubs.

I mean, who could have possibly predicted that the leaking of classified diplomatic cables would lead to the disclosure of information that terrorists could use to get the most bang for their buck? Apparently not Ron Paul, who has actually gone so far as to make requests for what the next leak of classified information should be.

As to the substance of Paul’s argument, absolutely no one is arguing that Assange ought to be criminally prosecuted for treason, for the painfully obvious reason that Paul himself pointed out; one cannot be a traitor to a country of which one is not a citizen. Quite a few people have suggested that Assange ought to be prosecuted as a lawbreaker – or better yet, summarily executed as a spy, because that is what Assange is. But the fact that Assange is not guilty of treason is not a good reason for a sitting Member of Congress to solicit attacks on America’s infrastructure. Unless, of course, the Congressman in question’s reflexive lodestar is the destruction of America, which seems to be more or less the case when it comes to Ron Paul.