Michael Weiss writes:

In the end, the man who reportedly smeared feces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feminists and bespectacled Jewish writers was pulled from the Ecuadorian embassy looking every inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam plucked straight from his spider-hole. The only camera crew to record this pivotal event belonged to Ruptly, a Berlin-based streaming online video streamer, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of RT, the Russian government’s English-language news channel as well as the former distributor of Julian Assange’s short-lived chat show.

RT’s tag line is “Question More,” and indeed, one might inquire how it came to pass that the spinoff of a Kremlin propaganda organ and now registered foreign agent in the United States was first on the scene. Its camera recorded a team of London’s Metropolitan Police dragging Assange from his Knightsbridge cupboard as he burbled about resistance and toted a worn copy of Gore Vidal’s History of the National Security State.

Vidal had the American national-security establishment in mind when he wrote that polemic, although I doubt even he would have contrived to portray the CIA being in league with a Latin American socialist named for the founder of the Bolshevik Party. Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno announced Thursday that he had taken the singular decision to expel his country’s long-term foreign guest and revoke his asylum owing to Assange’s “discourteous and aggressive behaviour.”

According to Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo, this evidently exceeded redecorating the embassy with excrement—alas, we still don’t know if it was Assange’s or someone else’s—refusing to bathe, and welcoming all manner of international riffraff to visit him. It also involved interfering in the “internal political matters in Ecuador,” as Romo told reporters in Quito. Assange and his organization WikiLeaks, Romo said, have maintained ties to two Russian hackers living in Ecuador who worked with the country’s former foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, to destabilize the Moreno administration. [Continue reading…]