Somebody get that king some clothes!

While Hillary Clinton runs around the world kissing ass, I've been entertained by the latest wikileaks. It's always amusing when people get caught talking behind other people's backs — provided, of course, that the tongue wagger is not oneself — but so far I haven't seen any startling revelations.

Sarkozy's, Merkel's, and (especially) Berlusconi's "character flaws" have never been especially well hidden, and the State Department employees who decided to enshrine them in diplomatic cables should be reprimanded for wasting time belaboring the obvious. Russia under Putin is a mafia state, as any Westerner who has done business there can tell you, and it doesn't require much imagination to infer that the Sunni leaders of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are not at all happy about the prospect of Shi'a Iran having nuclear weapons. And, yes, both Maliki and Karzai are corrupt. Big news.

It also wasn't much of a secret that the Obama administration has been bribing foreign governments to accept internees from Guantanamo. (Kuwait's interior minister, by the way, came up with what I think is a pretty good idea for getting rid of the ones who are dangerous, but can't be prosecuted because of fuck-ups by the Bush administration: drop them off in an Afghan war zone where they are likely to be expeditiously killed.)

We await further revelations — although the New York Times, which received the documents in advance and is participating in their recission, let it drop in an editorial today that this time, at least, there's nothing about torture or rendition. If the Times isn't lying, that's good news.