In the September 2017 issue of Vogue, the magazine did a full spread and bio of Bradley Manning turned Chelsea Manning.  Photography was done by Annie Leibovitz, perhaps the most influential and popular portrait photographer alive today.

Chelsea Manning Changed the Course of History. Now She’s Focusing on Herself.  That was the title.  The article was obsequious.

From February to April 2010, while living as Bradley, an Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, Manning sent three-quarters of a million classified or sensitive documents to WikiLeaks. The breach’s breadth was startling, as were its contents, ranging from the so-called Collateral Murder video, showing a U.S. helicopter killing a group of Baghdad pedestrians that included children and press, to hundreds of thousands of “Cablegate” documents, disclosing 44 years of State Department messaging. When Manning’s role became clear, she turned into a polarizing figure—celebrated as a whistle-blower by some, condemned as a traitor by others. In August 2013, after pleading guilty to ten charges and being found guilty of 20, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison. The day after the sentencing, Manning came out publicly as trans.

What utter fawning coverage.  What intellectual dishonesty.

“[W]hile living as Bradley” 

No.  He is Bradley Manning.  Let’s get that straight, first of all.  The article glosses over the 750,000 classified documents released to WikiLeaks.  It seem that Bradley Manning did what he did because he always had a problem with the military.

The Left has always loved dangerous traitors who change their names for political purposes.

Wesley Cook is a cop killer.  He shot Philadelphia PD officer Daniel Faulkner to death in 1981.  He was a member of the Black Panther Party and changed his name to Mumia Abu-Jamal and has henceforth become a hero to The Left.

JoAnne Deborah Chesimard, nee Byron, joined the Black Liberation Army and was convicted of the first degree murder of  NJ State Trooper Werner Foerster.  She escaped from prison in 1979 and has been hiding in Cuba ever since.  She changed her name to Assata Shakur and is now a “civil rights hero” of the Woman’s March and was honored with a mural at Marquette University.

But the last sentence of the Vogue paragraph is the most telling.  Not just was Bradley Manning a traitor, guilty of violating the Espionage Act, he changed his name to Chelsea, and changed his gender, and is now a celebrity darling for the same revolutionary chic Leftists.

James Kirchick published an OpEd in The New York Times, criticizing the Vogue spread, titled When Transgender Trumps Treachery.  It was intended to be warning to The Left not to make Bradley Manning into a hero.

Kirchick tried to appeal to The Left’s sense of reason.

According to The New Yorker, when the United States tried to locate “hundreds” of Afghans named in the documents and move them to safety, “many could not be found, or were in environments too dangerous to reach.” When pressed by a journalist about the possibility of redacting the names of Afghans who cooperated with the United States military, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, reportedly replied: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Meantime, Mr. Assange gave a Russian Holocaust denier 90,000 of the cables. That man, who goes by the pen name Israel Shamir, delivered a trove to the Belarussian dictatorship, which then utilized the material to detain opposition activists. In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe used a leaked cable detailing a United States Embassy meeting with opposition figures as pretext for an investigation into “treasonous collusion.”

The problem is, when it comes to their heroes, The Left has no reason.  They embrace cop killers, mass murders, and the most vile scum of the earth.  Harvey Milk was a child molester who prayed on teen boys who had fallen on hard times, but you’d never know that from the white washed history of him celebrated for being the first openly gay elected official.

Apparently the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard saw the Manning Vogue spread and float at the NYC Pride Parade and said “hold my beer.”

Chelsea Manning has been named a visiting Fellow at JFK as an expert in network security and technology.  He is also being hailed as the school’s “first transgender fellow.”

That is like making Ted Kaczynski a Harvard Fellow for expertise in domestic terrorism and rural American lifestyles.  Maybe if Ted weren’t a white man, they would.

This is absolutely unconscionable.

This will be a whole chapter in the history books of reasons for America’s Second Civil War, when The Left figured out how to use their institutions to bankroll and praise those who committed actual treason against the United States.

I think the name of that chapter should be “How to Cut Off Your Dick and Influence People.”