Yesterday, a scarecrow made of mashed potatoes named Jamie Kirchick wrote an op-ed for the New York Times bemoaning how “transgender trumps treachery” for those who praise Chelsea Manning. Kirchick lamented the attention that Manning’s lipstick color choices and fashion sense receive, despite her having “jeopardized continuing missions and disrupted American diplomacy” by leaking hundreds of thousands of military documents to Wikileaks.

It was hard not to note that the op-ed appeared in a paper that reported extensively on the contents of the Wikileaks trove, in its War Logs series. Among those reports, one from October 2010 titled “Use of Contractors Added to War’s Chaos in Iraq” detailed the “many abuses, including civilian deaths” perpetrated by military contractors like Blackwater USA, and described how the documents had revealed a “lack of accountability” for contractors.

How embarrassing, to run an op-ed that decries the leaking of the very documents that the paper’s reporters relied on for such useful and worthy journalism!