I have always had my doubts about Julian Assange, or as Samantha Bee calls him “an albino rat hiding from rape charges in an Ecuador basement”. The fact that this misguided messiah suffering from a persecution complex managed to steer the daily election coverage in the US for over four months is the greatest indictment of both the media and the internet. A skilfully handled operation of cynical corruption.

Assange lacks personal courage and conviction. If he wanted to carry the moral authority that he thinks he deserves, he would come out of hiding and face the rape charges waiting for him, and clear his name. But, like Jacob Zuma, Assange will do anything to stay out of court. And while he refused to face the music he drowned out the symphony of democracy with an obliggato of innuendo, misinformation and that most unbeatable of slurs, “guilty by association”. The entire e-mail scandal which has been investigated and found to be baseless was given endless legs. Clinton and e-mails together came to mean one thing – guilty. Say a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.

The fact that he is biased is equally obvious. Nothing from Wikileaks about Donald Trump, nor anyone on his campaign staff, or any Republican politician? NOTHING. Not because there isn’t anything there, they are politicians, and human, of course there is something there, but because Assange did not want Hillary to win.

And in making sure that she did not win (even though she did win the popular vote by about 1.5-million) he had to undermine the whole party and so he helped to unbalance the entire system of checks and balances in the USA.

In 2012 Assange wrote in the introduction to Cypherpunks (2012), “the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen”.

That was in 2012. It is now even more true in 2016. Thank you Julian, you emotionally malnourished myopic techno nerd, incapable of sustaining a real relationship or understanding the concept of unintended consequences.

So please god, he will be extradited, face his charges – and join the rest of us in the real world, where we have to do daily battle with the unfortunate fact that the truth is not just two-sided, it is multidimensional. And this cyber coward is no better than any Fundamentalist Jihadist. It is his way or nothing. He is a dictator, not a democrat – and please god, like those other dictators Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, hopefully he will be dragged out of his underground sewer to face the fury of the mob he has manipulated and lied to.

Then look at James Comey. The upright living father of six who with three strategic moves unbalanced the entire political discourse of this election. In July, for no reason and without precedent, he gave a very public statement about the Clinton “private server”. It was very clever because it made her look guilty while saying there was no case to prove that she was guilty.

As the Republican Rant Factory Rudy Giuliani, a former prosecutor, pointed out, if she was indeed “very careless’ in her handling of confidential e-mails that would be the clear basis of a case of criminal negligence. So Comey could have his cake and eat it. By using the words “very careless” he condemned her while saying she is innocent of wrongdoing. And so the “Hillary is untrustworthy” label, based on little but innuendo, was now written in big letters with indelible marker.

Then came the debates – and Clinton won all three. She came across as prepared and far more likeable than most people had thought, and Trump looked like an adolescent with A.D.D. on Racutan. It was clear she was going to win, and in the way that US politics works, that meant she was going to drag the Senate to a tiny Democratic majority.

So this former (?) Republican white father of six made his move to support the Republican (?) white father of five. He sent a letter to a Republican politician, knowing that it would be leaked and dominate the headlines declaring that more “potentially damaging e-mails have been discovered” – 650,000 of them. And that number alone says “Guilty! There must be something in one of them!” One of the reasons South Africans believe that JZ is guilty is because when we hear that there are 783 cases of fraud outstanding against him we just know that at least one of them is true.

And then, in an act of cowardly self-preservation, having seen the 7-point lead that Clinton had drop to 2 or 3 points (she won the popular vote by just over 1.5 %) two days before the election day, when over 40-million early votes had been cast, Comey released another statement. “There is nothing in these e-mails, we will not be re-opening the investigation” – because Clinton was still INNOCENT. There was no way that they had reviewed 650,000 e-mails in one week, it is simply impossible. But by then the damage was done.

The American voters, like all of us, remember the last thing we have heard – she is not trustworthy and so they voted with that in their heads. Had they voted the day after the last debate she (and the Democratic Senate) would have won. Because without the filter of Wikileaks magnified through the media, Americans would have remembered her on that debate stage. Presidential, prepared and with practical policies.

Julius Caesar, having rejected the offer of King of Rome multiple times, was assassinated by his colleagues, on the grounds that they had to stop the tyrant! Caesar’s protégé Gaius Trebonius “delayed” Mark Anthony, his nephew, outside the Senate House with some invented story while the assassins moved in to overwhelm Caesar by violence. They, who felt entitled to power because of who they were, had to physically kill their opponent because he was adored by the general populace, whose lives he had understood and improved.

So too did Assange and Comey move to politically murder Clinton. But there are lessons in history here. Every single assassin of Caesar died ignominiously and violently and they are remembered and condemned as self-interested cowards. And in removing Caesar, the greatest man of his time, they launched a period of devastation and civil war. From the political wreckage following the murder of the worthy man emerged Octavius Caesar, the first Emperor who ensured 40 years of peace in Rome.

History will undoubtedly condemn both Assange and Comey. They are both self-serving egotists, who believe that they are right, and whatever they need to do to get what they want is permissible. They have proved that the internet, and the news cycle, are not to be trusted. And in the short term they will have won – but politics is a pendulum. By pushing that pendulum too far, they are going to end up in a world far different from the one they were hoping for. Because you can’t move backwards. It never lasts.

But for now these two men, one supposedly an independent, non partisan and powerful branch of democratic security; and the other an example of how a potential force for good has been corrupted by an unchecked power, are the hit men who did the job. They maimed and tortured the democratic process. DM