Reply #9: Calling Manning a "whistleblower" utterly demeans and impoverishes the term

[Azathoth]

Manning was not "blowing the whistle" on anything. He was a malcontent who was basically forced to enlist in the army by a father who was fed up with his behavior/attitude problems. Instead of shaping up, his attitude got the best of him and he eventually decided to get even with the mean people giving him orders. So he walked in to work one day and indiscriminately downloaded every document with a "classified" stamp he could find from every department he could access and he handed everything over to Wikileaks. And then he hopped on a chat server and boasted about how he had stuck it to the man.

Calling him a "whistleblower" demeans all those men and women who sacrificed their careers and risked jail in order to actually blow the whistle on something important.