The blame train continues its journey. First the democrats blamed racist angry whites for Clinton’s loss. But it turns out white’s preference for the R over the D candidate was statistically no different in this election than in those of recent memory. Indeed Clinton lost ground among blacks and Hispanics against the putatively “racist” Trump. Next came the “fake news” canard which suggested that overtly absurd “news” stories with limited ideological appeal somehow swayed the decision making process of those completely unplugged from the inside baseball of politics. Now the latest attempt at diverting blame for Hillary’s historic loss is the narrative that Russia tried to influence the outcome of the election by “helping” Trump by exposing to the public the sordid underbelly of the DNC and their candidate. The source of this narrative? None other than the CIA. You know, the folks that brought us “trust us, there really are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” The agency with a decades long history of interfering in the internal affairs of other nations (see Iran coup of 1953), whose sole purpose is to manipulate foreign nationals into doing their bidding so as to gain a political outcome favorable to US interests, they are now the ones crying foul that the US was the victim of the exact same shenanigan they routinely engage in. Well sort of. The Washington Post article citing this revelation only refers to anonymous sources indirectly briefed by the agency. Yep, sounds ironclad to me.
What evidence that has been released is laughable at best. It is the real world equivalent of citing as proof of an Indian attack the fact that the attackers wore headdress and threw tomahawks. Because no one ever has ever thought to cast a false appearance in order to shift blame. In other words, if Russia actually did decide to engage in such a hack they would not be stupid enough to actually use tools with a clear Russian fingerprint. That alone basically tells you it was NOT Russia.
Then again it doesn’t really matter if Russia was involved. They aren’t being accused of actually physically hacking vote tallies. They are being accused of playing a role in the release of truthful information. It is indeed a crazy world where the former heart of the Soviet empire is the vanguard of truth while the American government seeks to bury it. Notice none of those on the left deny the information that was released. They can’t, because it’s all true. The best they can hope for is some sort of Cold War era McCarthy-esque ties-to-Russia smear campaign against Trump in order to undermine or delegitimize his presidency. But it won’t work because at the end of the day the people only care about the information, not how it was obtained. To wit, even with all of the recent revelations of Russian “hacking” a Pew Research poll shows 99% of Trump voters and 97% of Clinton voters would cast the exact same vote today as they did on November 8.
This is a funny game that is being played in Washington. I heard a very strange interview this morning on NPR with Claire McCaskill, who is either lying through her teeth or one of the biggest idiots in Washington (I would bet: likely both)
She posited that:
1) There are seventeen (17!), yes seventeen, separate intelligence agencies in the US government who all agree that Russian intelligence interfered with our recent election.
2) We have the best intelligence agencies in the world.
First of all, anyone can see the obvious contradiction in the above two statements. If we have the best intelligence agencies in the world, why did we a) not know about Russian interference at the time and/or b) stop it?
The bigger concern with the statements, and I have heard #1 above many times before (it is a Democrat party talking point), is why the hell we have seventeen intelligence agencies in the US government?!?
The standard answer is “Because…terrorism”, and I can appreciate that we do have enemies in the world that are trying to hurt our citizens and, in reality, end our society and make Islam run the world.
But it concerns me deeply that we have all of these intelligence agencies running amok, most of which are probably unknown to the citizenry. It brings to mind the old question: Who watches the watchmen?
There are other ways to fight the war on terror, which we do not appear to be winning. For example, I would be willing to bet that we could stop Islamic terrorism very quickly if every time an attack on civilians by Islamic militants occurred a city in Saudi Arabia experienced a small nuclear “accident”. What do you think? One bomb or two, as it took with the last bloodthirsty cult we had to deal with: Imperial Japan?
Well see we have seventeen because the government invites market competition to figure out which one is the best 😉 and naturally the others will go out of business if they don’t do well (if only).
I know your second comment is tongue-in-cheek (as I can’t imagine you actually endorsing killing other innocent people simply because of the actions of some people, e.g. US civilians _shouldn’t_ be killed because of the actions of their government (and yet we were on 9/11, but that only goes to show how wrong such action is). But, even if one were to adopt such a policy I doubt it would work, those terrorists do not care about anyone but their crazy ends, I think it would only embolden them. Japan surrendered because they had no more resources in such a conventional war. But terrorism has no ends, all it takes is a kid making a pipe bomb in his garage and sticking it in a trash can at a mall… this terrorism is now “crowd-sourced”, can happen anywhere any time, it is literally impossible to stamp it out. It’s like that scene from Fifth Element… the more you fire at it, the more it grows, until it consumes you.