So, I’m interested in this; this thing as to whether Russia
or Russian interests interfered in the election with the express hope of
influencing voters to elect Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton.
I want to weigh the evidence.
Evidence Bit No. 1: Individuals connected to the Russian
government provided WikiLeaks with emails hacked from the Democratic National
Committee.
Aaaannnd everything else appears classified. When (and here
I have to insert a hollow laugh because it’s if, and that’s an IF visible from
space) this happens, I’m sure the press, which will have forgotten this outrage
next week, will get right back to us on it.
(The New York Times is telling us there’s no new evidence,
other than circumstantial, to back up the CIA’s claim.)
A former Acting Director of the CIA, you should know,
doesn’t want the general public to know about this at all. While he’s upset
over the dismissal of the CIA’s news, he has this to say about sharing it with
the public:
The Obama Administration should not be leaking, whether
that’s the White House, or the Intelligence Community, of whoever, right? The
Obama Administration should not be leaking and [Trump] should not be
criticizing publicly. They’ve got to get this discussion out of the public
domain. It doesn’t belong there. It belong in the room between the President and
the briefer, between the President and his CIA-designate, that’s where it
belongs.
Mind you, nobody’s disputing the authenticity of what was
leaked from the DNC to WiliLeaks and then to the press: That the DNC colluded
to give the nomination to Clinton over competitor Bernie Sanders because it was
Her Turn ®. That, I repeat, appears not to be in dispute. Debbie
Wasserman-Schultz lost her job over the deal, Bernie Sanders got a metric
shiat-ton more street cred with his fans, and Hillary Clinton got the
nomination. And lost to a candidate whom everyone – including the Republican
establishment – assumed anyone with a pulse and better hair could beat.
So what appears to be meddling is that the truth about the
collusion got out, thanks to the Russians who apparently did so to get Donald
Trump elected President of the United States.
In other words: it’s the ol’ Myrna Minkoff Effrontery*: The
information was good, it just came from the wrong source.
Read this report at the Washington Post and help me figure
out if there’s anything I’ve missed.
It might also serve as a sobering reminder to those
clutching their pearls or, indeed, calling for a negation of the presidential
election due to this alleged interference, that the United States itself has a
rather long, torrid history of interfering with the democratic or republican
electoral processes of other countries.
So you know, glass houses, stones, and all.
And a lot of this clandestine shinola was committed by the
CIA, the self-same organization leading the pearl-clutching over the alleged
Russian interference in our own election which – if I need to remind you –
revealed truths about DNC collusions via the Myrna Minkoff Effrontery. There
are few involved in being upset about this who would have been as upset if
their candidate had won.
It’s also important to remember that there are countries out
there actively paying hard cash to “develop relationships within the United
States with members of Congress, federal agencies, and even the media,”
including those frozen ratbags on our northern border, the Canadians.
I can still be righteously outraged that a foreign
government tried and maybe succeeded in influencing this election. But I can’t
pretend to be outraged over this while not being outraged over my own country’s
nefarious mischief, nor can I ignore the gigantic irony in believing the CIA in
this, when the CIA also insisted there were weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq.
A note to Russia: I do not need your help to believe my
country’s government is filled with empty suits and colluders and other
assorted slimeballs. Nor am I dumb enough to clutch pearls with the same agency
the pearl-clutchers were pissed off at for getting us involved in a decade-long
war.
An aside: There are some saying the FBI blew the election
for Clinton. That may be true. What’s also true is that, despite the FBI’s
decision that Clinton did not commit a criminal offense by using a private
server for government work, it was still a stupid and irresponsible thing to
do. For what it’s worth, I think FBI Director James Comey did what he had to
do. He had to say, whoops, we found more emails that we need to take a look at.
And then a day later reiterated that, well, nope, she STILL did nothing
criminal. Announced before the election, he’s a partisan dupe who handed the
election to the Republicans. Announced after the election, he’s – possibly –
the partisan dupe who handed the election to the Democrats. If I had the same
damned if you do, damned if you don’t decision to make in the weeks before an
election, I believe I’d do exactly what he did, because no matter what he did,
at least half of the nation was going to be miffed at him. With good reason.
NOTE: I will again announce I did not vote for Donald Trump.
I would neither have voted for Hillary Clinton. Substituting one power-hungry,
morally-ambiguous charlatan for another did not appeal to me. I voted for Evan
McMullin (and yes, I know he worked for the CIA, the irony is killing me at the
moment) in a state where voting for a third-party candidate did not make adifference in the Electoral College.
* Myrna Minkoff, a character in John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of
Dunces” was rattled by the fact that information/propaganda she happened
to agree with and had distributed to like-minded individuals (I forget
what exactly, and searching
the Internet for this information is futile) came from the KKK. In my
mangled memory of her words, she decried it as the “right information”
from the “wrong people”.
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