“The tainted election”…
…is the new meme. Discussion of the idea that Russian hackers tried to influence the US election in Trump’s favor and may even be responsible for Trump’s victory has certainly taken over Memeorandum.
So, what does this idea rest on? Here’s David Frum at The Atlantic:
The evidence to support the CIA’s conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump remains mostly secret. But the outline of the case is no mystery. Both Democratic and Republican Party servers were reportedly hacked by foreign agents, yet the Moscow-friendly folks at Wikileaks somehow only obtained the contents of Democratic servers.
That’s the evidence?
Frum goes on to list {presumably as supporting evidence} a bunch of ways in which Trump is said to be Russia-leaning—such as, for example his hiring of Paul Manafort as campaign manager. Manafort had previously worked on behalf of Russia-friendly Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych. The fact that Trump had also fired Manafort fairly quickly (replacing him with the far more successful Bannon and Conway) is left out, as well as the fact that Manafort had also been “an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, [and] Bob Dole.”
Now, it certainly is the case that Trump has been more of a Russiaphile than most of us would like, and certainly more of one than I would like. That’s not in dispute. And it’s also the case that the Russians are very active hackers. Maybe they even wanted Trump to win, and some of their hacking was geared towards that end. It’s a very logical possibility that makes sense.
That doesn’t mean that it happened. And it certainly doesn’t mean that if it did happen, it affected the election. The election was won because of rust belt voters who ordinarily vote Democratic going for Trump instead, and it is way too big a stretch of the imagination to think that those voters (or just about anyone, really) cared what Wikileaks revealed about the Democratic Party. Trump also won because not as many black voters were enthusiastic about Hillary as they had been about Obama, and they likewise were almost certainly not swayed in that direction by Wikileaks.
If Russia or anyone else is hacking and trying to influence elections, we certainly need to know about it. But actually, the entire area of US cyber-security vis a vis Russia (and not just Russia) is a very troubling one that involves great vulnerability, and that includes government institutions of all kinds. It’s one of the biggest hazards of the internet age.
But that has little to do with the results of this election. Ever since 2000 and the ruckus over the election results in what was basically a photo-finish tie, decided by the courts, the pathway to delegitimization of the winner by the loser’s supporters has been to claim the election is tainted. Trump’s victory was a very deep shock to many people who would like to say it couldn’t have really happened and that he’s not really the legitimate president, and now they believe they’ve found a fine mechanism by which to do so.
[NOTE: The actual phrase “the tainted election” comes from this Krugman column.
See also John Bolton’s suggestion that the hack could have been a false-flag operation, perhaps even by the Obama administration. Personally, I don’t think so.
And see this by Andrew Malcolm:
Now that the 2016 election is long over and online hackers have had ample time to cover their e-tracks, a bold President Barack Obama has decisively ordered a “full review” of Russian and other interference in the United States electoral process.
We should probably say alleged Russian interference since no one has offered any proof, just reasonable suspicions of who might benefit from the release of documents that Democrats wanted to keep hidden…
Besides complaining publicly, has the Obama administration done something, anything, besides whine about being victimized by hackers? Maybe take responsibility and tighten security?
And why did alleged hacking only bother Obama after a Republican victory, not his own two?
In 2012, Obama mocked Mitt Romney for suggesting Russia was our top geopolitical foe. Now it’s expedient for the Democrat and minions to ensure the focus is on Moscow as foe.
I doubt we’ve heard the last of this.]
Really too bad that Trump seems to be going for Rex Tillerson as secretary of state; that’s only going to fuel the “tainted election” meme. Romney in that position, on the other hand, would have gone a long way in quashing it.
Bolton did not directly accuse the administration of running a false flag operation. He suggested that someone may have done so and that the administration could not be assumed to be innocent, since it has been previously demonstrated that, “the intelligence community has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.”
And, Bolton’s highly pertinent question remains, “the question has to be asked, why did the Russians run their smart intelligence service against Hillary’s server, but their dumb intelligence service against the election?”
Yes, this is all about, delegitimization of the winner by the loser’s supporters
The Democrats see the whole WikiLeaks thing as a Russian orchestrated effort, which it very likely is. Their problem is that by nominating Hillary who they thought was a reliable shoo in, they didn’t think they needed to get her to clean up the email scandals.
But Russian agitprop and political tampering are nothing new. I’m confident that the worst trolls supporting Trump are Russians working for the Russian government. They also flood blogs and YouTube channels on former Soviet states like Georgia and Estonia. Here’s an interesting link on the Estonian volunteer cyber defense groups to counter Russian cyber attacks.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/04/132634099/in-estonia-volunteer-cyber-army-defends-nation
Russian agitprop trolls also work the rumor mill on US defense programs like the F-35 fighter. Recently there was a rash of reports about supposedly poor performance of the F-35 in tests. The Norwegian Airforce took a special effort to counter this by putting their Pilots training with the plane in Arizona on TV and the Web to counter it. Too bad our President-Elect couldn’t do a little off time from Twitter on this deal.
Hacking, schmacking . How many times have we heard that word used by unscrupulous types who themselves are up to no good?
“I was hacked!” was Anthony Weiner’s very first response to being caught. And fundamentally this is no different.
How, exacty, did this so-called ‘hacking’ actually affect the outcome of the election?
I call BS. Same thing with this massive “Fake News” campaign that the Left is now prosecuting. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
The Big Lie, redux.
Pure agitprop, pure BS.
In addition, a predator like Putin has to prefer dealing with appeasing sheep like Obama and Hillary, rather than with a sheepdog like Trump.
Note: Trump may be all bluster and not a sheepdog at all but Putin can’t know that to be true, so until proven otherwise he has to assume that Trump may well be a sheepdog. While Obama and Hillary’s mentality has been repeatedly demonstrated.
Trump wants to increase America’s oil production which will further lower oil prices, exactly the opposite of what Putin must desire, while Hillary would have decreased production to appease her environazi supporters.
Then there’s Trump’s support for strengthening the military, which Putin cannot desire to see happen.
It seems like a much stronger case can be made for Putin wanting Hillary as President, than Trump.
Ann:
The jury is still out on Trump’s SOS pick, IMHO.
This Powerline article points out that the Russians hacked computers in the White House, the Executive Office Building and the State Department in October, 2014, shutting them down for weeks. The Obama administration did not discover the hack themselves, but rather, were tipped off by a foreign power.
As far as I understand it, the “hack” in question was the release by Wikileaks of e-mails of the DNC and John Podesta. Of course, the problem with those e-mails was not that they contained classified info, but rather, that they contained the truth about the corruption in the Clinton campaign. If Mrs Clinton had run a clean, above-board campaign, there wouldn’t have been any paydirt for the hackers to dig up.
Furthermore, the Russians had undoubtedly already gotten all the classified stuff from Hillary’s home-brew e-mail server.
No one seems to have wondered why, if the Russians hacked the DNC servers, why they only released emails by John Podesta?
In the absence of any evidence whatsoever, it is at least as likely that only Podesta got hacked, DNC public statements notwithstanding. I doubt that the DNC pressroom or their talking heads know squat about electronic eavesdropping.
Discussion of the idea that Russian hackers tried to influence the US election in Trump’s favor and may even be responsible for Trump’s victory has certainly taken over Memeorandum.
I am so glad about all the attention now directed at the need for scrupulously fair elections. I look forward to similar concern on the part of these patriots about voter fraud (including voting by “undocumented” non-citizens) and the “taint” caused by 90+% of the MSM heavily distorting its coverage to favor Democrats — which can amount to $billions in stealth advertising unaffected by campaign finance regulations.
Cap’n Rusty wrote (12/12 @ 3:40):
If Mrs Clinton had run a clean, above-board campaign, there wouldn’t have been any paydirt for the hackers to dig up.
Yeah, good point. Maybe they should spend a little effort examining Clinton’s somewhat weak argument, which essentially is:
Hey! All that corruption should have remained private!
I will just say that the Democrats and their surrogates may not understand that they are playing with fire. If they somehow managed to overturn the election–remote though the possibility may be–I doubt that the American people who live outside the coastal/DC bubbles would take it without a fight. In court? Maybe; but many no longer trust the impartiality of the courts that have been politicized by the same people who are fanning the flames.
Short of overturning the election, the game seems to be to delegitimize Trump’s Administration in advance, and handcuff him. That, too, will only lead to greater divisiveness; with unforeseen results and possibly the dreaded “unintended consequences”.
I find the commentary about Tillerson as SoS strange. The big charge against him seems to be his personal relationship with Putin. Yet if Tillerson had come up through the diplomatic ranks, through several foreign postings of increasing importance and responsibility, and which included a senior posting to Moscow, everyone would be talking about how great it is that he has such a depth of experience, and already knows world leaders on a personal basis.
To aver that Tillerson’s similar experience somehow works against him is astonishing. Who among senior State Department officials is fired over wrong decisions? vs. how many wrong decisions are you allowed on your way to the top in an enterprise as vast and as far-flung as Exxon?
I don’t know that I have ever seen a story pushed through the news media so hard that has literally zero evidence presented so far. If I claimed that Hillary Clinton was really an alien from another galaxy, there would be exactly the same amount of evidence that she is such as there is for the Wikileaks material being the result of Russian government hacking.
So, the question is why is this being pushed so hard in the absence of any evidence and in the absence of any real credibility retained by the media? I think the real reason- and it seems to have escalated since the middle of last week when it became clear that the Wisconsin recount wasn’t going to change the result by more than about 100 votes maximum, and that the failed recount would be done before the safe-harbor deadline- the real reason is a last ditch attempt to get the electors to repudiate Trump. On the Left, I think they know that such faithless electors will never vote for Clinton, but they would like to hang Trump’s carcass on the wall even if it meant another Republican won in the House election.
All in all, after next Monday’s vote of the College is done, I suspect all this Russian non-sense will die down because I don’t think anyone really believes what you read in the NYTimes that isn’t a hard-core Democrat.
And I will just throw this out there- the fact that some Republican leaders are voicing the idea of holding investigations on this nonsense is a little worrying- it does give me reason to believe that there might be some movement in the House to dump Trump for Kasich.
I think this is still a low probability event, but it is higher than it was a week ago. I predict that next week, Democrats/s in the House will challenge the electoral slates of WI, MI, and PA. Republicans, of course, have the majority of states necessary to reject the challenges, but they don’t have to.
Yancey Ward:
I don’t think it’s really aimed at either the electors or Congress.
I think it’s aimed mostly aimed at the readers, in order to discredit the election (and Trump) in their eyes. One the meme is established, it can go away, because it’s become a generally accepted truism.
I find the whole kerfuffel raises a lot more questions than the MSM realizes — no surprise there. For example:
Why are there 17 intelligence agencies that have decided the Russian was the hacker? One or two, I could understand, but 17? To me, that indicates gross mismanagement of the intelligence community.
If there are 17 intelligence agencies that are properly tasked with dealing with cybersecurity, what have they been during for the past eight years? Off the top of my head, I can think of the Target hack, the Sony hack, the Office of Personnel Management hack, and now the DNC hack, and many, many more, and that doesn’t even count the ones we never hear about. The amount of money we spend on these agencies to fight cyberwar is certainly not well-spent. More bad IC management.
The only way the 17 agencies could “know” that the Russian were aiding Trump rather than just tweaking the US would be if they had a HUMINT source in Russian Cyberwar HQ. Otherwise, they’re just jumping to conclusions. In either case, they should shut the hell up!
Finally, Gen Michael Hayden, former head of NSA and of CIA, said when the first revelation of the former Evil Empress’s private server came out, “Any intelligence agency that hasn’t hacked Hillary’s private server isn’t doing its job.” So, how do we know which intelligence service did the hacking? And, as John Bolton said, why would they run their good — leave no clues – hackers, against Hillary, and their dumb ones against the DNC?
My conclusion is — BS all the way down!
Agitprop to taint a ‘republican’ president. Deja vu all over again.
I have claimed, repeatedly that the left is good with the destruction of middle America. I have reluctantly granted though, that although they wished to profit by it, the rank and file at least, were a bit squeamish about plunging right into social war, and would prefer that the “forces of historical progress” (i.e. Presidential elections, judicial decisions, and expanding Federal bureaucratic power) do their work gradually and out of sight for the most part.
I’m still convinced however, that the average left-activist is not only morally alien (in the sense of having radically antipathetic life values), but in some important sense, morally not-sane (insane is too strong) as well. That is to say that they are so nonchalantly incoherent, so self-contradictory, so psychologically at ease in hypocrisy, that they cannot have normally functioning brains.
Grant for the sake of argument, that at least some of these people imagine that they are sincere when they start waving the banner of patriotic outrage over the Russians.
If so, if they are “sincere”, what can they be thinking regarding their audience? Given their open and decades long in your face love affair with “subverting”, can they possibly expect to be taken seriously by anyone not already a raving liberal?
Who do they think they are talking to? If they are only talking to the troops, what does that say?
It gets worse.
I’ve spent a little time recently looking at the “Trump predicted to lose” gloats placed up on YouTube by Trump fans. Figured they would be entertaining. They were.
But what they also reveal en passant, is the astounding race based ideology assumptions of the left.
Once these progressive commentators thought they were safe in saying so and that they could not lose by doing it, or equally, were under so much emotional pressure that their internal censors failed, they began jabbering how the new “brown” progressive plurality would inevitably save the day through the agency of politics, by cementing the ascendency of redistributive values, they implied, forevermore.
They basically boasted that the vehicle of progressivism in the US is immigration, to be finalized through the supplanting of the traditional American populations by members of foreign cultures.
Any need for the paranoid to infer a threat is over. The left proclaimed it outright.
However, they seem to imply not only that bare dynamic, but in addition that the life-ways and values of these emerging demographic cohorts are not mere historical accidents, not the simple product of geographic happenstance as progressive anthropologists used to argue; but, somehow [liberal dog-whistles this time] gene-linked.
They are subtly claiming the very same thing that the racists claim. That: race drives political values … all the way down.
Apparently when they call you a Neanderthal, they mean it; in as literal a way as is possible to mean it.
Their America, the progressive America, will first be saved, and then carved in stone, only when the free-market and liberty valuing American is swamped by immigration. Because to their progressive minds, of the emergence of brown immigrants is the key; and because to their minds, “brown” equals “progressive”, collectivist, it-takes-a- village values, right out of the gate, always and evermore.
If anyone planned to give those “alt-right” types which so frighten Bill, some incredibly volatile justifying fuel for their alt-right arson, they could not have done better than did the histrionic commentators on MSNBC and CNN when they unthinkingly spoke their minds under pressure.
This … is a problem. A big problem.
But now for something in a lighter mood … “Yeah, I’m better than you deplorables.”
It’s not the version I caught live while watching their show, but I typed in “Young Turks and I’m better than you”, and numerous choices came up. This is one.
Richard Saunders: The reason that there are 17 intelligence [sic] agencies saying the Russians hacked the election is because the 17 intelligence agencies were told to say the Russians hacked the election. Occam’s Razor.
A very similar outline argument could be made about voter fraud.
It perennially comes up as a fear, concern, rationale, reason for losing elections, or potentially so (e.g. “millions of illegal votes”)
Yet, there is hardly any evidence to prove so, only suspicion. Furthermore, the ones who ought to be looking into all this belong to the very same party that’s been using this means to breed discontent… GOP Governors – the power to regulate elections of federal representatives is with the states!
If this was so pervasive, and the evidence so conclusive, one would think the GOP Governors would be on top of it, prosecute the effing offenders, and legally stomp it out.
Yet, they don’t.
At least, we haven’t seen them bring cases that are as broad and pervasive as the claims make them to be.
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So, yeah, about those Russian hackers. Should be a concern if our own LE, security and espionage services think there is some evidence.
A sitting President, or a President-elect ought to share the concern and see to it that it is investigated thoroughly.
There’s room here for trump to denounce it if it is true, but not jump the gun by concluding it is so, without further investigation.
That he or his surrogates are muted in their concern or even, possibly, “dismissive” is troubling.
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However, it would (and should) take a whole lot more to get anyone to say trump didn’t win fair and square.
Perhaps, like voter fraud, it is a gripe that really doesn’t have enough to hold itself up as such a problem, as to actually swing elections, even if there is some truth to it.
Here’s the transcript of the interview Chris Wallace did with Trump on Sunday:
http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2016/12/11/exclusive-donald-trump-on-cabinet-picks-transition-process/
Trump says that he thinks the Dems are looking for excuses and that no one really knows if it was the Russians or not. He endorses Obama’s investigation of it, but notes that, unless you catch the hackers in the act, you will never really know who it was. He says that our cyber security needs to be improved and it’s just one more job he has to do.
He seems quite calm about the whole thing. Not at all what the headlines are screaming. I suppose that they will continue to claim that Trump was selected by his pal, Vlad, just like they said W was selected by the Supremes. Both memes to diminish his authority. We’ll see.
Election fraud that does not seem to have the potential to affect an outcome (just piling it on), or is not known to do so, is generally ignored; especially if it is in a politically sensitive context.
There is little to no doubt for example that Detroit election return numbers could not be trusted for years and that there was a great deal of ballot fraud in local races; but as it was thought to make not too much difference except in an intramural way, no one bothered to make much of a stink about it except the papers and the municipal candidates most directly affected.
If one were to look at the situation in California, there is no Republican governor nor any real Republican power to pursue such an investigation. However, in the interest of gauging the magnitude of the problem, or whether there is one or not, it would certainly behoove the Republican National Committee to spend a couple of million dollars doing a serious analysis, whether or not the local establishment has the wherewithal or pretext.
There is certainly indirect evidence that many illegals are at least registered to vote. http://www.redstate.com/california_yankee/2016/11/28/team-trump-offers-evidence-for-millions-voting-illegally/
This caused the WaPo to object and there is back and forth
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/11/02/do-non-citizens-vote-in-u-s-elections-a-reply-to-our-critics/
Of course we have Democrat operatives boasting about stealing elections and have even seen Obama discussing voting with someone who was arguing that illegals ought to be able to vote without fear of repercussions; though his answer was formulated in a way to explicitly ignore the actual import of the question while providing the answer which was sought.
Now if these indications are substantive is another matter.
It seems critical to find out though; especially if your liberties are being pissed away by people who have no right of participation in the first place.
The Left are sore winners (2012) and sore losers (2016). The gloating and the bitterness are tiresome. The only thing I admire about The Left is when they get power they know how to use it to influence society and culture. The Right? Buridan’s ass when it comes to power from my observation.
Little to doubt, but always ignored, under GOP Governors.
Would think they have great incentive to any reasonable claims, and bring it to court.
Yes, there are states, big ones, run by dem Governors. However, several states were run by dems and have increasingly become run by GOP. No great revelations have come forth.
It is one thing to say there are fraudulent votes, and another to assert “millions of illegal votes” which would be hard to hide and hard to ignore, if true.
All adds up to maybe some in some places, but not something affecting national elections.
Big Maq,
Well… think about MN senate race Norman vs Franken, fraud clearly involved. Votes found inside car trunks weeks after election day scream fraud. Yes, ‘just’ one seat in the US senate, but one seat more or one less has revereberations. FLA general election 2000 provides ample evidence what a few hundred dangling and dented chads does/does not make.
And, IMO, that is the tip of the iceberg.
parker:
Please see this about that “ballots found in trunk of car” story.
neoneocon,
We can find many versions of the Colemen Franken ‘story’. Its always interesting when votes going one way and not the other way trickle out over 6 weeks, continuing to favor one candidate over the other dribbled out 1,2,3,5 per precinct by precinct. It is not evidence, but I have life long contacts in Northern Minnesota, all have good reasons to feel it was an election based upon fraud. And, there were ballot boxes in precincts that mysteriously were found weeks after the general election.
In FLA 2000 it was actually a matter of less than 1000 dangling, dented chads mostly under the scrutiny of dem precinct counters that ultimately ended up in the lap of SCOTUS. Integrity of the election process is often less than thread bare.
parker:
Whether Franken was elected by fraud is a separate issue. My comment (and the link) was directed specifically at the “ballots found in the trunk weeks later” story, which appears to be untrue.
I don’t like the Russians, but I do like a president who’s going to try to work with them rather than make the volatile global political situation flare up into open warfare between Russia and the USA, a war that would be quite likely to go nuclear very quickly.
Trump is above all a pragmatist, and he knows full well that the Russians are a force to be reckoned with in the global arena.
As to why Republican governors generally lack the fire in the belly to really fight the opposition as if it is an enemy that needs to be nailed to the mast, I cannot say. The Democrats certainly speak often enough in those terms. Must be something lacking in the typical Republican’s upbringing.
As for the last 2 paragraphs you are probably also more or less right. Elections, municipal and state have certainly been stolen. Ballot box stuffing has been considered a time honored practice by big city machines; and has been practiced even in recent years by at least one Detroit official who brazenly voted nursing home patients, and probably the dead.
However, it probably amounted to several hundreds of votes or in the modest thousands “only”.
But big elections have been stolen as well. Lyndon Johnson is pretty well proved to have stolen his Texas senate seat in the election against Coke Stevenson. Robert Caro covers this in some persuasive detail.
And, in addition to the well-known accounts of voter fraud in Chicago in 1960, and the FBI’s awareness of it, we have Seymour Hersh’s 1997 account of the election. Yes, Tina Sinatra, and old mobsters may not be unimpeachable sources, but the details they added seem to establish the events as more than historical myths which offer the tale-teller a starring role.
So, that Johnson got to the Senate on the basis of voter fraud is pretty well demonstrated. It is generally conceded by the sources I have reviewed that the Texas totals in the 1960 Presidential election were untrustworthy by any reasonable standard. The FBI according to Cartha DeLoach had the wiretaps showing a rigged election in Illinois, and Hersh’s book offers other supporting accounts and details.
Now, for the big question: Could millions of votes be illegally added to a candidate’s totals?
I don’t see how, unless it involved widespread lawlessness and intentional, virtually open, subversion of the process: essentially by granting the unqualified, in this case illegal aliens, ballots. And this scenario I think could at present only apply or be gotten away with in California, where the governor is already on record as happily anticipating a complete cultural transformation of the polity.
My guess is that it could be in the tens of thousands pretty easily. I don’t think anyone in California knows who is and who is not a citizen anymore.
Suspicion does not equal Guilt.
Suspicion, with facts to back that up, is worthy of investigation.
We ought to have those suspicions investigated, rather than letting this escalate to claiming “millions of fraudulent votes”, and then ignoring it.
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Wrt Franken, it seems that enough people in MN didn’t care all that much about the suspicions as they re-elected him with a 10% margin.
And, from a Federalist viewpoint, they have the biggest skin in the game and should care most about a suspicion of fraud like this.
Yet, the 2014 GOP candidate received 360K fewer votes than the prior election, and there were 380K fewer votes for all candidates not dem, nor GOP?
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In extremely close races, yes, it can make a difference, but I’d suggest that anomalies in how states carry out their election processes have a greater impact.
How is it that the state cannot catch felons voting and stop them before a vote is even made? How is it that voter rolls are so out of date, dead people are still eligible?
Is the problem really fraud, or is it incompetence?
We can argue if it is intentional incompetence – but that doesn’t explain GOP led states, that also suffer from similar anomalies… that is, unless, perhaps, it is to THEIR advantage.(?)
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Several of our own security organizations claim to have some evidence that the Russians are behind efforts to influence our election.
So, blow them off as BS, or should we investigate? The president-elect seems not to believe it (the same guy claiming millions of fraudulent votes and ignores it).
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It is the same thing over and over. When we don’t like the direction of the suspicion, discredit it, but if it suits our narrative, play it up.
It just seems all a part of the same game at play.
Huh. 100,000 fraudulent votes in Chicago as recently as 1982.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/04/where-theres-smoke-theres-fire-100000-stolen-votes-in-chicago
I’m not really clear on what it is being alleged that the Russians have done, in “influencing” our elections.
Apart from their possibly outright lying and fabricating incriminating disinformation documents, I really don’t care what Russians do, or anyone else does, in the way of exposing malevolent Democrat Party insiders who are stupid enough and arrogant enough to lay themselves open to such attacks.
This is, of course, not a jury trial; and I am not a judge obligated to dismiss genuine evidence of malfeasance because it has been supposedly obtained by, and then disseminated by foreign sources.
I have neither a legal, nor a moral obligation to look-away from the malign doings of Democrats because our rules of evidence have not been followed by a foreign government.
Again, and this does not apply to you Maq, but I find little that is so hilarious as Democrats playing the “we” card, shouting out “my fellow citizens!”, while simultaneously waving the flag of a nation the values of which they have dedicated themselves to subverting and then transforming.
Gosh. Not saying there ISN’T fraud (and not like I don’t have my suspicions too).
Now, if it is so “big” and so “obvious”, press the politicians to jail the bast*rds. And if you really cannot vote the politicians out who won’t take action on it, move!
They will eventually bankrupt themselves – e.g. Detroit city (lost 1.2M since 1950), Chicago city (lost 0.9M since 1950), while both metros have grown (2M for Detroit MSA, and 4M for Chicago MSA).
Folks are voting one way or another.
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Probably one of the most balanced take on the Russian issue:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442992/cia-reports-russia-hacking-more-investigation-needed
I find it amazing that while the Democrats, the media, and assorted rinos are hyperventilating over the possibility of Russian hacking and the releasing of e-mails over Wikileaks, I have heard no one in that bunch making the claim that the information released was incorrect or a lie. So essentially our betters are upset because the bad, evil Russians gave us not disinformation, but the truth that they and the media concealed from us. They are playing with political fire here.
Of course what we have learned from Wikileaks, regardless of how the info was gained, is that the Dems *DID* say all those awful things, and *DID* conspire to defeat Sanders, and so on. Whatever the final truth here, the fact is the Dems cannot claim they did not do and say stupid things. They did. And that ought to follow the party around forever!
benning – but that’s the Russians’ mortal sin: they let you know the truth — and you’re not allowed to know the truth. You can’t handle the truth!
If I were trying to swing the election for one candidate, my first tactic would probably not be the release of reams upon reams of mostly boring emails from the opposing campaign in the hope that the majority of voters would pick through the documents and notice the evidence of corruption.
Russia’s strong point is their Disinformation and subversion ops, as documented by Yuri Bezmenov and other Soviet KGB members.
It’s not their cyber force.
And that ought to follow the party around forever!
Like Jim Crow, Civil War 1, and Racism followed Democrats around forever…. hah.
There’s another viewpoint to all this:
If this is instigated by the russians, they may have thought they merely wanted to sow the seeds of distrust, discontent, discord, etc. all towards undermining an assumed clinton win (doubt their crystal ball was any better than anyone else’s).
After all, wasn’t it trump who “invited” them to hack the dems, and who said the elections were “rigged”?
The dems may not have behaved any differently, but trump and his surrogates now arguing the opposite rings hollow.