Guardian piece with good points on Putin
I apologize if this piece has been posted already in the discussions, but I think it raises some basic, strong questions about the hysteria over the leaks, or hacks, or culprits.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/13/putin-trump-electi...
Putin didn't win this election for Trump. Hillary Clinton did
Doug Henwood
The Guardian
Tuesday 13 December 2016The US political and media establishment is in a state of mounting frenzy over alleged Russian interference in the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. The source of what has been called a “swell” of “circumstantial evidence” is the CIA, an agency which has been known to interfere with an election or two itself, and isn’t really a paragon of honesty.
And what exactly are the claims made by these Putin-did-it stories? That were it not for Russian chicanery, Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote by five million and not almost three million? That displaced machinists on the banks of Lake Erie were so incensed by the Podesta emails that they voted for Trump instead of Clinton? That Putin was pulling FBI director James Comey’s strings in his investigation of the Clinton emails? That those scheming Russians were clever enough to hack into voting machines but not clever enough to cover their tracks?
… Julian Assange denies that the Russian government was the source of the hacked emails to and from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta that WikiLeaks published. Of course, there’s no way of knowing if he’s telling the truth – but regardless of their source, how much influence did they have on the election outcome?
We can never know, but it sure seems like only a handful of connoisseurs read through them. And those who did discovered precisely how cynical and empty the Clinton operation was, like the moment where campaign manager Robby Mook asks Podesta and several other senior operatives “where we landed exactly on trade. Is she going to say she supports it?” (“it” presumably being the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Clinton supported as secretary of state but came to oppose for electoral reasons).
The displaced machinists in the industrial midwest, whose votes helped put sTrump in the White House, believe that free trade deals are responsible for their economic woes and they never trusted Clinton’s turn against the TPP. But that was Clinton’s campaign for you, bereft of principle and pathologically concerned with “optics” at the expense of substance.
… It’s easy to blame the FBI for the trouble that the private email server scandal caused the Clinton campaign, but the decision to set that up was hers and no one else’s. It was entirely consistent with her long history of secrecy, of trying to evade public scrutiny for her actions, one of the reasons that so many people dislike her.
If a Sanders supporter in the DNC had leaked the Podesta emails, would all hell have broken out like this? If a Republican spy in the DNC had leaked them, would we be contemplating re-doing the election? I think the answer has to be yes. It seems the Democrats are saying no one had the right to expose the truth about them, the truth in their own words, to the voters in advance of the election.
Comments
No matter how it gets said,
The Clintons, Obama, and the Democrats destroyed the Democratic Party.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Good for Henwood
I made similar arguments here and to the TOP dead-Enders over the weekend. Summed it up in an update, an excerpt of which covers this too:
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You coulda' linked it and saved me a search.
I've been reading Henwood for a long, long time. He used to write about Wall Street, mostly, but he was horrified by the prospect of another Clinton presidency. This essay, Stop Hillary! in the October 2014 issue of Harper's was the basis for a scathing little book called My Turn which came out in 2015.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
Thank you for pointing out
my omission of the link. I meant to include it and have edited it in.
Dammit You should have placed that photo face down
My cat took one look and now I can't get him to come out from under the bed. If he doesn't come out by sundown, I'll lie to him and say Bernie won.
This below from an article at CounterPunch from Monday:
Bold added.
The Fake Campaign to Blame ‘the Russians’
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK | "The more I see of the moneyed peoples, the more I understand the guillotine." - G. B. Shaw Bernie/Tulsi 2020
Keith Rouda, PCCC organizer
and this mornings offering from BoldProgressives.org:
Obviously the Russians are to blame! Sigh, will this ever end.
When the right wing talks about taking over the government
They usually envision a mass movement of people with guns.
When the Neo-Liberals do it, they imagine a mass movement of lawyers with subpoenas.
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
Following right behind the lawyers will be the 2nd Ammenders
This is exactly the situation that they've been saying they needed their guns for.
Jackson Browne's song "Lawyers in Love"
No suggestion that the Russians hacked into US voting
machines as the article says. The hacks were made through phishing emails to individual Democrats. The intent appears to be to humiliate and embarrass the candidates and other Democrats like Podesta, by sending their emails to Wikileaks and having them published by a very willing media. They reveal nothing illegal but a lot of mean gossip, sniping and plotting. Nothing about actual voting machines.
I don't understand why so many don't believe there was any Russian involvement at all. Why do people reject this news completely just the way Trump does. The NYT investigation is pretty convincing. All hacking was done during daylight hours in Russia, only Democrats targeted and some Russian words appear in a sub-text format in documents and emails, (editing words where they altered documents).
To thine own self be true.
Whether this embarrassment to Democratic candidates
in Congress and in the presidential campaign, did enough damage to sway voters to either stay home or vote Trump is hard to assess. I wonder how much damage it did do.
To thine own self be true.
Do you have any clue
How many tens of thousands of fishing emails are sent every single dam day out of Russia and eastern Europe?
Solidarity forever
Or bounced back after being sent from the US
And WikiLeaks still insists that it wasn't a Russian hack
That it was a leak from a DNC insider.
" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "
MarilynW,
I appreciate the questions you're raising. Your point that nothing the DNC was doing was illegal I think is untrue. You say,
This article addresses that issue:
I am a lifelong Democrat for the purpose of voting in the Primaries. During the entire past year I have received between 10 and 20 emails per day from the DNC and the DCCC asking me for money. If you raise money for an organization that has a charter defining how you can spend it, and you spend it wrongly, you have committed a fraud. And this fraud in particular does what the media are saying Putin did. It deprives the voters of their right to participate in an honest election.
The other issue you raise is this:
It's taken me this long to respond to your question because I wanted to make sure I read the whole David Sanger article at the NY Times asserting the CIA conclusion. And I watched David Sanger talk about it with Charlie Rose on my computer, the beauty of which is that you can stop, go back, and make sure you heard what Sanger said, exactly. My life experience is that the CIA lies, a lot, about war. And that's what this crisis is about. What I heard and read in the article and the interview were weasel words, qualifiers, and suggestions that Russia committed the hacks, but no definitive statements. When Charlie Rose pressed Sanger on that problem, Sanger eventually said that the CIA and President Obama can't come right out and declare that the Russians did it because to do so would reveal sources and methods and also put the administration in a position of having to respond in some way, presumably by sanctions, the enforcement of which would require other countries to see the evidence or proof, which would again reveal sources and methods.
So from my point of view, all of what the CIA is saying may be true. Or it may be false. But what is clear to me is that whoever released this information to the American people revealed the truth about the Democratic Party to its members and to the voters, and that was a good thing.
Democrats cant figure out how they lost
Same as many the right wing nutcases, when you wont/cant change
Make up a conspiracy theory to justify being plain old pig headed.