George Rebane
The Russian Hacking Pot keeps on bubbling without any clear resolution in sight. Our Left laments Hillary’s loss, and is now relieved to have found a deep dark reason for it – Russia colluded with Trump to hack her illegal server and the DNC, put the damning emails in the public domain through Wikileaks, and thereby suck away enough votes to give Trump an electoral landslide. Moreover, no matter how badly the emails reflected on the doings of Hillary and the DNC, since Russia is accused of ‘stealing’ them, their content should not have been allowed to become a factor in the election. And Trump did a dastardly deed by encouraging us all to consider what was in the emails.
In the olden days it was the journalists job to dig up, cite, and publicize bad stuff on public figures; not any more. Today journalists must consider how the bad stuff came to light before they report it to the public, since now they have a higher calling given that almost all of them are leftwing agenda driven. Or should they?
All agree that countries should not seek to affect the outcome of other countries’ elections. All with 3-digit IQs know that countries have practiced such interventions since forever to serve their national interests. And in this case Russia is accused of doing that by revealing truth about the parties involved in the election. But who are the accusers?
This morning NPR did another Trump hit piece by interviewing two ‘intelligence journalists’ – a senior NPR reporter and an academic – who were asked why no one knows who in our federal government is blaming the Russians, and why has there been no evidence cited or presented to support the accusation. The ensuing discussion was again most revealing of the liberal mind.
It turns out that the best that can be done about supporting the report that our intelligence community has identified Russia as the guilty party is a surreptitious interview with a ‘highly placed intelligence official’ who is not authorized to reveal such information to the press. This unnamed ‘Deep Throat’ was characterized as a brave individual who risked his career and perhaps more in causing the unauthorized leak. The NPR journalist assured listeners that ethics did not permit her to reveal neither the leaker nor the evidence, but that she did her best to confirm what she had learned (no claim of confirmation, just best efforts), and therefore all should accept her reporting at face value because, after all, she is an ethical journalist.
Due to the recent history of journalistic malfeasance – aka incidents of lying and faking news – journalists are correctly held in low esteem by the news consuming public; actually their credibility is somewhere below that of politicians and lawyers. Nevertheless, stiff upper lip and all that, the country is being asked to accept on the word of journalists that not only that the Russians did it, but also the follow on impact of what was done.
Now I have to admit that this tack may be as effective as that plied on the issue of climate change. There are many dots between accepting that climate changes and that we should implement economy killing policies to reverse preventable catastrophic global warming. The American public today assumes that all those dots are naturally connected as soon as someone starts talking about being a ‘climate change denier/skeptic’ or ‘accepting the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists’ on the matter. In short there is no rational discussion of the issue simply because reasoning about it is beyond the ken of most people.
While the Russian hacking issue is not as complex, it nevertheless does include such arcane factors as ‘in the public domain’, ‘damning content’, ‘authenticity’, ‘journalistic standards’, ‘ethics’, ‘electoral impact’, ‘anonymous sources’, ‘US intelligence community’, … . These are perhaps simpler dots to connect, but there are still too many of them for most folks to handle. (This can be confirmed by some of the entries in the comment streams of recent RR posts.)
And finally to confuse the matter even more, we now have the surprising assertion by Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano (here) that it was US intelligence that hacked the Hillary and DNC emails, and released them to Wikileaks which has not revealed its source for the purloined bagatelles. In any event, the Left’s argument that involving those emails in the electoral campaign was akin to the purchase of blood diamonds is patently ludicrous.
[17dec16 update] The Hillary/DNC email affair is getting stinkier with President Obama’s contribution at his yesterday’s news conference. While the lamestream won’t touch the story of a former British diplomat claiming that 1) the emails were leaked not hacked, by 2) disaffected Clinton insiders, and the principal leaker was murdered last July in a mysterious early morning shooting where the motive was clearly not robbery. Check out this video for the whole story and make your own determination of its verity and the sound of silence from the media (which could at least make a very interesting story out of debunking this and other such reports).
rebanesruminations.com 
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