George Rebane
Well now that Congressman John Lewis has declared the Trump presidency “illegitimate”, that icon of civil rights and registration-free voting has attracted more Democrat politicians to join him on the leftwing’s bandwagon to oppose our new president. Lewis’ contention is that the election is illegitimate due to Russia’s “conspiracy” to oppose Clinton, thereby aiding Trump. (here)
What I have been waiting to hear some pundit or nationally prominent journalist contribute to these reports of Russian participation, now elevated to conspiratorial heights, is a description of the means by which their activities torpedoed Hillary’s candicacy. We are taught that bad guys are indicted through establishment of their motive, opportunity, and means (MOM) for carrying out their dastardly deed.
Now posit with our intelligence community that Russia and/or her commissioned agents, along with anyone else with very modest knowledge about penetrating undefended servers, did actually hack the DNC and Clinton Foundation emails. What then? By what means would they reach America’s Democrat constituents to sway their votes away from Hillary. Here we have to understand the make-up of the audience targeted by this supposed conspiracy. These are people, especially the Millennials contingent, who among their other intellectual deficits have short attention spans (here), are characterized by their drastically deficient knowledge base, and who don’t follow current events until, charitably, just before the election. They are mostly what may be termed slogan-cemented voters.
Russia is then supposed to have turned over the emails to Wikileaks, who claims to have received them from one or more of number of plausible sources, and Wikileaks makes them available on their website. It is the US news media that then delve into the emails, extract their embarrassing, revealing, and uncontested content, and make them public over various outlets. Additionally, Putin would also have ordered its propaganda arm RT to include those emails in its continuing anti-Hillary coverage, which according to media surveys had and continue to have little impact on American audiences. It is simply a channel that we, especially our low-information brethren, don’t consume.
Concurrently with this mysterious and unexplained Russian impact, our own partisan media outlets (overwhelmingly supporting Hillary) drowned out anything that RT could have delivered on these shores. And our media’s content was overwhelmingly anti-Trump for the year plus preceding the election. So again, by what means did Putin’s puppets perturb the minds susceptible to Hillary’s progressive pabulum??
As I and many RR readers are aware, to advance their national interests, governments have always meddled in other countries’ internal politics and that includes elections (see the Logan Act addendum below). Most certainly the US is an established expert in this field. Under Obama’s leadership – e.g. mocking Romney’s timely and accurate identification of Russia as our prime enemy – we became especially vulnerable to Putin’s anti-American stratagems. Among a number of concerned individuals and government departments, the FBI is on record of having warned the DNC at least eight separate times about the vulnerability of their servers, and especially Hillary’s illegal private servers on which SecState business was conducted. The evidence that the Democrats, under Hillary’s lead, did it to themselves is now overwhelming. And therefore the efforts to successfully conceal and confabulate this evidence must overwhelm even more.
So far all that the anti-Trump forces have been able to do is simply, forcefully, and repeatedly claim that it was the Russians who changed voters’ minds and therefore made Trump’s victory illegitimate. And according to Alinsky and other spiritual forebears of the Left, that is all that one needs do to embed any new idea, no matter how false or unsubstantiated, into the mind of a malleable public. Within such a campaign there is no need to identify and give evidence of the plausible means by which the Russians stole the election for Donald Trump. It just happened because we said it happened.
[Addendum] Logan Act histrionics. In recent comment streams this law and its alleged violation has seen a lively debate. A little research reveals why the Left’s invocation of this ancient piece of legislation represents just another desperate Hail Mary denigration of and the latest attempt to impede the upcoming Trump administration. This, along with Congressman Lewis’ illegitimizing claim discussed above, once again reveals and underlines the writhings of a political party in crisis, and unable to get purchase in the arena of public attention through any other means – e.g. such as presenting a revised platform of policies that may garner public support.
The Logan Act (here) “forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments having a dispute with the U.S. It was intended to prevent the undermining of the government’s position”, specifically conducting such negotiations “to the injury of the United States”. Proving the intent to undermine and injure one’s own country has properly erected high bars for applicable evidence. And for that reason only one person has been indicted and no person has been prosecuted under Logan during the 200+ years that the law has been on the books.
The Democrats’ current insistence that national security adviser designee General Flynn violated Logan in his recent contact with the Russians is the latest of the many invocations of the law, all of which appear to have been launched by either party to serve their political agendas. To now claim that such contacts, with no plausible injury to the country, are evidence of Trump administration corruption while still in the starting gate is prima facie laughable and excellent material for a late night comedy skit.
People innocent of the broad range of contacts that Americans of all political promotions have had over the last two centuries will readily leap into this fray to serve their larger political agenda. Contacts between American business leaders, lobbyists, union bosses, and even political parties (e.g. American Communist Party and Moscow) with foreign governments have been a common and intensely practiced intercourse over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, as a Democrat, with only hoary and encrusted collectivist policies to offer, and with only old war horses like Lewis, Clinton, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, … available to carry the party banner, you pull every lever that you can reach.
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