The Chris Moeller Archives

Our Russian hysteria

Happy New Year. Let’s get a couple things out of the way first.

The Russians, even if reports from anonymous CIA officials are true, did not hack our election. They hacked emails-- ones of a non-government entity (the DNC) incidentally that revealed wrong-doing that we shouldn't be distracted from. The trail of media misinformation on this speaks to how easy it is for intelligence officials to find eager trumpeters from America’s Fourth Estate.

Second, there is still no evidence that the Russians were behind the DNC leaks. President Obama could basically declassify anything he wanted to in justification for his punitive action against the Russian diplomatic community this week, and he has not. Evidence, incidentally, is not even the same thing as proof. The 13-page report issued by the Obama administration on Thursday that MSNBC, CNN, and Huffington Post present as evidence against Vladimir Putin’s government is only a list of details describing the phishing techniques used by the alleged attackers. No evidence of a link to the DNC case exists anywhere in the report. This report is, effectively, a tactic that serves the current president’s political need to take punitive action against Russia before he leaves office. One would look weak as hell to accuse a foreign government of such treacherous crimes, but then not do anything about it. A serious accusation demands serious consequences. It’s also a political tactic that suggests there have been other political tactics.

Julian Assange still says that the source of the emails WikiLeaks published-- his source-- was someone from within the U.S. intelligence community, and what motive would Assange have to jeopardize his perfect track record of accuracy and sourcing, and destroy the entire credibility of his enterprise? Do intel officials engage in such ploys of misdirection? Not only is the answer to that question yes, but they also have gone so far as inventing conspiracy theories with the aim of discrediting their critics as “crazy conspiracy theorists.” I’m telling you, there is nothing you can put past these fuckers. During the height of the Cold War, some of them conspired successfully to kill President John Kennedy and stage a coup of the American White House. Another group, with some overlap, broke into DNC headquarters in 1972. They have, time and time again, engaged in actions, direct and indirect, that were designed to spur regime changes in other countries as well. This includes many nations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, almost every country throughout Latin America and the continent of Africa, at one time or another. They conspired successfully to have Nelson Mandela, a man they perceived as a terrorist threat, arrested in the 1960s. They armed both the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in the 1980s. They arrogantly and clumsily created a fiction that became a breach that would be filled by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, toppling, through our military, the only semi-secular governments in the region.

And please know that our intelligence community wanted war with Russia over Crimea, where our military backs a group of Ukrainian neo-Nazis fighting for separatism from Putin’s control. While we should be teamed with Russia in the cause against terrorism, America's Democratic Party is, instead, a willing participant to the cause of re-starting the Cold War. As such, Clinton’s unexpected electoral defeat was a crushing defeat for that cause of escalation. Had she won a majority of electors on November 8th, we would be already looking at a massive build-up of U.S. military forces along the Ukrainian/Russian border.

The tip-off that this Russia angle has been trumped up is that the Clinton-supporting media has given almost no focus instead to the area of electoral malfeasance where there is not just smoke, but actual flames-- the failure to count votes from African-American-dominant precincts in Michigan and Ohio. Jill Stein has practically been begging for media attention to this voter suppression, but to no meaningful avail.

Perhaps releasing actual evidence of Russia's alleged electronic tampering would require the disclosure of the CIA’s similar covert actions at untoward influence aimed at other autonomous governments. Isn’t that we can now safely surmise happened at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy? If Castro had a hand in the death, and I’m actually in the camp that believes it was CIA and mafia operatives that were anti-Castro, what other motive would there be to suppress from the American people the act of Castro’s involvement than that declassifying documents would lead to the facts of our own failed attempts on the life of the Cuban leader? In other words, the CIA covers up because he got to us before we got to him.

This anti-Trump panic on the left has got to end. It is an immediate imperative for the operatives of the Democratic Party, those that conspired against the reforms of the Sanders campaign, and are still acting-- from the Oval Office on down-- to prevent Keith Ellison and a new band of reformers from gaining control of their broken party, to wake the fuck up, and stop the madness while the public relations damage is only moderate. You. Lost. You did it to yourself. You cheated. You disenfranchised your own base, you assumed that it would stay a secret because who was going to report on it-- the Washington Post? (Haha) And your misconduct and hubris were exposed for all to see.

As a growing majority of Americans look upon the Clinton cultists, they see, chiefly now, the absence of accountability. If they're on the right, they see hypocrites and sore losers, desperate to hang on to power. On the left, they see hypocrites and scoundrels, desperate to hang on to power. Working men and women see the leadership of a once-major political party still ignoring them. The detrimental effects of continuing to blame their loss on anybody but themselves, and to avoid taking a good long look at their own mismanagement and perverted values, are nearly incalculable.

As he continues to be belittled and have his legitimacy questioned, Trump will score electoral points with any even marginal success-- and he will have his share of successes because he has, sometimes in spite of himself, managed to blow up the rotted core of both major political parties. We saw this with Obama as well. He galloped to an easy re-election in 2012 thanks in large part to the illogical attacks he was forced to endure. When will these party hacks-- on both sides-- learn their lesson about the whole of the American people? We each have our favorites, but we don’t want to believe that the president is illegitimate. That’s why the birther crap backfired so badly. And this is how the Republican wing of the Democratic Party will die-- not with a new openness towards reform, but drowning in their denials.

Here’s a better explanation of the Democrats’ historic defeat last month. A great big group of passionate Bernie Sanders activists, mostly 20- and 30-somethings, the type that Clinton should have been salivating to have attending her events, tried to stake their place within the party’s power structure and simultaneously serve as messengers to the DNC from the collective pulse of the people of the United States. They attempted an explanation to the Clinton monarchists that she should oppose the horrendous trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that even her Republican opponent very publicly and correctly opposed. Hillary told audiences that she opposed it also, but Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, who stands as close to the Clintons as any politico not surnamed Wasserman-Schultz, went around telling every person with a microphone that the candidate was only publicly posturing and that she really would support the deal after Election Day. When McAuliffe’s supposition was exposed as fact by WikiLeaks, Hillary went as wobbly as she did that day she got hustled into a shuttle van on the streets of Manhattan.

They also told Hillary to get her tail to North Dakota and stand up against the Bakken Pipeline. She didn't go because she wasn't against it. The Clinton team didn’t listen to the impassioned shouts for radical change in the party's neo-liberal policies on imperialism and militarization, or to ix-nay the saber-rattling in Syria, or to come clean on her illegal attempts to shield her work emails from FOIA requests. They avoided rural voters as if they were infected with the Zika virus. The campaign staff did hardly anything at all to woo, let alone inspire, these Sanders loyalists. In one particularly dark episode, entertainer Sarah Silverman, acting as campaign surrogate, chastised and infantilized these activists in front of a convention television audience of millions. In retrospect, that was one of the moments it should have been apparent this shit was not going to end well.

We were in line for a Bernie Revolution, and instead they gave us a Trump Revolution. Clinton’s bank money was used to push people out of the way. Her SuperPAC brazenly and illegally coordinated with her campaign. WikiLeaks already revealed years ago that, as Secretary of State, Clinton employed diplomats as spies at the United Nations, spying even on the leaders of our allied countries-- do remember that this week when you read about Russian diplomats acting as secret agents in the U.S. That, combined with her electronic attempts to shield from public view her actions at the State Department, should have disqualified her as a candidate before the convention even commenced. It’s hard to know which offense is the worst-- the malfeasance, the attempts by her and her allies to shield it from us, or how badly they are at doing that.


Wanna have a retroactive laugh? Read this Ruth Marcus article in the Washington Post from eleven months ago. "It's far from clear," to Marcus that Americans "are prepared to embark on (a revolution)." What a massive misreading of tea leaves. Apparently, all that's left to do a year later is to blame it all on Vladimir Putin.

posted by CM @ 12:46 PM