Are you as tired as I am of the endless incantation of “Russian attacked our democracy”? I was going to write about the Dems’ call for a takeover of healthcare or Romney’s Trump-bashing. Instead, I talked myself into this topic after running into the hackneyed charge for the zillionth time since before Trump placed his hand on the Bible, Jan. 20, 2017. I feel like the Peter Finch character in “Network” when he shouts, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”. Enough; please, enough! Put it to bed.
The reason is obvious. This is disinformation about a commonly-used disinformation campaign. The Russians have been at it for a long time, and so have we.
The ex-veep Dick Cheney fed the monster of overheated rhetoric by calling Russian campaign interference an “act of war”. But the monster had already been unleashed in the interregnum between the Obama and Trump presidencies (more about this is likely to come from the “investigation of the investigators”). It became the established Democrats’ tag line to explain Hillary’s loss. From the gitgo, it was a ruse to muddy the winner and exonerate the loser. Apparently, the Democrats aren’t supposed to lose elections.
Do I really have to recount the long roll call of Russian attempts to influence western electorates? The tactic was done through espionage by comrades in the various national chapters of the Communist Party (“Witness” by Whittaker Chambers) and “agents of influence” in the chancelleries of the West (Research our government’s Venona Project). It was done by financially feeding fellow-travelling activists in the anti-nuke, anti-war, and anti-capitalist movements west of the Iron Curtain.
Reagan faced a full fusillade of these “acts of war” in the 1980’s when he moved to counter the Russian medium-range nuclear missile threat in Europe. Anti-war sympathizers went nuts in Congress, the media, and the streets. Thank God he stuck to his guns … er, missiles.
Shenanigans in western elections were, and are, a staple … and it includes us. Our interference in Israeli elections is less than unusual. Obama sent some of his campaign veterans to Tel Aviv to assist Labor. The smell of hypocrisy is rich in the air.
We could do much worse for humanity than doing more of this in places like Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
The Democrats are desperate to remain politically relevant by any means at hand. The means at hand, though, are patently ludicrous. The crazy plot requires a god-like omniscience on the part of the Russians. Russians are seemingly more adept at electioneering than Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign tsar. Maybe that’s true.
The scheme demands a Russian crystal ball to foresee how to precisely calibrate their phone bank of basement bots and Facebook ads to tilt the election to Trump. But there’s a fly in the ointment. They don’t need a crystal ball or time machine if their goal is to sow discord regardless of who wins. Their objective was to sully the winner, who everyone, including the Russians, expected to be Hillary.
They succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. The winner was falsely covered in mud. Shockingly, it happened to be Trump. If it had been Hillary, the story would end up in the same place as the Ark at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
The only successful part of the subterfuge was the Hillary-Steele-Russians element. The product of the cabal – the Steele Dossier – was fed to the mandarins of the Obama administration, and used and leaked to soil the real electoral winner. For over two years, the country, the president, his family and helpers, were subjected to a drawn out nothingburger.
A lot of people have egg on the face from their nothingburger (sorry for the mixed metaphor). The “egg” is ruined reputations and more business for defense lawyers. The sorry affair was always a Dem disinformation campaign rooted in a Russian one.
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
John F. Kennedy
RogerG
