What an interesting five minutes!
And then, five minutes later …
Not a slow news day. But the hackers ought to have known that this was a dumb day to try to break their “exposé.”
Zowie! This was what I was blogging about ….
“Guccifer 2.0” — the Romanian hacker who can’t speak Romanian*, releases the “Wikileaks” bombshell that Julian Assange failed to deliver this morning.
Guccifer 2.0 Hacked Clinton Foundation
Many of you have been waiting for this, some even asked me to do it. — So, this is the moment. I hacked the Clinton Foundation server and downloaded hundreds of thousands of docs and donors’ databases. — Hillary Clinton and her staff don’t even bother about the information security…
[* Or, as Politico puts it: “A hacker persona with alleged ties to the Russian government”]
And here comes the con: most media will accept this as “news” — and not as a blatant attempt to “throw” the American presidential election — and as NOT FORGED.
But the displayed contents on Guccifer’s blog could have been created by a three-year-old, and the accusations — that Democrats were given wholesale cash cuts of the TARP funds — seems more the fantasy of someone more used to unsophisticated Russian graft than with American politics. No one in their right mind would keep such a list on their computer, even WERE they supposedly receiving wholesale bribes.
The Invisible Hand always leaves a footprint, after all.
Come on, folks. This is known in the law business as the “poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree.” Occam’s razor suggests that if this is exactly what it appears to be, the need for scandal — either real or fake — is paramount, and that it is the chaos created that matters. Forged documents? When did Vladimir Putin’s old KGB ever do THAT?
Clear attempt to influence American elections? When did Vladdy Daddy ever throw a temper tantrum after a failed attempt to get his way in the world? Say, in Syria?
Guccifer might as well go by his regular name: Russian Intelligence.
Now, you do the math and ask yourself, “Do I want to be a Kremlin Cat’s-paw?”
That bird could just as well be an American eagle, kids.
The problem here is not an Australian national, hiding in asylum in a South American embassy is attempting to openly interfere in a USA national election, using stolen (Russian hacked) documents. (I cannot think of a nation that would find this acceptable.)
Slimy British tabloids — like, say, the Daily Mail, I suppose, are justified, since this intentional attempt at chaos is their stock in trade. But the US “patriots”? I guess patriotism doesn’t mean what it used to mean anymore. [No false equivalencies or Tu Quoques, please.]
There is something fundamentally wrong when thousands of partisan “Americans” automatically accept disinformation — from a foreign government that is KNOWN to be an attempt to interfere in internal US politics — when it fits their hatred of their own countrymen.
I remember well the SCREECHES of outrage that Al Gore might have solicited donations or accepted DONATIONS or something at a Buddhist temple. The screams were not about religious separation nor religious bigotry, but, rather that the COMMUNIST CHINESE were attempting to influence an American election!
Sam Adams (pre-bottling)
People ultimately went to jail over that, amid intense tongue-clucking by the selfsame “patriots” who now openly ally themselves with the “capitalist Russians” against their own countrymen. Isn’t there something fearfully wrong in that?
Isn’t that WORSE than any supposed “smoking gun” that the hackers either hacked or forged?
I mean, Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton and 47 Republicans in the Senate (that famous “47” that GOPs get caught on so often) actively collaborated with a foreign government to attempt to derail the multinational coalition’s Iran Nuclear Negotiations in a fit of treasonous pique, but now their followers and allies are openly (if intentionally ignorantly) collaborating with Putin?
Gee.
Gee. So what happened to the “hack”?
And what happened to our “patriots”?
Time will tell.
Courage.
Cross posted from his vorpal sword.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.