The Trump Effect
While it’s all the rage right now, particularly on either coast, I can’t honestly say that I hate Donald Trump. That’s way too strong a word. At best, I never particularly cared for him. It’s a Boston-New York thing, in part. (You wouldn’t get it unless you’re from that area). I grew up in New England, fully in the heart of Red Sox country, back when they were still lovable losers like the Cubs (were – until last year) – and the Yankees couldn’t lose to us no matter how hard they tried. I moved to Queens for one year to live with my mother. Of course, it had to be 1986. There I was, a displaced Red Sox fan smack dab in the middle the Mets run in ’86… and run they did, right over my Sox in that ill-fated World Series. I had to endure that from inside enemy territory, boisterous New York fans everywhere…
Then there was my uncle. When I was a kid, we used to visit my aunt and uncle in Flushing, Queens. He was a self-made guy, owned his own business… but he was the quintessential New Yorker, right down to that way he pronounced “radiator” – with the first a short, as in cat. Why does he pronounce it like that? My six-year old self used to wonder. Everyone knows it’s ray-dee-ay-tore… the pronunciation is right in the dictionary!?
Donald Trump has those same exact speech patterns.
It was my Uncle’s cock-suredness about New York’s supremacy over all other places on Earth that really did it for me, however.
New York is the best, he would begin. It’s got everything. I mean, Evvvry-thing! you could ever want! We got lakes, rivers – beautiful river, the Hudson – we got mountains… I mean, the only thing we don’t have is a desert, but who wants a friggin’ desert anyway? California’s got a desert and they can have it. But they don’t have New York City! We’ve got the Yankees – c’mon, best team in sports history, not even close.
…And on and on he would go about the superiority of New York, particularly as it related to how inferior Boston – and the rest of the universe – were in comparison to the Big Apple, Baby! He was to New York what Dickie V is to college basketball.
Donald Trump is like my uncle becoming President… And worst of all, The Legacy Media is making me have to defend him.
I was out of the country for a little while, so I figured that all of the sturm und drang by Team Blue and their Media proxies would have cooled off by now. Nope. Evidently, everyone lost their mind while I was away.
Let’s review a few salient facts because it’s gotten pretty confusing – not by accident, in my opinion.
The allegations against Messieur Le President that started the current brouhaha are this:
1. It is alleged by the Media that there was some kind of Russian “hacking” of our election.
- It is important to note that this term – “hacking” – is not being used in its normal sense by the Media and Democrats. This is not accidental. The principal (original) allegation does not involve any real “hacking” of voting machines or the vote totals themselves. While recently leaked information shows some phishing attempts against a company that manufactures voting machines, there is still no evidence that any vote hack occurred by the Russians or any outside party. In fact, a federal judge rejected Jill Stein’s recount bid by pointing out that she had produced zero evidence the Russians had done any such thing and mere speculation and allegations couldn’t justify her attempted recount.*
- Instead, the term “hacking” is referring to the allegation that WikiLeaks/Julian Assange were really Russian agents of influence and that the leak (by Assange) of the Democratic National Committee’s and John Podesta’s emails was done to intentionally harm Hillary Clinton’s chances at the Presidency – and that it succeeded and thus is why she lost the election to Trump.
2. It is vaguely alleged that Donald Trump or some folks on his campaign (or current) staff were in cahoots with said Russkies. Thus, we are told in loud voices, that it is “absolutely essential” that we “get to the bottom of this!”
*(Perhaps not surprisingly, Democrats and the Media lost their ardor for a recount when the early returns in Michigan showed anomalies in districts in which Hillary prevailed over Trump. In more than one case, Herself got more votes than registered voters in multiple districts in Detroit.)
Be Careful What You Wish For…
The Hack That Wasn’t… and Is
On March 16, 2016, 7 months before the Presidential election, WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive of the emails sent or received between 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. The whole thing is located here.
Happening concurrently, with a lot less fanfare, was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against Hillary Clinton by Judicial Watch, a libertarian-leaning legal watchdog group. The lawsuit basically requested that the state department and its former Head do as the law requires – and turn over any of her official emails that were not otherwise exempt from FOIA requirements.
This is the part that people (in D.C. in particular) don’t seem to get – or, at least, don’t get when it’s applied to them. As a government official, your correspondence isn’t technically “your own.” You work for the taxpayers of the United States, and in an effort to have some accountability in government, Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act, which basically says that unless there’s some specific legal exemption, your correspondence while serving in office for We the People of the United States of America is subject to being checked, sort of like grading your homework to see how folks are doing their jobs… or not, as the case may be. It happens that sometimes even large chunks of an entire Agency are not working and claiming they are… So that’s why we have that law.
FOIA has turned out to be the bane of the bureaucrat’s and statist politician’s existence because – like just about everyone else on planet Earth – politicians and their operatives rely upon their email to conduct “business.” In fact, Ms. Clinton’s attempt to avoid FOIA so she could conduct her favor-for-money job on behalf of her Clinton Foundation donors is exactly what caused this mess in the first instance. How could I make such a claim? you ask. Easy – the proof is in her own emails.
One of the (several) attempts Hillary Clinton made to justify her unprecedented (and ridiculous) use of a private email server in her own home was by citing to Colin Powell’s previous use of a personal email account for some official business. The NY Times wrote about it here. First, notice that Powell’s use of a personal email address was not an entire server set up outside of the law’s requirement of government control and preservation of documents. Second, by the time Hillary Clinton asked Powell about his use of a blackberry outside of the government’s knowledge, she had already had a personal server set up for almost a year. Finally, most importantly, what did Powell actually tell Ms. Clinton about her use of personal email that might shed some light on the subject?
“I had an ancient version of a PDA and used it,” Powell said in the exchange with Clinton. “If it is public that you have a Blackberry,” he said, “it may become an official record and subject to the law.”
“Be very careful,” warned Powell. “I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data,” he said, referring to private discussions outside the agency’s classified system.
“The law” that Powell is fretting over, FOIA, is what ultimately makes the entire Russian hacking so obviously and transparently a political smokescreen. Regardless of what emails were released by Wikileaks, all of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails that she sent while working as Secretary of State are subject to a strict requirement to be preserved for possible release under FOIA. The Russian “hack” did nothing more than reveal emails that were by law required to be turned over – and which the Clinton State Department did everything possible to obstruct and delay, including deleting emails that were under a separate Congressional subpoena from early March 2015 – and for which no one has ever been held to account. In fact, it is the Clinton “story” that some IT person “accidentally” deleted some 39,000 emails AFTER she had already received a subpoena from the committee investigating Benghazi, coincidentally in late March, between 25 and 31 March, weeks after she was presented a records retention request and subpoena.
To be continued…
(Next up: “The Moral Case for the Russian Hack,” and “The DNC is a Clinton Front…and so is the State Department.”)