Thursday, July 28, 2016

Wait, what?

Remember this?


Apparently, the 80s have answered the call:
 American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.

But intelligence officials have cautioned that they are uncertain whether the electronic break-in at the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage — of the kind the United States also conducts around the world — or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.
That gave the Donald a chance to do some trolling:


The actual quote, because this video cuts it off:
“Why do I have to get involved with Putin? I have nothing to do with Putin. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know anything about him other than he will respect me. He doesn’t respect our president. And if it is Russia—which it’s probably not, nobody knows who it is—but if it is Russia, it’s really bad for a different reason, because it shows how little respect they have for our country, when they would hack into a major party and get everything. But it would be interesting to see—I will tell you this—Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Are you not entertained?

So, do we need to worry about the Russians, or don't we? If you check the ol' social media feeds, chances are you'll see some people think Trump's statement is treason.

Point of order -- how would the Russians hack the 30,000 missing emails? Were they on the DNC website? That would be a story. They are not, of course. What Trump suspects, and his opponent fears, is that the Russians, or some other actor, already has the missing emails, which obviously weren't on the DNC's server but on the homebrew server that Hillary Clinton used. Those would be the emails about Chelsea's wedding and yoga classes, or so we were told. If that were true, Team Clinton could laugh Trump's taunting off as inconsequential. But I didn't hear anyone laughing yesterday.

Writing for the New York Sun, Seth Lipsky explains the problem well:
The Democratic National Committee emails that started this whole contretemps were made public via Wikileaks, with whom the pro-Democratic Party press has been collaborating for years.

How does that compute for the Democrats who blame Mr. Putin? What about Edward Snowden, who is being sheltered in Russia by the regime that the Democrats are now gleefully quoting Paul Ryan as calling a global menace? Maybe the Kremlin will enlist Mr. Snowden in finding the missing Hillary Clinton emails. The Times would probably love it. “Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed,” it editorialized in 2014. “Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service.”
Just so. Back to Lipsky:
The truth is that when the emails that are leaked in the age of the Internet are America’s wartime secrets, such as battlefield secrets in a time when our troops are engaged in combat with a savage foe, the left is all too eager to work with the leakers and characterize them as “whistleblowers.” But when the messages being leaked include internal email traffic of the Democrats themselves, wires that show them maneuvering against Senator Sanders in a ghastly way, the Democrats are suddenly up in arms. Mr. Trump seems to have figured out the petard on which the Democrats have hoisted themselves.
There's gonna be dirt aplenty over the next three months. If we don't already hate both candidates, we will for sure by the time November rolls around.


Oh, those Russians.

4 comments:

Bike Bubba said...

Trump is growing on me with that one, and the Democrats are making themselves look totally idiotic in response, especially since the server has been offline for months. He's more or less saying "hey, just show us what you did get from Hilliary's server." Brilliant.

They should just re-open Alcatraz and send everybody in the Obama administration there, really.

jerrye92002 said...

It's hilarious that Russians are being blamed for attacking our national security, when we are told the only things in those emails were talk of yoga lessons, cookie recipes and Chelsea's wedding plans.

Trump seems to know that ridicule is perhaps a most powerful political weapon, and Democrats have no ability to even understand when they are being ridiculed, let alone laugh at it.

Mr. D said...

The Dems understand the value of ridicule, since they ridicule Republicans all the time. The problem is they have largely lived in a ridicule-free zone since W was elected. This ties into what I was talking about in the comedians as commissars post I wrote earlier this week. You rarely see any comedians making fun of Democrats any more. If people don't get called out from time to time, they start to believe that they're not going to be called out. So when Trump starts calling them out, they react with fury. How dare he!

Johnny Carson ridiculed presidents from Kennedy to GHWB. Jimmy Fallon invites Barack Obama to "slow jam the news."

jerrye92002 said...

I wouldn't call what Dems do "ridicule." It's more the explosion of perpetual anger they have at anybody who dares tell simple truth. And everyone who disagrees with them is an enemy that must be personally destroyed. To quote MIB, the Dems "have no sense of humor of which we are aware."