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(s)Elections See other (s)Elections Articles Title: How Hillary Clinton Poisoned American Politics Crazy conspiracy theories dominate the final days before Nov. 8 FBI Director James Comeys decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clintons mishandling of classified information has the Clintonites falling back on their tried-and-true response to all the revelations coming from WikiLeaks and other sources its all a Russian plot. Except, this time, the hysteria has reached such a fever pitch, and the conspiracy theories are so unhinged, that the political discourse in this country will be poisoned for years to come. It started with Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who told CNNs Wolf Blitzer: So the question is: Where did these [emails] come from? How did they get to the FBI? Is Russia involved in this? We dont have a clue where this stuff is coming from. We dont know if Ryan was drunk (again) when he said this, but his nickname of Congressman Moonbeam seems well-earned, and the implication of his remarks that the FBI is in league with the Russians underscores his marginality. However, it wasnt long before the marginal started merging with the mainstream. In tandem with Rya, Howard Dean, former presidential candidate and once head of the Democratic party, tweeted: Ironically, Comey put himself on the same side as Putin. Now Dean may be a bit more credible than Ryan, but who can forget the Dean scream that dramatized his loonier side, and effectively knocked him out of contention for the Democratic presidential nomination? And then there were those payments from the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a nutty Marxist-Islamist cult, in return for serving as their front man. And so while Dean may be better known, what hes know for isnt exactly adding to his credibility, and so we can safely relegate this kind of conspiracy theorizing to the fringes of the Democratic party spectrum. Right? Wrong. Here is longtime Clintonite strategist James Carville opining that Its unprecedented
the House Republicans and the KGB are trying to influence our democracy. Well, okay, who listens to Carville, anyway? Hes so yesterday! Well, then, get a load of Harry Reid, who leads the Senates Democrats, repeating a different version of the same nonsense in a letter to Comey: "In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government a foreign interest hostile to the united states, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information." Its so explosive that it exploded into utter nothingness, according to the New York Times this [Tuesday] morning: For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead which they ultimately came to doubt about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, FBI and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump. As Gertrude Stein once put it, Theres no there there. She was talking about Oakland, California, but might just as well have been describing the inside of Harrys brain. And, yes, you read the above cited Times story right: instead of going after terrorists, or ordinary criminals, for months the FBI has been chasing down rabbit holes looking for Trumps alleged links to the nonexistent International Kremlin/Alt-Right/Putinist Conspiracy. We have returned to the halcyon days of J. Edgar Hoover, when people were investigated and harassed for their political views at the instigation of their ideological opponents. Oh, but the FBI was too overburdened and undermanned to keep Omar Mateen on their radar. In this election, the tragic and the comic mix and merge, but surely the former is dominant in the latest of Franklin Foers Russophobic effusions. Formerly the editor of The New Republic, who was unceremoniously dumped by its new owner, Foer has teamed up with the Clinton campaign as its unofficial conspiracy theorist, spinning tales of Trumps links to the Russians. Hes the Alex Jones of the Clinton crowd, except that not even Jones would be caught dead promoting the kind of incoherent nonsense in Foers latest screed. According to Foer, Trump has a secret server set up specifically to communicate with his Kremlin Masters. We know this because a computer scientist who wants to be known only as Tea Leaves, and other experts who also dont want to tell us their names have supposedly discovered this Secret Link. The server connects to the Alfa Bank, which is located in cue in scary music Russia! And guess what!? This closed communication link was especially active during politically sensitive times! This, according to Foer and his anonymous band of experts, is conclusive proof that The Donald is a secret agent of the KGB, intent on polluting our precious bodily fluids with icky Russian cooties. The only problem with this wacky conspiracy theory is that theres a prosaic explanation for the existence of this suspicious online traffic: the Trump Organization had hired a company to send out ads for their hotels. The online traffic to Alfa Bank meant only that several employees of that bank had stayed in Trumps hotels and were being solicited to do so again. And in spite of the scientific-looking chart displayed in the Foer piece, in fact the online traffic to and from Alfa didnt peak when the US political scene got hot: Thats wrong, writes Timothy B. Lee in the anti-Trump pro- Hillary Vox.com. If anything, the chart shows the opposite of that. As Lee puts it: Foer claims that the pattern of traffic between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank servers is highly unusual so unusual that it can best be explained as a secretive communication link between Donald Trump and the Kremlin. But in this case, there seems to be a plausible and perfectly innocent explanation for the traffic pattern suggested by an IT consultant named Naadir Jeewa and endorsed by security expert Robert Graham: The Trump organization is sending out promotional emails about Trump hotels, and one or more Alfa Bank employees is on the recipient list. This is actually the explanation thats suggested by Occams razor because as Foer himself acknowledges in his story the server was originally registered by an email marketing firm called Cendyn. The Trump organization seems to have hired Cendyn to send out emails promoting Trumps hotels, a service Cendyn has been providing since the Trump server was registered in 2009. So the most obvious explanation for the traffic is that Cendyn is using its server for its intended purpose. When Hillary Clintons Twitter account tweeted Foers farrago and declared Its time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia, cyber-security expert Robert Graham replied on his blog: This is nonsense. The evidence available on the Internet is that Trump neither (directly) controls the domain "trump-email.com," nor has access to the server. Instead, the domain was setup and controlled by Cendyn, a company that does marketing/promotions for hotels, including many of Trumps hotels. Cendyn outsources the email portions of its campaigns to a company called Listrak, which actually owns/operates the physical server in a data center in Philadelphia. So the server wasnt even owned by the Trump Organization. And yet it took the FBI months, and journalists, including even The Intercept, weeks to conclude that this story is completely bogus. The US taxpayers should demand their money back not to mention Pierre Omidyar. Even after this sloppy McCarthyite smear was debunked, the Clinton campaign breathlessly repeated the charges: This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trumps ties to Russia! What this perfervid fantasy is the actually key to is the hysterical desperation of the Clinton campaign as it is engulfed in daily scandals that threaten to sink it beneath the electoral waves. Are you laughing or crying yet? Oh, but Im not done! If you think this grade-B conspiracy theory is the lowest form of electoral entertainment, then you obviously havent read David Corns latest entry into the Smear Trump Sweepstakes. Glenn Greenwald no friend of Trumps describes it as an unnamed person, from an unknown country, who used to work in an unnamed agency, claims Trump is a Russian agent. How did the real estate mogul become a tool of the Kremlin? Well, you see, Trump once traveled to Russia, where he was suborned by one of those slinky-looking Russian ladies and Russian intelligence had compromised Trump during his visits to Moscow and could blackmail him. Yes, theyre blackmailing Trump over a sexual indiscretion because that would destroy him for sure! And its all in a secret memo that only Corn, the editors of Mother Jones, and their Mysterious Veteran Spook have seen. On one level, this is hysterically funny; its grade-C thriller material that is likely to be found at the bottom of some publishers slush pile. On another level the political level it is immensely depressingly significant because these people are liberals, even leftists. They arent stupid: they know the ignominious history of witch-hunting in this country. Id call this McCarthyism but even Joe McCarthy had some actual evidence to back up his claims of foreign agents lurking in the corridors of power. Corn, Foer, and the Clinton campaign are simply retailing lies. Whats depressing about this is the fact that, if Hillary wins, it isnt going to stop. Far from it: the new red scare will accelerate, as her political enemies are tarred with the KGB agent brush. And when the notoriously vindictive Democratic candidate takes revenge not only on her domestic political enemies, but on the Russians, an ugly and dangerous confrontation is in the cards. Shell sic the FBI on Trumps supporters, and Trump himself, and shell unleash the US military and our allies on Putin and then, watch out. That American liberalism has degenerated into a Russophobic, warmongering, witch-hunting ideology so quickly is one of the most astonishing ideological transformations in our political history. And all in the name of garnering partisan political advantage. As Donald Trump would put it: Sad! Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
No, dumdum, the only question is whether the emails are legitimate or forgeries. The hysteria coming from the Clinton camp answers that question. " As a citizen, I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party -- and I think the government is capable of proving that -- then that is another matter." - Ronald Reagan to House Un-American Activities Committee, October 23, 1947
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