Have you heard the news? We’re on the verge of becoming a province of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and only the Electoral College can save us.
But the Electoral College won’t save us because this whole theory is garbage. It’s also, like many conspiracy theories, all-encompassing.
The beauty of the paranoid vein of conspiracy theory Democrats are employing to discredit President-elect Donald Trump is there’s no way to disprove it. Sure, it can’t be proven either, and the “evidence” put forth in the media is pathetically thin – single anonymous sources and assumptions from people unwilling to put their name on it. But it will stick with the people Democrats need it to.
The essence of the Democrats’ claim is the Russian government “hacked” the presidential election. Not by stealing votes or changing counts, but by showing the world how the Democrats conspired against Bernie Sanders to help Hillary Clinton and how what the Clinton campaign said in private differed from what it said in public. In other words, they made Democrats as transparent as they’d always claimed to be.
I’m no advocate of hacking. Private information should remain private, as long as it is legal. But once it’s out there, like with the Pentagon Papers, it should be reported on. Once the emails were released by Wikileaks, it would have been irresponsible not to report on them.
Although some outlets did their best to downplay the information contained in those emails, the truth got out there. We found out how Hillary was slipped town hall questions in advance and how Democrats spoke about minorities when they didn’t think anyone would hear. Were the Russians responsible for people’s curiosity about their would-be president? Of course not.
Nor is there anything close to proof the Russians were responsible for the hacks in the first place.
Besides, the question is largely irrelevant. What matters is whether the leaked information was accurate.
And it was. People saw the Democrats for who they were. No foreign entity or random hacker made them be themselves; they did that all on their own.
Democrats didn’t lose because some random Democratic National Committee staffer made a gay joke or interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile unethically slid Clinton a couple of forum questions in advance.
Democrats lost because Hillary Clinton was a horrible candidate who ran as if she were guaranteed victory. She didn’t run her campaign as if it were hers to lose, she ran it as if it were simply hers.
No hacker, Russian or otherwise, convinced Clinton to ignore Michigan and completely skip Wisconsin. No outside entity forced Hillary to set up a secret email server while Secretary of State. And no outfit, foreign or domestic, caused any of those emails to be written, any of those discussions to occur or any of those lies to be told. Democrats and members of the Clinton campaign did that all by themselves.
You can’t rob a bank and complain you are the real victim because there weren’t clear signs noting the security cameras that led to your conviction.
The Clinton campaign’s response to its loss is straight out of Scooby-Doo: We would have been elected if it hadn’t been for those meddling Russians!
Sorry, Hillary was an awful candidate. Her campaign was awful. Her argument for leading the country consisted of not being Donald Trump.
No hack made Hillary take millions for paid speeches. No leak set up the sketchy Clinton Foundation deals. Nothing computer related caused Hillary to lie about her mishandling of classified material. And no Russian anything caused Hillary to ignore, even belittle, a large swath of the American public. She did that all on her own.
In the end, it doesn’t matter who hacked the DNC or John Podesta. The perpetrators should be pursued because they committed crimes, but their identities and motives don’t matter. Their information was accurate.
The problem for Clinton and Democrats was the attitude revealed in the content of those emails. Whether they had been hacked and leaked or not, that attitude permeated the campaign and the last eight years, and millions of voters did not want any part of it.
The idea Russia “hacked” this election is just the latest attempt to damage Donald Trump’s presidency before it takes office. If Democrats want to know the true reason they lost they need look no further than the top of their ticket. No one can say which straw broke the camel’s back, but when it comes to Hillary Clinton there are bales to choose from.
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