After nearly two years of a systematic Democrat smoke-and-mirrors smear campaign, amplified and perpetually recycled by a nonstop fake news media juggernaut, there is yet to be presented any credible hard evidence, anywhere, of interference by the Russian state in U.S. elections. Merely because the media has adopted it as an article of faith in their ruthless ongoing effort to frame Donald Trump and his campaign for “collusion” with the Russians does not make it so.
This is not to say that the Russians have not attempted to insinuate themselves into American politics, even if only on the margins. But so far we are expected to believe nothing more solid than a sketchy supposed digital trail which we are told (not shown) leads back to a Russian intelligence unit, again without any verifiable details. Conveniently, this “evidence” will only have to be presented if the named Russian personnel appear in U.S. court to answer the indictments brought against them, something the Russian Interference Special Counsel and his subordinates know very well is an extremely unlikely scenario.
Whatever the case, it should be abundantly clear to any honest, rational person that the “Russian collusion” smear campaign against Donald Trump and his supporters has been a malicious ulterior-motivated hoax, cynically perpetrated on America by the most underhanded partisans ever to afflict our country. While Americans are no doubt thoroughly impressed by the lily-pure pearl-clutching Trump resisters and their eminently civil, always classy, never dishonest or despicable tactics, their sudden pseudo-patriotic affinity for national security police state apparatuses and the “intelligence community” is a bit much to swallow.
Some of us remember a time when there were principled members of both parties who were genuinely outraged at the sort of manipulation by our own intelligence services that we have seen at work in this Russian interference/collusion distraction. Seeing the entire Democrat party, a portion of the Republican party, the corporate left-wing media and all of the so-called “progressives” now blindly falling into line behind this farce, slathering praise all over an unaccountable police state type intelligence superstructure for no reason other than it serves their narrow partisan political purposes, is chilling to say the least.
Those of us aware of the long history of duplicity, deception and disruption that trails these murky government bureaus are not about to join those living in the fantasy world in which the massive U.S. national security surveillance capabilities now in existence could never possibly be abused, much less by a corrupt political cabal with total control over its levers. Some of us simply cannot adopt the stunningly hypocritical premise that the United States ‘intelligence’ community and its political denizens can credibly feign outrage over efforts by any foreign power to meddle in our domestic politics or elections. The sad, disconcerting truth is that such foreign insinuations would be just a mere taste of the medicine our own government has been doling out around the globe for the better part of a century.
Forgive me if this is old news, but powerful agencies of the government of the United States have undertaken to interfere in and influence national and presidential elections in foreign countries at least 81 times between 1946 and 2000! This does not even account for military coups or general “assistance” with foreign elections, such as by monitoring. Of these scores of attempts to interfere in foreign elections, 59% were successful. By contrast, the Russian state has attempted to influence about 36 elections worldwide during the same time period.
The term “influencing” in this context can mean anything from dumping huge amounts of cash to the candidate of our liking to outright rigging the vote count to leaking damaging information to the media to harm disfavored candidates or parties to threatening to cutoff the subsidies we provide foreign countries via huge loan packages and other forms of aid.
Call it what you like, I’m talking about election meddling, which has been at the forefront of media chatter and endless partisan accusations in our country for the better part of two years. Russian hacking? How about American hacking??
Unlike nearly all other nations that might undertake to interfere with another country’s internal politics, on the rare occasion U.S. efforts to rig, or otherwise control, a country’s elections fail, we don’t simply give up. When meddling doesn’t achieve the desired result, covert military action has quite often been instigated…and people have died…LOTS of people.
In 1954 our CIA and State Department trained a small army of mercenaries to violently overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. A supposed “people’s” army led by Colonel Castillo Armas, a CIA-handpicked military strongman, ultimately established a violent, repressive fascist government that was responsible for thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths throughout its bloody reign of terror. This American engineered coup in Guatemala was hardly an isolated incident. We have either installed or supported dozens of repressive, fascist leaders around the world since the 1940’s.
If I told you that the U.S. interfered with a Russian presidential election would you believe me? Well, we did. In 1996 Russian President Boris Yeltsin was running for re-election. U.S. President Bill Clinton wanted Yeltsin to win a second term. Because of the terrible state of the Russian economy at the time, Yeltsin was not favored to win. Not one to be denied, Clinton authorized the formation of a group of ‘private’ U.S. citizens to infiltrate Russia and ensure Yeltsin’s re-election. They were given an unlimited budget and had no accountability. The group spent four months working in Russia to ensure Yeltsin’s victory.
Meanwhile, Clinton ensured an IMF loan to Russia of $10.2 billion, cash which Yeltsin spread around, effectively buying votes and ultimately winning Yeltsin his second term as Russia’s president. Time magazine even did a cover story in its July 15, 1996 issue on how the United States “steered” the Russian presidential election. Speculation was rampant that the official results were basically rigged.
All of this certainly sounds to me like President William Jefferson Clinton had colluded with those (evil) Russians, and quite openly at that. In reality, Clinton and Yeltsin liked each other and had secretly agreed to mutually support each others’ bids for reelection. This secret agreement came to light when a White House memo leaked and was published by the Washington Times in March 1996.
Clinton called the leak a violation of federal law and opened a criminal investigation. White House press secretary Mike McCurry explained that Clinton considered “the leak to be far more sensitive than the typical anonymous disclosure” because “the president feels like he ought to be able to sit down with the president of Russia and have a private conversation.”
You just read that correctly: Clinton and his cohorts argued that as president he should be able to have “a private conversation” with the Russian president. Is this not something that the Democrats have been lambasting President Trump for doing, with such vicious fervor in some cases that intelligence spooks on far-left media networks went so far as to accuse the president of treason??
Of course, being a Democrat, Bill Clinton can do no wrong and, as we all know from his track record, is above reproach in all things, just like his power-mongering loser of a spouse…clean as the driven snow (on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike, three days on). Clinton, we are told, was working to “normalize” relations with Russia, no different than what Trump has been trying to do, to the great consternation of the permanent Beltway neocon warhawks itching for the confrontation with Russia that the Cold War never produced, thanks in huge part to the personal efforts of President Ronald Reagan to bridge the U.S.-Soviet divide in “collusion” with then Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.
This is not to say Trump is dealing with the same circumstances as his predecessors, but the core of the relationship remains the same – one that could easily be strengthened for the better or exacerbated for the worse. To reinforce my point that the U.S. intelligence community and its domestic political puppets are hardly credible in whining about election meddling, from any other nation, here is a short list of our country’s election interference activities: Italy in 1948, Iran in 1952, Japan in the 1950’s, the Philippines in 1953, Chile in 1970, Bolivia in 2002, Palestine in 2006, Libya in 2011 and Israel in 2016.
There are many more instances and dozens more of a violent nature. For additional information and sources, the following links are quite detailed and helpful.
