Just in passing, I thought it might be worth mentioning that one of the main jobs of the Russian and ALL intelligence services is to try to swing elections in a direction that is favorable to their country. I have no idea of whether the Russians actually tried to swing the 2016 election in favor of Mr. Trump, but I doubt it for the reason stated below. But if they or another nation did try, they were knowingly abetted by U.S. citizens named Hillary Clinton and Podesta.
As I have said before in this space, the Russian, Israeli, Iranian, Chinese regimes, all NATO governments, and probably dozens of others have — thanks to their intelligence services — every one of the e-mails that Hillary Clinton and here correspondents put on her non-secure personal server.
For foreign governments this kind of e-mail haul is the stuff dreams are made of, but it becomes worthless if Clinton looses the election. If she wins, however, the foreign regimes are on easy street as they can exert an unprecedented level of effective blackmail against a President Hillary Clinton because they have documentary proof that she is a liar, a traitor, a racketeer, and — given press reports of her sordid and unhinged behavior on election night — a coward, or a drunk, or a drug user. No wretches on earth at this point in history are more susceptible to successful blackmail operations — or more frantic to fully hide or at least obfuscate their crimes by blaming Russia — than Hillary Clinton and her husband. Thankfully, she lost.
It has long been important that the great bulk of Americans begin to become adults, and this episode ought to give them a shot of maturity. Where was their outrage when Hillary Clinton’s State Department intervened in elections in Russia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, and Ukraine? In case of the Ukraine, she and her EU counterparts caused the downfall of the country’s pro-Russia government, and thereby gave Putin every right — indeed, the clear patriotic duty — to annex Crimea to protect Russia’s facilities for its Black Sea Fleet. All of the troubles the West now has with Russia flows from this mindless Clinton-EU intervention to change the regime in Ukraine. In Iran, Clinton and her State Department halfwits — and probably some EU regimes — sought to swing the election against the Mullahs, but failed and accomplished nothing but making themselves the cause of all the dead Iranian young people who Hillary encouraged to challenge that murderous Iranian regime unarmed.
Part of becoming an adult, of course, is reading and understanding history, and so learning how the always zero-sum world always works. Today’s perpetually adolescent American citizens — had they been properly educated — would know that history shows U.S. intelligence services, as well as the intelligence services of all nations who have the capability to do so, try to guide, alter, or control elections so as to serve their nation’s interests. South America, Eastern and Western Europe, and Africa have all been places where scholars have shown that foreign intelligence services have covertly and repeatedly intervened in elections. There is absolutely nothing new about this practice, it is very old hat and a time-honored tradition.
The new part of what can be called “election interventionism” lies in the invention of technologies pertinent to manipulating elections. The makers of computers, social-media systems, mobile phones, and a thousand other kinds of communication tools have made the world an easier place to live. Too often, however, all that most people think about is the pleasant side of the technologies, chanting childish and patently insane words about making all the world one big, united, talkative, and happily multicultural community. That sounds good to adolescents, but adults would know that hell lays on the other side of that coin. In devising these technologies, their creators also have built electronic gear which greatly advances the likelihood that invulnerable tyrannies and police states will be built by people who — like Hillary Clinton and her party — want permanent power and no resistance thereto. After all, if the security and intelligence services run by Hitler, Mao, and Stalin had today’s technologies, there would be no way to even try to change the German, Chinese, or Soviet police states, or any other police state, from within. Communications technology, in short, will inevitably pave the road to tyranny.
The bottom line, then, is that libraries are full of books showing that elections are the targets of all intelligence services — including those of the United States — and some have more luck than others. This is the way the game of international affairs has been played since at least 1945, and it will be played this way for as long as we can stave off the would-be tyrants that Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerburg have so blithely assisted.
If there is a question, however, about why Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and those of the DNC were hacked, the answer is because both Hillary and John Podesta thought that their e-mails were impregnable, and that they had corrupted the U.S. election process to the point where “Madame President” was unbeatable. They were not only wrong on that score, but used security protection that could have been — and probably was — hacked by 18-year-old, geeky high-school dropouts from Hoboken. Quite simply, Clinton and Podesta were astoundingly negligent, the former criminally so.
Infuriating though it is, Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Russia — and China, Iran, Israel, dozens of other countries, Julian Assange, and a gang of yet to be heard from folks — who seized the all-but-unprotected e-mails of Hillary Clinton. They demonstrated for thoroughly adolescent America that its national government — in the person of Hillary Clinton, her correspondents, and all the other agencies that have been hacked in the past decade — is either willfully negligent in protecting sensitive data or technologically incompetent to do so. It is no wonder America is consistently defeated on the battlefield, when it is led by politicians who refuse to obey the simple-to-comply-with laws that are in place to protect the republic’s sensitive electronic communications.
The foreigners also have taught us another much-needed lesson; namely, that that the laws of the United States are irrelevant, even laughable, if they are not enforced. Yes, we learned from the e-mails that Hillary Clinton is a criminal in every sense of the word, but most Americans knew that, and many were ready to vote for a criminal. But the most important thing we have learned is that Hillary Clinton and those government officials who dealt with her via that e-mail server — all of them violators of the espionage acts — have so far both flaunted and escaped what is, and must be, the hard-hand of the law on this issue.
What can be done by the citizenry when the national government refuses to enforce laws meant to defend the republic against enemies, as the saying goes, foreign and domestic? Well, the voters peacefully and fairly voted the Clinton crime family out of power, and they put in a new bunch on the condition that they be significantly more law abiding. But in the back of many minds there must be a lingering question of what can be done if the new folks offer the same kind of lawlessness.
It is in such a situation that knowledge of America’s history is a most useful resource. That knowledge teaches that it was once possible for Americans to defend themselves against domestic enemies, if the government refused to do so, or was just incompetent to do so. Indeed, the theme of citizens enforcing the law when the government will not, still reverberates in some of contemporary America’s popular music, and it provides all Americans with with a bit of nostalgia, perhaps even some food for thought.
Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street,
For all the people to seeWe got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
We’ve got too much corruption, too much crime in the streets
It’s time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send ’em all to their maker and he’ll settle ’em down
You can bet he’ll set ’em down (1)
Endnote
- Scott Emerick and Toby Keith, “Beer for my horses,” https://www.google.com/webhp?tab=nw&ei=6-pPWJyfDMTY-gGTg6qgDQ&ved=0EKkuCAUoAQ#q=beer+for+my+horses+lyrics