Two Paths Leading Backwards

Let me suggest that it is impossible to have just one bad political party for any length of time. If you had a good party and a bad party, everyone would vote for the good party and the bad party would be forced to be competitive if it wanted to survive. The good party would push the dividing line further towards the bad party, forcing the weaker of the two to incorporate stances held by the winning party. At some point, the dividing line would land roughly halfway between the will of the people.

One political party can move the line left or right, but it takes both of them, one standing at either end, to raise or lower the bar. What you are witnessing now is a limbo contest of epic proportions.

I used to vote for Democrats, not because they were what I wanted but because they were at least moving forward. As someone who defined himself as progressive, that was the logical choice. Or at least the justifiable compromise. But with the advent of Bill Clinton, it was pretty obvious that they were no longer even standing still, they were going backwards. All right, it wasn’t so obvious to me, since I voted for the man, at least the first time around. But doing so made me feel cheap and used the morning after, an effect he had on a few others, I imagine. I don’t remember the particular incident, but I truly remember in the first week after him becoming president, the regret sinking in. Sure, presidents once they’ve transitioned from candidate to office always disappoint, but this one really made me realize I had to change my behavior.

When someone can no longer identify with the party they have voted for all their lives, they typically switch to the other, but that is not a viable option in this case. Though Democrats have ceased to be Democrats and moved way further to the right, Republicans are still in the lead and running as if the devil himself was trying to overtake them.

You see, it doesn’t matter which side of the line you are on so much as where the line is. And if someone keeps dragging the line to the right and you follow along but do not cross it, that doesn’t make you a progressive. The very fact that you follow every time the line is positioned further to the right indicates you are not an answer nor an opposition.

But enough of the x axis, it is the y axis I’m more interested in. And the bar has been falling. It is continuing to fall. It is in the negatives now, retreating with no signs of abatement. And while each party is going backwards in its own special way, they are both doing so in tandem.

Conservatives are attempting to go back to the way it (never was but they believe it) used to be, for white and white-identifying people. Cultural myths are comforting, because they are both idyllic and simplistic. They want to go back to Mayberry, they want the little town that is not influenced by the outside world that is so corrupting (and different). They want a world that is black and white. Mostly white.

There would be a few modifications to the Mayberry blueprint, however. For example, the first time Sheriff Andy Taylor tried to take the bullets away from Barney’s gun, they’d call in the NRA and have him driven out of town, to be replaced by David Clarke or Joe Arpaio.

Better yet, the new sheriff would be played by Charles Bronson, and each episode he’d be sure to pop a cap in someone’s ass. Tax payers supporting Otis’ life of addiction? A bullet’s cheaper than the cost of putting him up for the night (unless, of course, the jail was privatized, in which case Otis’ stay would be indefinite).

But it would be justice, only the bad guys would get hurt. Of course, the definition of bad guys would be very liberal, encompassing anyone who was not a conservative.

Conservatives want to venerate and preserve the past, no matter how crappy it might have been for many Americans. Japanese Americans, African Americans, migrants in general. It was pretty bad for poor whites ignorant of their history too, but that’s a stratum of society that seems to repeat the same mistakes over and over. At any rate, conservatives want to keep the memory of America’s glorious past alive, they just don’t want to think critically about it or discuss it. It is not history they wish to remember, it is myth. But one has to wonder how people who cannot face the complexity and unpleasant truth of the past see the present for what it is. If you cannot see the racism in the past, what makes anyone think you see it for what it is now?

Hard work is what built this nation, that’s the rallying cry of the conservatives, neglecting to mention whose sweat and labor that was. It was the labor of immigrants and slaves, of children as young as 8 working 60-hour weeks as breaker boys, sometimes losing their limbs and even their lives to the dangerous machinery they were more familiar with than their own beds.

Work hard and don’t expect to be given anything. That’s the advice I would give to my child if I were a wealthy capitalist. Work hard and don’t expect to be given anything. That’s the advice I would give to my employees if I were a wealthy capitalist too, but for entirely different reasons.

Conservatives want to go back to the era of fewer restrictions for business, without ever looking back at that era and the misery created by it. The thinking of conservatives is that they are going to succeed because they are hard-working and things will work out for them. They figure since they were the one sperm out of a million that fertilized the egg that they are special, not realizing everyone alive was created that way.

If conservatives have regressed into a sort of tribalism, then liberals have regressed into infantilism. They don’t want to build mass movements to take power into their own hands, they want Daddy Deep State to make the Big Bad Trump-Monster go away. They want Mommy Media to hold them in her arms and tell them she’ll keep them safe from the Russian hackers under their bed.

Never in my life have I experienced a doe-eyed child whole-heartedly swallow a story an authority figure has told them the way liberals have the Russian hacking story. And I’ve been around to witness the Benghazi conspiracy theories.

The liberals believe because they want to believe. No, they believe because they need to believe. They need to believe that our nation has not come to this, even though it has quite clearly come to this. They need to believe that Donald Trump was not at the end of the road we’ve been walking for a generation and more. DAMN IT ALL, ALL WE HAD TO DO WAS ELECT HILLARY AND EVERYTHING WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE IT USED TO BE!!! And how it used to be was pretty good for those not losing their jobs, watching their paychecks get stretched further and further, or being incarcerated for minor drug offences. Or dying on foreign soil.

Liberals are looking for a quick fix to make life the way it was before. Not a hundred years ago, just last year. Somehow the idea that the present flowed logically from yesterday doesn’t seem to occur to them. There was no natural progression from the world they helped shape to the reality they now experience. Trump came out of nowhere, a deus ex machina to a cheaply written novel. It is a story involving one-dimensional villains wearing black but always white. If only there was a Condoleezza Rice or Collen Powell to stand up for truth, justice and the American way.

We needed a villain to blame, since we weren’t in the mood for looking in the mirror. Blaming terrorists was getting old, and more than a little awkward since Hillary was helping them overthrow nations. Besides, it’s politically incorrect to blame people of Middle East descent for all that has gone wrong, though oddly enough it seemed permissible to kill them and take their oil to fuel our SUVs. We needed to tie Donald Trump to the most reprehensible people imaginable, those forces that from our earliest memories were the symbols of all that is evil in the world. Let’s see, who could we get?

Putin! Yes, the leader of the Evil Empire.

Never mind that Russia is not the Soviet Union and Evil Empire was Ronald Reagan’s term, not one those on the left ever used. Ronald Reagan and Joseph McCarthy. The Republicans liberals used to hate are their friends now, at least those who are willing to dis on Trump. And while we’re dipping into the well of our deepest subconscious stereotypes, let’s add fascists to the list. Never mind the mixed metaphor, never mind the fact that there is nothing so abominable in the collective memory of Russians as fascism or Nazism. Never mind that the U.S. is supporting far-right regimes on Russia’s borders.

And so liberals simplified the narrative enough that they need not do anything beyond hate everyone that disagrees with them as they await further instructions from anonymous sources from intelligence agencies we’ve never heard of.

And where are the adults in all of this? At the margins, the far end of the right and the left who seem to have more in common with each other than they do with those closest to them. They sit on the margins not because they are that distant from what the majority of Americans want so much as they are there because the story they tell is not the one the mainstream media wants. At the edges sit those who 40 years ago would have been mainstream Democrats and Republicans, but have been kicked to the curb by a cancer that has grown in between them. It is a cancer that both margins see clearly, though each from its particular vantage point. The right sees a bloated government trampling on the rights of the individual, while the left sees bloated corporate power that needs to be reined in. But that bloated cancer in the middle is what is paying the big money to get those in the middle elected, those politicians willing to allow that festering bag of corruption into the hallowed halls of our government.

Thus there is no dividing line between the two parties anymore, not in any true sense. They have both been absorbed by that pulsating evil at the center of our society, the big money that controls the big government. To squabble about the minor differences as seen from the left perspective or the right perspective is foolish.

And thus we have two paths, both leading downward through their unrealistic desire to revert rather than advance. But even while there are differences in the two political approaches of the liberals and conservatives, there are many similarities. Both have chosen hatred, division and self-delusion as their responses to the problems we now face. The irony being that the most dangerous problems we now face are hatred, division and self-delusion.

Two Parties, One Failed Political Process

Interesting times we are living in. We have two parties and no vision for the future coming from either of them.

In any other age, any war that was fought was sold with the promise that it was fought to bring about peace, justice, and renewed prosperity. Not so, nowadays. War is now fought to punish bad guys. And since dropping bombs on people tends to bring out the worst in them, we are merely creating more bad guys. There is no end to the wars we fight, because we fight wars on behest of the weapons manufacturers, not for a better tomorrow. We fight wars for corporate interests, and corporate interests run contrary to the interests of the citizens of the countries we bomb. Therefore, we will never be able to bomb them into seeing our country’s point of view.

There is no path to peace, only rationalizations for the next war (which does not replace but is added to the pile of wars we are already fighting). There is no path towards prosperity, other than cutting taxes for the very wealthy, and signing trade agreements written by those same tax-avoiding corporations.

On the issues where the two main parties agree—the federal reserve, never opposing war, never doing anything about climate change, bailing out failed banks without demanding accountability or changing the rules, increased surveillance, etc.—they are both firmly on the side of powerful interests against the citizenry. Where the two parties disagree, each of them floats into some fantasy world detached from the realities the common person cares about. (Transgender use of bathrooms? Why did that suddenly become the dominant news topic for months on end?) Or else they label the other in the most absurd and extremist way by disallowing any middle ground. Most people sit somewhere in the middle on issues such as gun control and abortion, but Republicans and Democrats would make you believe that there is no middle.

Somehow, some way, Republicans managed to get themselves elected not only to the Presidency, but a majority of both houses of Congress, and most of the governorships, on issues that most people find repugnant. Voters had very genuine issues with the Affordable Care Act and were hoping for the Republican opposition to replace it with something better. And yet the Republicans could only come up with something worse, could only imagine stripping the better parts from an otherwise terrible idea.

Republicans are in charge and are incapable of doing anything. And they’re incapable of pushing through any of their ideas because they know there will be nobody to blame but themselves. For the last eight years their whole identity was to be a resistance to the Democrats and that foreign-born President of theirs. It’s really easy to tear down what someone else is trying to build up, it’s a lot harder to do the building up.

Now it is the Democrat’s turn to be the party out of office, the ones who oppose everything the other party does. Not in a rational, principled, or constructive manner, but in a knee-jerk sort of way. Find an issue you can exploit and drive the wedge in deep, regardless of whether such distractions harm the populace.

As the Republicans are unable to do anything because they have no one to blame for their failures, so to do the Democrats seek to avoid actually taking a position while hurling vitriol at all things Republican. To take a position of their own, to promise to actually work for the American people should they be elected, is a bridge too far. Unlike Trump who was willing to promise anything and everything to get elected, most Democrats have been around a while and know it’s safer to offer platitudes without actually saying something that might come back to bite them in the butt. They have yet to appreciate and mimic the genius of Trump, which is to speak so absurdly that supporters can only see what they wish to see in the candidate.

But what has the resistance accomplished so far, other than making itself look ridiculous? What is the Democratic strategy to defeat the ignorance and hatred they see in the Trump movement, other than showing themselves capable of an equal degree of ignorance and hatred? Their one hope seems to be to play nice with the deep state in hopes that it will eventually exert its power and rid them of Trump.

There is not an adult in the room, other than the deep state. And the deep state is quite willing to have the focus be on the warring children rather than themselves. Politics as it stands now is a Jerry Springer Show and we simply cannot permit ourselves to take seriously anyone who would walk on that stage. New outlets must be established, our trust in the media outlets and power structures that have led us to this point must be redirected into people and groups who prove worthy of trust. We must finally realize that any institution taking vast sums of money from powerful interests are innately unworthy of our trust.

We must divert our energies from the large institutions that have only their own interests at heart. And perhaps even more important, we must divert our mental focus from the narrative that such institutions have woven for us. Until we can free ourselves from the perspective and world-view that now box us in, we cannot help but be part of the machine that is busily tearing down humanity, our resources, our environment, and our future.

Losing At A Not So Trivial Game

Since 2,000, the Democrats have lost the presidency to George W. Bush and Donald Trump. I’ll just pause for a moment while you contemplate the degree of losertude required to accomplish such failure. George Bush could not win at Who’s Smarter Than A 1^st Grader, while Donald Trump shouldn’t even be allowed in the same room as children. If either one of them was to be on Dancing With The Stars, he’d be the first one to be voted off. If they were on The Dating Game, they wouldn’t be picked even if the third contestant was Richard Speck and the woman doing the choosing was a nursing student. If the two of them played Trivial Pursuit, they couldn’t beat your cat.

Go ahead, imagine for a moment how that game might go down, imagine Trump and W. sitting around a dinner table, you might as well throw in Sarah Palin for good measure. True, Sarah lost in 2008, but it was only because the nation was in the midst of a financial meltdown the likes of which we have not seen in nearly 80 years.

First of all, you know one of them is going to call it the Genius Edition and none of the others is going to correct him (with the possible exception of your cat). Imagine too the conversation as they struggle to pronounce words and names such as pharmaceutical, isthmus, Medici, Diogenes, and Francois Mitterand. You can just hear Palin massacre the name of Charlemagne and Trump correcting her with something even worse, can’t you?

Imagine the response you’d get to a question like “What black author wrote Another Country and Nobody Knows My Name?” Or “What U.S. president declared ‘The ballot is stronger than the bullet?’” Or “How many stripes did the flag first called The Star Spangled Banner have?” Or “What was stormed in Paris in 1789?”

Just close your eyes and it is easy to visualize them studiously avoiding the categories of History, Arts And Literature, Geography, and Science And Nature, hoping instead to get lucky with a Sports or Entertainment question.

And you just know, two hours into the game, that when they are on Roll Again and they roll a 4, they’re still going to have to count it out to get to the other Roll Again. Of course, long before then, they’ll already be blaming others for their abysmal inability to get a single slice of pie. Sarah will be accusing the creators of the game of being Ivy League liberals while Trump will be saying the answer is not right while providing no evidence that he even understood the question. It will be accompanied all the while by W.’s patented idiot chuckle as he sits and grins and time after time grabs the die, believing it is his turn when it is not. And should one of them whine their way or connive their way into a slice of pie, they’ll put it in sideways and you’ll end up the next day trying to pull it out with a pair of tweezers, all the while cursing their names.

Now imagine losing to that.

Imagine being on the side that actually knew many of the answers to those questions and yet losing to the others in election after election.

If you were laughing at the earlier descriptions of Trump, W., and Sarah, I’m guessing you’re not laughing now. Doesn’t that warrant a long, hard look in the mirror? Doesn’t that make you stop dead in your tracks and question your most basic assumptions of the world you are living in?

You can blame other people, I suppose. You can blame all the people who voted for Donald Trump and call them stupid and evil. You can hate people who didn’t see things your way and hope they all die and have their jobs exported or eliminated by technology. It sounds a lot like the very thing you say you oppose, but you could do that. You can blame the Russians, it’s quite tempting, although I don’t see how even Putin would find Donald Trump someone he’d want with keys to a nuclear arsenal. You can blame the Bernie Bros, assigning them a label in order to stereotype and denigrate them.

There’s a lot of things and people you can blame for the fact that Hillary Clinton lost, for the fact that Democrats are consistently losing to candidates that look and smell like something that just crawled of your toilet. But winners don’t blame others, losers do. Winners take honest stock of what they’ve done wrong in order that they can stop doing that and do something better. I haven’t seen a single hopeful sign of that happening.

Oh sure, Democrats have unveiled a new game plan. As I recall, they also had a game plan in 2,000 and 2,016, too. They had boatloads of strategists, advertising agents, propagandists, spinmeisters—whatever you want to call them—figuring out how to best project their candidate in order to match with focus groups in ways that would connect (I could have probably phrased that better to sound more like those kind of people, but I have rejected walking down that path even if only to understand and mimic it). Democrats spent $10 for every vote for their candidate, and still couldn’t win against a meaner, cruder version of Uncle Buck.

But the Democrats have revealed that they have found their problem and are working to improve it. It was not that there was anything wrong with their platform, it was that they weren’t doing a good job of communicating their message. $1.2 billion dollars on campaign funding for Hillary’s campaign. Able to buy the most brilliant and evil story tellers. Those guys who sell diabetes to children and cancer to smokers, they could not sell your product.

The Democrats say they have not been doing a good job of getting their message out, the obvious implication being that George W. and Donald Trump were masterful communicators. Let’s face it, the Democrats don’t want to change their product—and let’s face it, product is the right word—they want to change the packaging.

The Democrats won’t change, they can’t change. They can’t change because they are a corporation that exists only to make a profit for its shareholders. If a candidate is good at selling the product that shareholders want to sell, they’ll make a lot of money. If someone actually questions the mission statement they’ll be out the door without a severance package.

The Democrats can’t win, either. They can’t win because they are only a diluted version of the Republicans. They are Bud Light compared to Bud, and most people, if they like drinking mass-produced fizz-water, will choose the real thing. Changing the name to America isn’t going to make it more palatable, nor does it make it a real alternative.

It doesn’t matter to the shareholders whether the Democrats win or lose, because they own the competition as well. If the Democrats win, they’ll make money, but if the Democrats lose, they’ll make more. And all those micro-breweries trying to provide an alternative to the big guys? They’re systematically being squeezed off the shelf or bought out. So much for choice.

But the game goes on, until enough people refuse to play it. Donald will continue to “accidentally” move his pie three spaces instead of two and get away with it because that’s the rules that have been determined. The precedent has been set, the game has been crooked for so long there are no rules anyone adheres to anymore. Trump is merely the most grievous example of a game we should never have agreed to play.

We should have walked away a long time ago, insisted on more accountability, insisted someone with integrity be allowed to hold onto the rule book. But as long as we were able to get our slice of pie, we allowed it to happen. But now all the pieces of pie have been handed out, some people having more pieces than will ever fit in their pie while others, smart and hard-working though they be, have nothing. Like the Wheel of Samsara, still the game goes on.

Syria, Russia, And What I Can Say With Certainty (Part 2)

In my last blog I stated that I couldn’t be certain that President Assad did not use chemical weapons on his own people. Today I would like to state that I do not know for certain that Russia did not do the thing. After all, I am not privy to the information available to the people who make the secret documents that said Russia did the thing. Of course, the very fact that the people who said Russia did the thing are not forthcoming with the evidence is one of the reasons why I am unable to state anything with certainty. In fact, the very people who say Russia did the thing are hiding in the shadows. The people who have the secret knowledge that leads us to war couldn’t find someone to step forward to put his face and reputation on the product they are selling. Perhaps everyone learned from Colin Powell’s example.

Now I’m sure a lot of people reading this are angry about my characterizing what occurred as “Russia doing the thing”. In their minds it is quite clear that Russia hacked the DNC’s files in order to release them and cause embarrassment for their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, causing her to lose. We will discuss the likelihood and possible impact of that later. My point is, once that idea got into the minds of those who wanted Hillary as president and were in denial about the election of Trump, it opened whole new vistas in their minds. Vague notions floated in the minds of Hillary supporters. Unlimited depths of subterfuge must have been involved in order for them to be so out of touch with reality. An explanation was required (one not blaming Hillary Clinton or the DNC), and Russian hacking was something to hold on to.

I’m not saying Russia didn’t hack the DNC, I’m just saying the story has taken control of the minds of the Democrats and is being used as an excuse to avoid confronting the President on the issues that mattered to Bernie Sanders supporters: climate change, peace, single payer health care, etc. Instead, the Russian hacking story can now be used to support the wars the Democrats never seemed to have a problem with in the first place, though they are ostensibly the peace party by default. The line between Democrats and Republicans needed to be clear, and Russian hacking was just the issue. It was the perfect distraction for the fact that the neocons in the middle were agreeing far more than appearances dictated.

The idea was seized upon by Democrats whose comfortable and convenient conception of reality just got flushed down the toilet. It was a convenient escape hatch for those who didn’t want to face reality. And Putin was the perfect strawman, the Darth Vader or Valdemort in their adolescent escapist fantasies. The all-seeing eye that sat enthroned in the lands to the east sees all, pierces clouds, shadow, earth, and flesh. Let the theories and the imagination run wild.

If Putin was capable of swinging the election, just how far did his involvement go? Is Trump a dupe unwittingly controlled by Russian operatives? Is he a willing traitor to his country? Is he a Manchurian Candidate who was mind-controlled through the use of brainwashing and drugs?

Did the Russians help him overcome his Republican candidates as well, knowing that he could then defeat Hillary? Did the Russians have secret videos of Russian prostitutes peeing on Donald Trump which they were using to blackmail him? Did Russian hackers cause Brexit? Did Russians hack a Vermont utility grid? How much more are the Russians responsible for that we’ve been unaware of until this moment?

All of these theories accepted as fact rest upon the statements of anonymous agents with dubious motives. Cults are formed on revelations that don’t stand the light of criticism, reason, or facts. Cult leaders do everything in their power to assure you that the world is out to get you and that they alone possess the facts you seek.

That’s the problem with speculation without verification. Once you start down that road there’s nothing holding you back from traveling a road free of facts. There’s nothing keeping you tied to reality. That is the road to madness.

When reality becomes too unpleasant, it’s time to create a fantasy world to live in. You may disagree with my assessment that this is what you’ve done, but anyone viewing it from the outside can see it quite clearly.

It might all seem as clear as day to you, but to someone willing to pepper their thoughts with a degree of skepticism, it seems much different. One could compare it to Orwell’s 1984, but I prefer comparing it to Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In it a man is accused of some unstated crime by anonymous sources. Throughout the entire novel he is never given the relevant information as to his situation but must instead rely on the government’s assertions. With the entire Russian hacking story, we are not given the information thoughtful people require to make intelligent decisions but are instead given the choice between accepting the narrative supplied by anonymous authorities or else be labeled ignorant and traitorous by the official media outlets.

Which puts a lot of Left-leaning people in a very difficult position. To say that Clinton lost because of the positions she chose to defend, and perhaps worse, to suggest she lost because she refused to defend the principles most important to the left, has become tantamount to treason. To want more liberal and progressive policies from the left is no longer acceptable. A line has been drawn in the sand as to what can and cannot be discussed. There is such a thing as being too liberal, and those who ask too much from the left are not actually leftists but persons willing to betray their country and leave it in the hands of the enemy, namely Donald Trump, AKA Putin’s puppet.

Of course, the underlying rationale here is that the reason the establishment candidate lost is because the stupid traitorous Bernie Bros didn’t accept the only rational choice and vote for Clinton. Because of this we now have Soviet troops goose stepping down main street (don’t worry about inaccuracies or mixed metaphors, only Russian stooges would do such a thing. In fact, it is best you keep your mouth shut and your critical thinking skills in neutral). And whatever you do, don’t stop to think that the Republicans won by voting for the outsider candidate and perhaps that is a tactic the Left might employ. This is not the way Democrats do things—better to vote for the compromise candidate and lose than risk what lay beyond the accepted limits proscribed by the party. Whatever the Democrats say, it is they and not the Republicans keeping socialized medicine from becoming a talking point.

Here are some of the problems I have with the official story as delivered by James Comey and the anonymous minions who are quoted by reporters who do not investigate:

• ·         The portrait drawn of Putin is of some grandmaster chessman both complicit in everything that is wrong in the U.S. and as evil as Boris Badinov. His motivations are that of an imp looking to create chaos in any manner possible for us. Such a template is the same one used over and over whenever the U.S. wants to take military action.
• ·         Implicit in our demonization of Vladimir Putin is that something should be done about him. We miss the old days when a Western backed drunk like Boris Yeltsin permitted his country to run according to our blueprint. In other words, our worst fears are that Russia might be doing to us what we have already done to them.
• ·         If Russians hacked the DNC then Clinton’s use of emails was every bit as damaging as the Republicans said it was.
• ·         If the Russians were responsible for Wikileaks’ revelations, then the assertion is that they were the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election, not James Comey’s late hour announcement that they were reviewing her emails. Not being a fan of Hillary Clinton myself, I perused the evidence Wikileaks released and found them a bit of a yawn. Believe me, if there was something there I thought was particularly damning against Hillary, I would have shared it. But I did not do so even once.
• ·         The revelations in Wikileaks were too elaborate to be effective propaganda. They required thought and an attention span. If Russia had wanted to influence the elections in favor of Donald Trump, there were far more effective means of doing so. Do what all politicians everywhere do: lie. Make allegations that ISIS had video of prostitutes peeing on Hillary, cast doubts upon the nation of Hillary’s birth. Just make something up. How naïve must the Russians be if they think truth has any part in swaying the U.S. elections?
• ·         Intelligence agencies reveal information for a specific reason, not because they believe the American public has a right to know. Any information they release is in order to advance an agenda. Hence the reason we were never told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until we wanted to overthrow the man we sold such weapons to in the first place. Ironically, by that time he no longer had them. The point is, there is a reason the intelligence agencies released information—or, rather, assertions—that the election was hacked. They want the population to react in a certain manner, or else they would have dealt with any possible hacking covertly as they do with most things.
• ·         If we truly had any interest in protecting our nation against the influence of other nations, we would have done something about Israel and Saudi Arabia long ago. No candidate can hope to gain the presidency without first kowtowing to AIPAC, the lobbying group whose job it is to promote strong support for Israel. As for Saudi Arabia, you might want to check how much they’ve contributed to The Clinton Foundation, all for humanitarian concerns, no doubt. It’s hard to find people more concerned about the welfare of others than the House Of Saud.
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• Lastly, the primary doubt I have about the Russian hacking story is the media that has presented it. But that I will save for my next blog, the third and final of “Syria, Russia, And What I Can Say With Certainty”.