Before the 2016 presidential elections Donald Trump's supporters were worried about Hillary Clinton's emails because of what they might disclose. But today they have no problem with very real evidence that says Russia was effectively running a Manchurian operation in America.
This is both interesting, and troubling.
As your conservative friends continue to embrace what Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange have to say, rather than look into what our intelligence community is presenting in real time, you can help check their unpatriotic enthusiasm for their new comrades in Russia. You can start by asking them about the following stories ...
From National Public Radio we get: "Putin Ordered 'Influence Campaign' to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Report Says." Some of the report's key findings include:
- Putin and the Russian Government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him."
- The report states that Putin's motivation to discredit Clinton was at least partially personal. It says he "publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him."
- Russian intelligence "conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 US presidential election, including targets associated with both major US political parties." This included primary campaigns, think tanks and lobbying groups.
- The report asserts with "high confidence" that Russia's General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate "relayed material it acquired from the [Democratic National Committee] and senior Democratic officials to Wikileaks."
- "Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards."
- Taken together, these efforts "represented a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations aimed at US elections."
Then we have the Washington Post reporting: "U.S. intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win":
Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.
The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country’s cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.
Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of “actors” involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website ...
The key for us today is how much the political Right is bending over to ignore what these developments say about their Manchurian President-elect. Oh, and they also don't want anyone paying attention to their less than patriotic response to Russian operations in America. They know it makes them look like (cough, cough) turncoats. So this is what we have. America's conservative class would rather install "their guy" in the White House than try to determine why Vladimir Putin disliked Hillary Clinton so much, while ignoring the real reasons why Russia wanted Trump in the first place. Simply put, conservatives in America want to ignore the larger reality because of what it tells them about their guy ...
Stay tuned. This is only going to get worse.
- Mark
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