The Russians Ate This Blog

Hola Everybody,
I had written a whole blog justifying the widespread panic regarding the allegations that the Russians hijacked the presidential election. Unfortunately, a three-legged dog stole it, so you’re getting the following instead.

The Russians are Coming!

(Or: How I Stopped Thinking and Came to Love the CIA*)

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.
 -- Edward R. Murrow 

Have you no sense of decency, sir?
 -- Joseph N. Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy

There’s been a lot of hysteria emerging from the recent and unproven allegations that the Russians hacked our democracy with the intention of skewing the election in favor of Donald “Le Grand Orange” Trump. Proof you ask? Well, maybe you didn’t ask as you rushed out the door looking for the nearest nuclear bomb shelter, but the proof, as a Washington Post article alleges, lies in some secret CIA document (“assessment”) presented to legislators in recent days. Mind you, the anonymous sources cited in the article aren’t the ones who did the assessment, but are unnamed sources guessing at what the people who did the assessment were thinking!

If you think that’s weird, consider that leading the war cry are recalcitrant Hillary Clinton supporters (“pragmatic liberals”) who didn’t have a word to say when credible evidence (i.e., not a “secret document”) was provided regarding the thieving during the Democratic primaries that saw the DNC going in the tank for Hillary. If you doubt the veracity of the evidence in that instance, consider that top-level democratic operatives were forced to resign once the evidence came to the surface.

But back the WashPo article. Glenn Greenwald does a great take down of that particular hit piece masquerading as journalism here. Essentially Greenwald decries the irresponsibility of accusing a nuclear-armed power of directly and deliberately interfering in the U.S. election in order to help decide the winning candidate without any credible evidence. This is how wars are started -- or have we forgotten the Iraq war yet? The CIA is an organization dedicated to propaganda and professional lying. They brought us COINTELPRO (the documented campaign to sabotage the Civil Rights Movement) and Contra-Crack Cocaine. It gave us Pinochet in Chile, and the overthrow of freely elected leaders the world over, and we’re to take their word based on a “secret document”? 

So to sum it up: politicians, gullible people (aka pragmatic progressives), and the corporate press are now in high dudgeon over an allegation based on no evidence. Not even a smoking gun. 

Still, the election has been hijacked. However, the culprits likely weren’t the Russians but U.S. conservatives on both sides of the aisle. As previously noted, the DNC and news outlets were in cahoots against Bernie Sanders during the primaries. In fact, during one 16-hour period, the Washington Post managed to publish 16 negative Bernie Sanders stories. This is the same paper, by the way, that recently published an article decrying “fake news.” The irony is that the Post had to “append” that article after discovering their anonymous sources were flaky, to say the least. Hence, the same paper that used cowardly anonymous sources to besmirch legitimate news sources, itself trades in fake news. I can’t make this fuckin’ shit up, people.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have refused to take leadership in forcing a recount in states that show suspiciously skewed statistics. The real election culprit has been a Jim Crow-like attempt to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color. In the mean time, while the aforementioned pragmatic progressives waste their time whining about Russians, they have completely missed the essence of the problem. In the blackest city in the nation, Detroit, 87 vote machines broke on Election Day. That’s 59 percent of the voting machines there. Considering that Trump won Michigan by the tiniest of margins, you would think that the Democrats would be showing some leadership on this travesty. Actually, they are nowhere to be seen. The lone voice in the wild here is the Green Party’s Jill Stein. However, she’s probably run into a brick wall: Michigan officials passed a state law that says any time a vote counting machine breaks and causes it to display a different vote total than the one in the precinct log books, those votes legally can’t be recounted.

That’s a New New Jim Crow -- clearly a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. So “cousin Pookie” (a racist stereotype our current neoliberal president loves using to beat other black people over the head) did vote, but his vote didn’t count. Add to that the millions of Pookies who have lost their right to vote due to felony disenfranchisement, the millions of votes lost due to the racist and criminal practice of crosschecking, and right there alone you have the stealing of an election. There’s no need to go to Sarah Palin’s front porch to peer at Russia, the crimes are being committed here, on our soil. As Jill Stein points out, if you live in a rich white suburb, you have nothing to worry about. However, if you live in a multicultural urban enclave the chances of your vote being invalidated grows exponentially.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The same factors that skewed Detroit are played out throughout the country. We have an electoral system that’s antiquated, undemocratic, and racist. The least of our worries should be the Russians, or any outside entity. The enemy is within. All this let’s-kick-Russia-in-the-ass-rah-rah without a shred of evidence is pure insanity and eerily reminiscent of the lead-up to the Iraq war. Same con job.

If the CIA has credible and verifiable evidence that the Russian government conspired to have Trump ascend the seat of the most powerful office in the known universe, then by all means, publish it! Obama needs to declassify that assessment and throw it out there for public consumption. But (fuck!) let’s also look at the ways conservatives -- both Democrat and Republican -- game the system to invalidate votes and skew the results in their favor.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

*Apologies to the film, Dr. Strangelove, for mangling the title.

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