In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s upset victory in the presidential election, Hillary Clinton and her aides have done their best to get control of the post-election narrative. But in doing so they continue to exhibit the same blind spot that made it possible for Donald Trump to scale the once formidable blue wall in places like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to claim the presidency.
Clinton surrogates have asserted that her loss was the result of two “unprecedented factors”: Russian hacking of her campaign and the Democratic National Committee as well as FBI director James Comey’s announcement, just a few days before the election, that his agency had more materials to review on Clinton’s supposed email scandal.
Clinton’s assertions came at a “thank you” event in New York for major donors. The former secretary of state said that Russian president Vladimir Putin had targeted her campaign and the DNC for hacking because he had “a personal beef” with her for Clinton’s 2011 claim that Russia’s parliamentary elections were rigged. “We are well beyond normal political concerns here,” she said. “This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.”
In a Washington Post opinion piece, John Podesta, former chair of the Clinton campaign, lambasted the FBI for discovering the Russian attack in September 2015, as the New York Times has reported, yet failing to send an agent to warn DNC officials. Instead, the FBI left voicemail messages for a DNC computer technician.
As a former head of the FBI cyber division told the Times, this is a baffling decision: “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana.” What takes this from baffling to downright infuriating is that at nearly the exact same time that no one at the FBI could be bothered to drive 10 minutes to raise the alarm at DNC headquarters, two agents accompanied by attorneys from the Justice Department were in Denver visiting a tech firm that had helped maintain Clinton’s email server.
Former CIA acting director Michael ll, another Clinton partisan, ratcheted the moral outrage several notches higher, describing the intelligence agency’s assertion that Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election to help Donald Trump “the political equivalent of 9/11.”
Nowhere in the mix of after-action Clinton reflection is the reality that Trump carried a third of the 700 counties that President Obama carried in 2008 and 2012. In states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where this happened, there has been no real economic recovery. As documented by the Center for American Progress, a prolonged foreclosure crisis was still depressing home values in those places.
Even in defeat the Clinton forces remain oblivious to the motivations of voters who had voted for Obama twice but felt that after eight years they were worse off and voted for Trump. But the Clinton deflection is only part of the problem with the current debate over allegations that Russia covertly tried to influence the outcome of our elections. Depicting the United States as a hapless victim of the ruthless Russian cyber-bear is ahistorical, and ignores the decades when the U.S. did similar things and worse all around the world.
The FBI and CIA have a long track record of covertly manipulating politics both here and abroad and much of it remains classified to this day. While the Clintonistas may want a full disclosure of the FBI’s internal process involving her private email server, I am still holding out for the long-promised declassification of all the JFK assassination files.
None of this gives Vladimir Putin a pass. We don’t see enough reporting on the repression of religion and the media inside Putin’s Russia. But failing to acknowledge our own dark side when it comes to internal and external covert operations to twist political outcomes makes us look hypocritical in a world where so many nations have been victimized by our covert machinations, often with deadly consequences.
Evidently, this is the real-world meaning of “American exceptionalism,” where only we are exempt from the requirement to respect other nations’ sovereignty. There’s no better example of this than the 2014 Edward Snowden revelations that the U.S. had spied on many other countries, even allies like Germany, France, Italy and Japan.
There is also the overt overseas business through which the American professional political class makes them vast sums of money, advising business-friendly foreign candidates in numerous countries how best to win elections. This was depicted on the big screen in the Sandra Bullock movie “Our Brand Is Crisis,” based on Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary of the same name.
For decades both Democrats and Republicans working for Washington law firms and global crisis management outfits like Hill & Knowlton or Black Manafort & Stone have helped the world’s most brutal and oppressive regimes hang on to power and marginalize their opponents, all while continuing to get U.S. military aid. Back in 1993 the Center for Public Integrity’s “Torturer’s Lobby” mapped out how the likes of Jonas Savimbi used this netherworld of creepy crawlers to help fund his brutal campaign in Angola, which employed child soldiers and deployed so many land mines it created an army of civilian amputees of all ages.
According to Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” early on in its history our nation started picking geopolitical winners and losers:
Source: Salon: in-depth news, politics, business, technology & culture > Politics
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