The Left Beclowns Itself As It Attempts To #StopTrump
Progressive left leveraging Electoral College, Russia, the kitchen sink to undermine Trump
Since the night of the election, when media coverage of election night went from joyous to stunned to near-weepy, the progressive left has been in a self-righteous lather about President-elect Trump’s victory. They are pulling out all stops in an effort to undermine President-elect Trump and his presidency. Indeed, they seem intent on seeing that he not take office at all.
Blaming everything and everyone but themselves and their candidate (with a few notable exceptions), the left took to the streets to riot, they took up their pens to advocate the end of the Electoral College, they bully and harass electors attempting to sway their votes, and they’ve recently landed on Russian involvement in the elections.
Attributed to the culture of each agency, the FBI is uncomfortable stating that the Russians definitely intended to help President-elect Trump because there is no factual evidence to support that conclusion; the CIA, on the other hand, is more comfortable with drawing inference from evidence and results and states confidently that Russia did indeed intend to help Trump.
In a secure meeting room under the Capitol last week, lawmakers held in their hands a classified letter written by colleagues in the Senate summing up a secret, new CIA assessment of Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.
Sitting before the House Intelligence Committee was a senior FBI counterintelligence official. The question the Republicans and Democrats in attendance wanted answered was whether the bureau concurred with the conclusions the CIA had just shared with senators that Russia “quite” clearly intended to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton and clinch the White House.
For the Democrats in the room, the FBI’s response was frustrating — even shocking.
During a similar Senate Intelligence Committee briefing held the previous week, the CIA’s statements, as reflected in the letter the lawmakers now held in their hands, were “direct and bald and unqualified” about Russia’s intentions to help Trump, according to one of the officials who attended the House briefing.
The FBI official’s remarks to the lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee were, in comparison, “fuzzy” and “ambiguous,” suggesting to those in the room that the bureau and the agency weren’t on the same page, the official said.
The divergent messages from the CIA and the FBI put a spotlight on the difficulty faced by intelligence and law enforcement officials as they try to draw conclusions about the Kremlin’s motives for hacking Democratic Party emails during the 2016 race. Officials are frequently looking at information that is fragmentary. They also face issues assessing the intentions of a country expert at conducting sophisticated “influence” operations that made it hard — if not impossible — to conclusively detect the Kremlin’s elusive fingerprints.
Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, states, “I’ll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now. There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it.”
Among the bizarre “evidence” being amassed is that Russians hacked the RNC but . . . withheld the information they found.
[T]he Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.
In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.
Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.
It seems that the main “evidence” of Russian “intent” to influence the election for Trump is . . . Trump won. He couldn’t possibly have won on his own merit or message, they imply, so it had to be Russian involvement. How else could their experienced, inspiring, trustworthy, and delightful candidate have lost?
Meanwhile, Harry Reid is not content to limit his loathing for James Comey to calling for Comey’s resignation. Now he’s actually claiming that the FBI “hid” evidence of Russian meddling in the election.
“The FBI had this material for a long time but Comey, who is of course a Republican, refused to divulge specific information about Russia and the presidental election,” Reid told MSNBC on Saturday. Comey testified to Congress in July that he was no longer a registered Republican, though he belonged to the party most of his life.
“Everyone should know WikiLeaks was involved from the very beginning,” Reid continued. “They leaked the information as if it was run by one of the great political operatives in America when in fact it was run by the political operatives in Russia.
“Russia has a pretty good way of cheating. Look at what they did with athletes,” he added, alluding to the long-running doping scandal of Russian Olympic athletes.
Pressed on whether he believed Comey had information on Russia’s influence and sat on it, Reid replied: “That’s right, that is true.”
All of this is intended to call into question Trump’s victory and the legitimacy of his presidency.
When coupled with the recent demands that the Electoral College be eliminated and the pressure on electors to change their votes, the progressive left has flown into overdrive with this Russian influence story. One Democrat in the House, Rhode Island’s David Cicilline, is even going so far as to argue that the electors should weigh Russian influence in their decision to cast their ballots on December 19th: “To the extent that foreign interference in the United States presidential elections may have influenced the final result, I believe the electors have the right to consider that.”
The left seems to hope, if not dare fully believe, that the election results can be overturned in some way. Over at HuffPo, they wildly claim that supposed Russian involvement with the election could “give the courts legal authority to install Clinton.”
Liberal demands 4 Electoral College 2 go rogue or prevent Trump from taking office show they r as great a threat 2 our freedom as Russians
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) December 11, 2016
The American voter is being completely ignored in this entire discussion, however, as it appears that the assumption is that without this alleged Russian interference Americans would have elected a woman they have loathed since the 1990’s, whose private email server and fast and loose treatment of secret information exposed national secrets to all kinds of security threats (including those by Assange, China, North Korea, and Russia), whose Clinton Foundation corruption was reported by the New York Times (not RT), and whose entire platform consisted of shoring up Obama’s deeply unpopular legacy and a $15 minimum wage. Oh, and . . . woman!
The Wikileaks emails did nothing to change anyone’s mind. People who already disliked Hillary saw them as confirmation of everything they dislike about her, and the people who already supported Hillary saw the emails as falsified or delegitimized due to Russian influence (an accusation widely made at the time).
#imwithher #HillYes #HillaryClinton4President #nevertrump #dumptrump #russia #VladimirPutin #eveplumb #thebradybunch pic.twitter.com/EVQ8vn5Smb
— Aquarius Solrac (@Carlos214Carlos) October 20, 2016
In other words, even if Russia were behind the hacks and wanted to influence the election, showing Hillary to be a lying, untrustworthy corruptocrat didn’t change anyone’s mind. Hillary herself made that point quite often saying that voter knowledge of her email scandal and questionable Foundation activities were “baked in” to voters’ choice for president.
She and her team were confident that against Trump’s failings, Hillary would win with nothing new to say or offer and by ignoring a giant swath of the country whom they believed to be a lock for her. They were wrong.
They’d do well to take Hillary’s advice.
Our democracy is built on fair elections and peaceful transfer of power. Trump can't threaten that just because he can't handle reality. pic.twitter.com/hOG0VealI5
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 20, 2016
The shoe is on the other foot now, and it is the left who cannot handle reality.
Perhaps the biggest irony in this entire episode is that its the Obama Democrats who are complaining about foreign meddling in elections. These are the same Obama Democrats who regularly take huge sums of money from foreign sources for their own elections, who actively use taxpayer money to try to defeat the Israeli prime minister in his reelection bid, and who cackled gleefully over their role in the ouster and death of a foreign leader.
So while the progressive left wails and rends its garments because they can’t handle reality, we can look forward to more stories geared toward undermining President-elect Trump and his presidency.
Just as they did with President George W. Bush when they spent his first four years in office calling him an illegitimate president, they’ll do the same to President Trump. In fact, we shouldn’t be at all surprised by this turn. There is a long history in our country of the winning president being questioned as an “imposter” or as otherwise illegitimate.
For his part, President-elect Trump is confident that once he takes office and his policies take effect, he’ll win over the reticent and sweep to an even bigger victory in 2020. This scenario is far more likely—and far more welcome—than the sore losers on the left successfully stopping him taking office on January 20th.
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Comments
Is it just me, or has anyone else noted the left’s sudden love for and confidence in the ‘intelligence community,’ especially the CIA? I’d have to say it’s ‘transformational’.
Drowning persons clutching at straws.
The depressed and confused folks of the left reside mostly on our coasts, I’m told, and it’s on our coasts where many of our most famous bridges are found, such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. So… liberals… let’s jump to it, shall we?
Delusional behavior!
Blame anyone and anything!
Throw it see what sticks!
Gustave Le Bon and the Madness of Crowds. Trump’s victory confirmed that this enbubbled class lives in a Jonestown writ large.
Is there going to a run on grape Kool-Aid?
The new “Sour Grape” flavored Kool-aid seems to be a hit this year
That is very funny! Mind if I borrow it?
And the behavior on the left has confirmed that progressive liberalism is a Mental Illness.
They usually don’t make jokes about Jonestown. The punch lines are always too long…
Ah, the chorus of voices heard every time a liberal idea belches smoke and rattles to the side of the road to die.
“It isn’t our fault! Somebody else did this! Next time, it will work perfectly!”
Why would the Russians not want as president someone they know they can buy – and indeed have bought in the past, when she was SecState and sold them a third of our uranium supply? It makes zero sense.
What makes much more sense is that someone at CIA doesn’t like Trump and wants to hurt him. Hopefully, after he’s sworn in, he’ll find out who and terminate their career(s).
Doesn’t say much for the characters running the CIA under little barry – another agency corrupted by him and his commie mother, Valerie Jarret.
January 20th cannot come fast enough.
No, he didn’t corrupt the agency. It was corrupt long before he came along.
Um, she never did that. She did a lot of things, but not that. (Not that I’d put it past her if she’d had the chance, but it never came up.)
As for the CIA, it has always had a Democrat culture. As Charles McCarry famously said, while there he never met a stupid person, an assassin, or a Republican.
You can ding it down as much as you like but it won’t change the facts. This is not one of the things she did. She had no power to do it even she had wanted to.
“As for the CIA, it has always had a Democrat culture.”
Absolutely true, particularly at the mid level up. But that doesn’t mean the commies in the WH didn’t corrupt it further.
I’m loving the outrage from certain republicans who believe we should all be equally outraged that Russia hacked the DNC servers and the emails found their way to wikileaks. If Russia managed it, every other country on earth probably hacked in as well. It’s like leaving a window open, your alarm system off and then bitching because your house was robbed. Boo-Hoo.
Russia didn’t make Hillary set up a private unsecure server which she used to transmit classified information.
Russia didn’t make Hillary the most corrupt candidate in my lifetime.
Russia didn’t make Hillary an unlikable bitch.
Russia didn’t force Hillary to leave her Ambassador to Libya with inadequate security and then refuse to send help when his consulate was overrun.
Russia didn’t make Hillary lie about a video causing the attacks in Benghazi.
Hillary lost because the DNC fronted a weak candidate who had a crappy ground game and believed she was entitled to the Presidency. Hillary lost because after 8 years of Obama, people were more interested in burning down DC than putting another establishment candidate in office.
Fuzzy, the only reply necessary is to point out that only Hildebeeste’s campaign was caught on camera bragging about hiring thugs to attack the other side.
Her campaign was also the only one caught on camera describing how they had successfully committed voter fraud in the past and how they would do it again.
And I hope Trump’s lawyers are prepared to bring that up in court.
I hope Trump’s lawyers are smart enough not to be wasting time preparing for a court case that will never happen.
Then AG Sessions should be using them.
The RNC was never hacked. At least according to the FBI, who investigated it repeatedly starting the day after it was shown that the DNC had issues keeping their secrets secret.
The New York times running with more Fake News.
Fuzzy, Good article.
I don’t think electors should change their votes,=, but…
I seem to remember a whole bunch of people arguing that it was within the rules
electorsdelegates to the GOP convention to change their minds, and that they should.Not that I think it will happen in quantities large enough.
If you don’t want everybody to know your business or view your dirty laundry, don’t put it in writing. There is no such thing as a totally secure, unhackable email account.
Whoever “hacked” the DNC and the Clintons really doesn’t matter. They aren’t responsible for the contents.
They probably found a lot in the RNC e-mails … but it was all recipes and yoga schedules, so they just deleted it.
FWIW Quote from Julian Assange earlier this year
“The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything. Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”
Recall that a few weeks ago, some slight evidence was offered for the accusation of Russian involvement in the leaks from the DNC’s Vault of Horror. That slight evidence was that somewhere along the line a server located in Russia was involved.
Just for giggles, I read this thread via a server located in Moscow. That doesn’t mean I’m a Russian agent, it just means that I managed to stay awake through Internet 101. Location of the server means nothing.
But now they aren’t even offering that primitive level of “proof”. They’re offering nothing at all, but rather fobbing us off with assurances that some bunch of secret agencies—though exactly which ones will of course remain secret—concur. Only CIA is mentioned by name (acronym? neologism? Eh, whatever), and nobody knows anything about CIA, so … it must be true.
Who could possibly be fooled by this big pile of nothing?
The theory that the American Left is composed almost exclusively of six-year-olds is a popular one, but so obvious that it seems too glib.
But what else could explain this kind of puerile silliness? That pap Dirty Harry fed the Guardian doesn’t mean that Harry is six years old; it could just as well mean that he knows he’s talking to six-year-olds. (And that he knows they’re six years old at the Guardian, too).
I think six is about right. It’s emotional age, not intellectual. They may be able to reason like, say, ten-year-olds, who have some understanding of cause-and-effect, markets and costs, abstractions (like, say, negative numbers) … things somewhat above the mental capabilities of a newt. But they react like six-year-olds.
A historian once noted that much of Medieval European history becomes comprehensible only when realizes that the typical Medieval mind was, in the main, at what we’d consider appropriate emotional development in a six-year-old. It would explain a lot … then, and now.
If a Republican elector fails to vote for Trump, that elector is substituting his will for the will of the voters he said he would represent. While I got to cast one vote based on my will, a changed elector gets to effectively cast hundreds of thousands of votes based on his will while nullifying my vote along with hundreds of thousands of other votes.
This is Democrat party voter fraud on a massive scale and out in the open. Whether an elector can legally substitute his will for the will of the voters may vary from state to state, the constant is such a substitution of a personal will for the voters’ will is absolutely unethical.
Which is why the laws in every state need to be changed to make casting a ballot other than what the majority of the people have ordered to be a state level felony.
What worries me is the trend we are watching.
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When Bush was elected, there were howls from the Left and a number of people making silly demands, but this all went away soon after the election.
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When Obama was elected, the Left was very much in the face of the Republicans telling them that they were not welcome to participate in any governing activity. “Elections have consequences.” Then Democrat support started to crater and Obama realized that he had to mend fences which he refused to do. If anything, he dug his heels in, governed by decree, and worked so hard to further divide America. Harry Reid took it even further by creating lies against Romney out of whole cloth and then bragging about them later – and few seemed to care about this unethical and even reprehensible behavior.
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Now, after a long election season where Hillary created as much hate and discontent as she could, when the DNC clearly was corrupted and tried to make it impossible for Bernie to win, where the Left was caught openly funding violence against Trump and his supporters, and where the major papers were caught consistently printing outright anti-Trump propaganda, Hillary lost the election. First there was the crying and emotional distress, then came the violent protests, followed by the recounts, and now there are rampant claims of Russian tampering where no evidence is being offered other than “trust me”. Meanwhile, we have endured more riots in the streets, open calls for Trump to be harmed (even assassinated), and demands that the inauguration be overrun with violence.
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Where do we go from here? Are we going to see armed insurrection next, even more widespread and coordinated violence? We have already seen reams of fake “terror” attacks, racism, and other events all blamed on conservatives and Trump when they had nothing to do with any of it so are we going to see this happen even more, perhaps even a false flag event? What does this all hold in store for us if the economy takes a turn down or even crashes? What about the next election?
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I fear that our political situation, largely fueled by the Left, is creating a climate where disaster and escalating violence/unrest is a given. The trend is not going in the right direction (no pun intended) and we could be headed for anarchy or even another civil war. How do we stop this nightmare from continuing?
“How do we stop this nightmare from continuing?”
By never giving in. Call the left and their enablers on the “right” exactly what they are, anti American assholes.
If they want a fight we shall give them one. In any fashion they desire.
It’s all about justification. The syntax of their rage is, if [insert justification here] then BAMN: we deserve to win, we must win, By Any Means Necessary!
That’s why they said “Bush=Hitler,” and why they now say Trump is Hitler: because if the Reichstag is about to burn, then anything, anything at all that might done to prevent that is justified.
What they don’t (or won’t) see is that when Reichstags do burn, they are burnt by those who have justified doing so do By Any Means Necessary.