Sunday, October 23, 2016

Paging General Jack (D) Ripper

Democrats have clearly all gotten the memo to ignore answering anything substantive about the damning information found in the Wikileaks releases by attacking the now-evil Russians as the source of the information and questioning the patriotism of anybody who isn't outraged about that origin alone.

Which is kind of funny coming from the party that only four short years ago mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for saying the Russians are our number one geopolitical foe.



Since then the Russians have invaded Ukraine (which is ongoing), intervened in Syria on behalf of a monster with their signature "we have to destroy the city of Aleppo in order to save it for Assad" approach, threatened NATO allies and friendly non-NATO friends with nuclear weapons, cheated on nuclear weapons limitations, buzzed our ships and planes in a dangerous fashion, harassed and physically attacked our diplomats, and waged cyber-war on our presidential election process.

And now Russia is a threat, notwithstanding its conventional military and economic weakness compared to America and the West.

Yeah, our president isn't equipped to lecture anybody on foreign policy. The second decade of the 21st century called, Democrats. It wants our 1980s foreign policy back.

That ill-informed mockery that the Left embraced at least fit well with the late Cold War Democratic tendency to see the evil Soviet Union as morally equivalent to free America. Republicans say the Russians are our enemies? Oh no, our flaws are so much more worse, the Democrats said. America is unworthy of opposing them, they argued.

But now, in response to Russian hacking of Democratic emails, these Democrats are suddenly hard-line Code Warriors ready to go toe to toe with the Russkies in cyber-space to protect their precious bodily emails.

To be fair to the Democrats, it has to be unfamiliar territory to have Russians trying to undermine Democrats rather than undermining Republicans, as the Soviet Russians regularly did during the Cold War with their propaganda efforts that our Left ate up like organic kale.

I assume the Russians have Republican emails, too. And I do want our government to stop the Russians.

But the information is out. And it is damning, if true. The Russian origin isn't a reason to avoid fixing the broken system that created political operatives that these emails reveal.

One can't rule out that the Russians have altered some of the emails--perhaps subtly--to get that forged information warfare bullet circulating among the real email leaks.

After all, how do the Democrats reveal only the real emails they possess to show that altered emails leaked by the Russians are false without exposing that they have other real emails to compare that would verify the majority of leaked emails?

And do Democrats really want to stick to the party line that the Russians took everything but Hillary Clinton's State Department emails housed on her bathroom server that bypassed State Department security systems and procedures?

Still, this is progress. I am a glass half-full kind of man, after all. So welcome Democrats to the American faction that doesn't look at the Russians with weepy-eyed, Reds-tinged admiration.

Maybe Democrats will now condemn that Russian espionage tool Edward Snowden who stole information for the Russians from our NSA. Hope springs eternal.