Lights Out on Real News
December 17, 2016
The cable news channels this morning are emphasizing links among Russian hacking, Trump and the recent election. The CIA and Obama have succeeded in shifting attention away from the content of the scandalous and factual Clinton-Podesta e-mails and onto the unknown process by which they were made known. To cement these connections in people’s minds, Obama has ordered a review of hacking in past elections.
This is mission accomplished for the CIA and the Obama team, at least for now. They favor government secrecy. For the time being, he and others in his administration have shifted the controversy away from Democrats and toward Trump and alleged foreign interference, away from Clinton’s crimes and toward Russia, Trump and the election. Had their been no e-mail revelations, how much more we’d have been in the dark during this election! That’s what the CIA-Obama position stands for: Lights out on real news.
With the mission accomplished and the damage done to Trump, Obama soft-pedaled these matters during a press conference yesterday. He had space to zig-zag and to present himself in a moderate and presidential light. The Hill put it this way: “At an end-of-year press conference on Friday, Obama sought to dial down tensions that seemed to be reaching a crescendo this week, when news headlines were dominated by allegations that Russia had interfered in the election specifically to help Trump win.”
The Hill created a new and more flattering story line: “President Obama is seeking to preserve an open line of communication with Donald Trump, even if doing so disappoints a liberal base that would like to see him light up the president-elect.”
Obama knows that his intelligence services do not have a smoking gun at their disposal and are not united in their assessments . Russia knows this too. One Russian response helps explain why Obama backed off: “Russia responded Friday morning. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said the U.S. needs to show some proof or quit talking. ‘It is necessary to either stop talking about it, or finally produce some evidence,’ he told Interfax, per the New York Times. ‘Otherwise, it all begins to look quite unseemly.’”
A president can have his cake and eat it too. He and his underlings can attack. He and they light the anti-Trump, anti-Russia fire. Once it’s burning, they step aside. Obama can place himself above the fray, as if his role in the arson is nil.
The Obama administration has consistently had a campaign to stop leaks and whistle-blowing in order to enforce government secrecy. This latest episode is consistent with that broader effort.
Is the fire of suspicion of Russia, Trump and the election burning brightly or has Obama extinguished it by appearing less partisan at one press conference? An article in The Daily Beast today provides an answer. Russian hacking is treated as a fact that Obama accepts, even if he awaits further review and decides what sanctions to impose or what cyber actions of his own to instigate. After all, Obama has clearly accepted Russian hacking as factual. He has said “And so when I receive a final report, you know, we’ll be able to, I think, give us a comprehensive and best guess as to those motivations. But that does not in any way, I think, detract from the basic point that everyone during the election perceived accurately — that in fact what the Russian hack had done was create more problems for the Clinton campaign than it had for the Trump campaign.”
Last July when this e-mail scandal erupted, the substance of it was what mattered most, as suggested by these remarks. By whatever means the e-mails came into the public domain, whether through Russian hacking, private hacking or leaks from within the DNC, it was a good thing. We gained important information. The knowledge was far more important than the process by which it was revealed. Wikileaks is an organization that is doing what needs to be done to penetrate the curtains that shroud secret government and political processes. Chelsea Manning and other whistle-blowers help us by informing us. Secret government and political processes are very harmful.
Keeping Property out of the Hands of the State