Here we are, 24 hours from the Electoral College vote, and the electors who requested an intelligence briefing on the hacking assertions are still in the dark, along with the rest of us.
Odds are we’ll stay there. It appears that whoever decided to throw the manure at the barn door — Obama? Clapper? Panetta? — didn’t really care if it stuck.
John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent and a truth-teller who did time for his courage and honesty, recently called the Russian hacking story “a red herring.” Like the electors — 70 of them? 56? whatever.— he wants to see some evidence. He said to an interviewer:
Are the Russian being accused of having hacked in the voting machines to steal the election? I’ve not seen that yet. Have they been accused of hacking emails? Yes, but if so, what was the fallout? I mean, this is something that the big powers do to each other all the time, and God knows the United States has a very long history, a rich history of interfering in the elections of other countries. I’m not really sure what the outrage is. I’m not sure why we should really care. This is just something that the KGB does to the United States and that the CIA does to the Russians, and it’s just one of those dirty little poorly kept secrets and it has been for decades.
A group of six former intelligence officials, including the impeccably reliable Ray McGovern, signed an open letter that declared: “It remains something of a mystery why the media is being fed strange stories about hacking that have no basis in fact. In sum, given what we know of NSA’s existing capabilities, it beggars belief that NSA would be unable to identify anyone – Russian or not – attempting to interfere in a U.S. election by hacking.“
In the real world, pledged electors are not likely to break with tradition tomorrow and throw the election into the House of Representatives. With or without an intelligence briefing, they could do so as an act of conscience and be within the bounds of the Constitution. But it won’t happen. Despite his ethical, intellectual and personal unfitness for the office, the Kakistocrat will be designated president-elect of the United States tomorrow.
In a long lifetime on this planet, I never dreamed that our democratic process could ever anoint such a person to lead the country. But it has happened, and we the people have allowed it to happen.
Now we will pay the price of our stupidity. The questions are: Can pockets of decency, civility and humanity survived the new holocaust? Will it be possible some day to begin evicting the Kakistocrats from the national government? Can a new left emerge from the ashes of our former democratic republic? Can people of honesty, vision and social altruism retake the reins of government?
The outlook is not sanguine, especially if one listens closely to the blood lust at the Pussy-Grabber’s “victory” rallies in states that he won.
But the sifters of election statistics say that Americans under 40 did not vote for the president-elect. As older voters, who did support him, die off, and younger voters become the majority, perhaps things will change. A young voter in Hawaii, who sniffed out many a falsehood in fake news items before they became staples of the internet, assures me that he is not unique among his generation in being able to smell a rat where one lurks in cyberspace.
“We’re savvy, Gramps.” he said. I hope he’s right. We need savvy. Perhaps, just perhaps, they will find a way to save this country from itself.
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