Can elections be hacked? And the Russian gambit.

As the pace quickens, I'll use this political posting to catch up on side items... such as...

Hey Hill! Want a solution to all the fuss around the Clinton Foundation? Hand it all over to the Carter Center, lock stock and barrel. Analogous to Warren Buffett making Bill Gates his heir! Because the Gates Foundation is run so well. Likewise, the one thing all Americans agree about Jimmy Carter is his rectitude... and the effectiveness of his foundation. Just do it.  Carter will give Chelsea a job and no one will care.

Only note the difference in the way ex-presidents who are Democrats spend their time, vs Republicans. They are is diametric and perfect opposites. Oligarchs holding court vs. scurrying around trying to help the poor. 

== The KGB Connection ==

What gives with the crescendo of internet hacks and trolleries - of blatant Russian origin? This surge of activity - which has the cyber sleuths in our intelligence community scurrying - points to a fervid obsession with meddling in Western politics.

The sheer number of these attacks is quite boggling. They range from stealing and clumsily altering documents of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to spreading anti-NATO rumors in Sweden to timing leaks of swiped Hillary Clinton emails for maximum effect on American elections.  

Former Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Morell – a lifelong leader in such matters, with no history of being political - describes Trump as “an unwitting agent” of Vladimir Putin, a view that is shared by many American intelligence personnel. 

John Schindler, a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer, elucidates in an Observer article you must read. 'The case for Morell’s charge is circumstantial but impressive. We have Trump’s repeated business dealings in Russia, dating to the Soviet era, none of them very successful, though that didn’t stop the candidate’s son from declaring in 2008 of the Trump Organization: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”'  And you wonder why he won’t release his tax returns? 

Sure, Fox News and right wing radio guys have been spreading a cult of adoration of Vladimir Putin for a decade, culminating in Donald Trump’s huge, bromantic crush on the (I’ll admit) very clever Russian President. But is it truly possible that the conversion of U.S. conservatism into confederate-ism is so thorough that no one in Red America can smell a rat?  Nothing else makes the conversion more clear. Russia used to be red. Now the color doesn’t even apply in Trump Country.

It’s Gray.

== But can American elections be rigged? ==

We keep returning to this question. The recent discovery of e-meddlings in Illinois and Arizona voter databases has raised chills. “U.S. elections are hackable, though it is much harder than some appear to believe. There are three main areas of vulnerability, according to Andrew Appel, a Princeton University computer scientist. Hackers could tamper with voter records, removing names from official rolls. They could attack electronic voting machines. And they could disrupt the proper tallying of voting results as they are collected from various precincts.”

The Washington Post Editorial Board recently reiterated a point I’ve been making for years: “In each case, one key to ensuring integrity is creating a paper trail that can be matched to the electronic records. Electronic voter rolls can be checked against paper ones; electronic vote counts can be compared to paper ballots filled in during the voting process; statewide vote tallies can be checked by examining and adding the results reported publicly in each precinct.”

The editorial board is a bit too blithe for my taste, suggesting that most U.S. counties do have auditable paper trails and that our voting machines are hard to hack.  I’ll believe that when a truly thorough and scientific study is done. There are states where the politicians will stop at nothing.  If you’d gerrymander – and suppress voter participation without helping poor folks to get the ID they need – then you are the kind of person who would ease the way for corrupt machines to be used.

Still, they make a cogent point: “At the moment, the biggest threat to the integrity of U.S. elections appears to be that politicians, Mr. Trump in particular, will use anecdote and innuendo to stoke a crisis of confidence. Given that Mr. Trump has already indicated he will not accept the legitimacy of an election that ends in his defeat, even a well-functioning electoral system in which any attempted hacks and other frauds are caught and corrected could look to many like a sham.”

This is so important that I will say it in several postings:

Hillary Clinton needs to declare this as a crisis! She should demand that Donald Trump put up or shut up, on electoral fraud. 

Insist that he appoint 6 friends who are “sages beyond reproach” to join six she would appoint, plus six chose by retired US Supreme Court Justice and GOP appointee Sandra Day O’Connor. And have that commission investigate electoral rigging charges right now!  No delays. No excuses. And they should look at everything from voting machines to voter suppression to gerrymandering. And no time for sage perfection. Report back in two weeks!

It would be an aggressive, assertive action and she’d look decisive, presidential. And it is utterly necessary, lest her presidency begin less valuable than a bucket of tepid spit.

== Trump is not an anomaly ==

Don't for a moment entertain the delusion that Donald Trump is some weird, side-canker on U.S. Conservatism.  Sure, hundreds of prominent Republicans have fled from the current, pyrotechnically-offensive ravings of their party's standard-bearer. Many of these defectors openly avow that Hillary Clinton is an acceptably "solid" statesman worthy of support.

Don't believe a word of it. This hemorrhage of conservative adults is still filled with rationalizers who call Donald Trump a "special case," while urging support for down-ticket GOP candidates. Even as they declare acceptance of HC's acceptable solidity, most declare their intention to fight for a GOP led Congress that will wage war upon her from her very first day as Commander-in-Chief. 

No, no. You do not get to do that, and I will repeat my counter-nostrum over and over. Trump is not the "disease."  He is a symptom of a virulence that you guys helped to spread. Yes, even the sage, nodding heads and professionals, and intellectuals who doubted WMD lies and tried to break the Hastert Rule against ever negotiating. Even you who pursed your lips and frowned silently over the tsunami of Fox lies.

Case in point. Donald has just appointed conservative eminence grise Ed Feulner to join Chis Christie heading his Transition Team… to prepare for a (shudder) Trump Administration. Feulner is a former head of the Heritage Foundation, the top right wing "think tank" that gave us neoconservatism, Iraq Wars, Supply Side never-once-ever-right-ever-even-once "Economics," and… (surprise) the general outlines of Obamacare. Feulner is credited with building the Heritage Foundation from a small, struggling policy think tank in the 1970s to the influential behemoth that prepares a majority of GOP policy positions. (Generally in close collaboration with Rupert Murdoch.) 

Sure, DT has emphasized the Tea Party, Breitbart, confederate-treason, screeching-nitwit wing of the party, finishing the decades-long task of driving-off every skill and knowledge profession, from scientists to the military officer corps. A War on Expertise. But to call him (and them) "aberrant" is to ignore the fact that he won the GOP primaries convincingly. And that half of the Republicans in Congress are bilious, raving loonies, who sabotage science and research and investment and who refuse to negotiate even a basic budget for the United States.

So no, you "grownups" who are defecting to Hillary Clinton temporarily, you do not get to feel virtuous and bipartisan while helping to carve out the Trump tumor. The surface mole grew up top out of a metastasized disease. And American conservatism needs chem and radiation and cauterizing therapy to burn out the Murdochian confederatism. Rip it out, and there's a chance the movement might survive Even thrive.

Oh, interesting note: Both Trump and Clinton have taxpayer-funded office space provided for a transition effort, the result of a 2010 law that moved up the availability of such money to just after the party conventions, rather than after the election.

== Russian sabotage ==

The Russian ruling clade is doing what I would do — were I a member of a cabal dominating an underdog world power that is deeply opposed to democracy and the Western Enlightenment experiment. They are doing what underdogs always do — innovating. Finding ways to undermine and sabotage and mislead their bigger, stronger, but less-focused adversaries.

Never mind that they are only “adversaries” because of reflexive paranoia.  From that psychological perspective — then yes, one can see how Vladimir Putin and his cronies perceive themselves being “surrounded” and threatened.  And hence their emphasis on “D&D methods” of waging cold-war… Disproportionate and Deniable… emphasizing small investments that yield larger outcomes while letting the Russian leadership say “who me? I had nothing to do with that!”  The aim? To defeat their lumbering adversary with the Death of ten Thousand Cuts.

Cyber sabotage is the most famous of these D&D methods.  Another is disinformation — the spreading of false rumors through far-left and far-right gullible paranoia groups and sites, as described in this article where Sweden’s closer cooperation with NATO has been undermined with untrue narratives.

“A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the European Union create an ever more receptive audience for Russia’s conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Mr. Putin. Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme-right party in France.”  Then there is Trump, over here. “The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left.”

“The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013.

We can only hope that this does not devolve into the scenario described in Frederik Pohl’s chillingly plausible novel The Cool War, which envisioned a horrid era when great powers deliberately and relentlessly sabotage each others’ infrastructure, causing power and water systems and bridges and highways and factories to collapse, leading to a general decline of all sides and all human civilization into a downward spiral of shabbiness and decay.

== Any proportion?  Any at all? ==

        

Finally. Just to be clear about the "30,000 emails" that Donald Trump wants Russia to find for him - there aren't even assertions of any concealed misdeeds in them! Only that HC made a dumb procedural mistake and tried to shrug it off.  Sorry fellahs. But that… is… it. The sum total of your trumped-up case.

Contrast this to 22,000,000 (yes, million) Bush emails that went "missing" when Congress sought information about the firing of 8 federal prosecutors who were sniffing at Bush-Cheney corruption.  Read that sentence over again, as many times as it takes, for the hypocrisy to sink in.

In 2014, e-sleuths managed to recover a bunch of those bushite erasures, though getting them sorted could take more years.  But the issue is both the amnesia and weird sense of scale displayed by our republican friends. Like spending 6 years of relentless hearings screaming over 4 volunteers who took an ill-advised risk in Benghazi... versus thousands who died on 9/11 because Bush re-assigned agents away from terror duties. Which of these got endless, endless hearings?

 Millions of deliberately deleted emails pertinent to blatant abuse of power in evading a corruption probe vs. a few thousand personal emails that no one even suggests were pertinent to any malfeasance? Which got hearings?


Cheney companies making billions off the Iraq wars and more billions sent by Cheney into Iraq as raw cash on pallets, that promptly disappeared...

... vs. a few hundred thousands in speaking fees with no known quid pro quo and those banks who paid for speeches are due anyway to get broken up by Hillary Clinton?  Which of these tales of corruption gets a lynch mob? 

I could go on and on.  But you see, those would be FACTS.  And now you see why Fox and its wholly owned party have declared war on science.

No. We want only five words from you scoundrels.


“OMG, what have we done?”