Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   12/02/2016

            The Liars Club Convention

Much recent news involves issues and topics not personally witnessed by this or any writer but that emerge from the hidden realms of CIA, Russian (and non-Russian) hacking and—we must maintain an open mind—leaks from domestic whistleblowers. News broadcasts have glossed over essential aspects of the deeply controversial question of whether said Russian hackers were intending to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. I’m deeply skeptical.

Several political cartoons and captioned photos provide perspective: A picture of former NBC anchor Brian Williams, of numerous journalistic misadventures, says, “Stop reading fake news, because we don’t like competition.” A picture of Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart carried the caption, “The same people outraged by ‘fake news’ listened to this guy for news for decades.”

A stern-faced, gesticulating Emperor Obama (remember that he said only an emperor or king could set aside immigration law unilaterally, and then just went ahead and did it) is shown pronouncing, “I have ordered the CIA to investigate whether Russia gamed the election as much as CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, and MSNBC.” (Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, if I recall, said in 2004 that media bias for Kerry would be worth 5 to 10 points in the presidential vote.)

Obama says in another one, “Russia was doing things trying to influence our election,” while Putin says, “You mean like staging riots with paid protesters pretending to be outraged Americans?” A caption for the last one I’ll describe says, “Here we see Donald Trump promising special favors for Vladimir Putin if he’s elected,” except it is actually a photo of Barack Obama quietly urging Russia’s Medvedev to convey just that message to Putin.

One way to encapsulate a lot of the hypocrisy and irony of the current situation is to go back to October 2014, when the White House and State Dept. computers went mysteriously silent, a silence noticed by journalists, mainstream or not. Queries went unanswered; suspicions, however, were scarcely uttered in the legacy news media. It was ultimately disclosed that Russian hacking was behind the computers’ malfunctions.

Readers may have little or no recollection of the blatant and aggressive attack that occurred. How, you might ask, could an actual invasive hack by an adversary like Russia not result in massive, incessant and probing questions by the news media? Well, you can look at the calendar, as well as remember that the primary function of said news media is to prevent the voters from learning things that reflect badly on Democrats. Congressional midterms were only weeks away and it behooved the “palace guard” media to take the (Star Wars line) approach that “these are not the national security failures the voters are looking for.”

In “The great Russia-hacked-the-election con,” Thomas Lifson (Americanthinker.com) refers to the “reporting” on Obama’s and Congressional investigations into “Russian hacking of our election, and that the intelligence community ‘confirms’ that it happened. Yet there is not yet any evidence that Russia hacked the election or was responsible for the DNC email hacks. None.

“When self-interested people and their media allies proclaim something is true, and form a chorus that drowns out any other views, I suspect a con. It’s so easy for the Left, since it controls education and the media, to sell any tale it wishes….Most people will simply fall in line because it is too much trouble and risky to dispute the ‘received truth’ by the power elite.”

Writer Glenn Greenwald similarly debunked the media rush to proclaim fact-free conclusions as if they were certainties, in “Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence.”

Back to Lifson, “My own suspicion is that an insider at the DNC leaked the emails. There is as much evidence for the public to see supporting that assertion as there is for the claim that the Russians did it. Where is the skepticism? The Russian hacking scenario is an excuse for the Democrats to explain away their loss without blaming themselves or their candidate, and it serves to delegitimize the next president—a bad thing for the country.”

Nothing in the now-conventional-wisdom narrative is proven factually, with documents or testimony. What is becoming evident is that we have a virtual “liars club”—the Russians, the CIA, the Democrats and the news media—holding a convention to award the prize for the biggest, most convoluted, and brazen lie.

I’ll describe it thusly: The CIA traffics in the realm of the unknown and often the unknowable. Most Americans serving in our intelligence agencies are patriotic defenders of our citizens and nation in places, by means and times utterly unpleasant and with only the grayest of guidelines.

However, ensconced in the safety of offices and buildings are CIA employees imbued with political avarice and the means to put juicy insider stuff forward to reporters happy to access the scoop, and impress their journalist buddies. They have every motive to exercise power and, in this case, continue the Clinton/Obama campaign by surreptitious means to undercut President-elect Donald Trump. It’s the same motivation behind the shameful attacks on electors, violent placard-waving “Not my president” loons, and Soros-funded progressive war rooms.

“We are a country based on laws. And we’ve had hot, contested elections going back to the very beginning, but one of our hallmarks has always been that we accept the outcomes of our elections.” Hillary Clinton’s words now apply to Trump haters and deniers; as of Jan. 20, it’s President Trump, together with a Republican Congress, calling the shots and setting the agenda.