But, to be fair, it wouldn't have been politically expedient at a time when President Obama was making "being flexible after the election" with Russia the centerpiece of his foreign policy....

Obama speechwriter admits that Democrats were "a little off" in criticizing Romney's comments about Russia.


//Former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau admitted Democrats were wrong to criticize Mitt Romney's 2012 assessment of Russia as "our No. 1 geopolitical foe" during an episode of the liberal podcast "Pod Save America" Thursday.

As Russia has dominated headlines with its interference in the 20`6 election and the investigation into whether members of Donald Trump's campaign colluded with the Kremlin, Democrats are being reminded of Romney's mocked statement in 2012 that Russia was the top geopolitical foe of the United States, citing its support of some of the world's worst actors.

Former Jeb Bush spokesman Tim Miller, a critic of Trump, appeared Thursday on "Pod Save America," which is hosted by a revolving group of former Obama aides. They discussed the recently reported meeting taken by Donald Trump Jr. with a Russian attorney last year, where he expected useful information on Hillary Clinton.

"That was one of our top complaints about ya'll's old boss, that he wasn't standing up to Russia where it was trying to undermine our influence everywhere in the world," Miller said. "The idea that you would take help from these guys is just mind-boggling."

"Look, I'm willing to say that in 2012 when we all scoffed at Mitt for saying that, gee, Russia was our No. 1 geopolitical foe, think we were a little off there," Favreau said, laughing.//

It's nice to laugh.

It almost seems that if these people didn't have double standards, they would have no standards.

Fake News.

Clapper says he doesn't know how the fake "17 intelligence agencies confirmed Russian hacking" line got into the story.

Having seen leftwing reporters repeat that false news, most people have some clue about how that happened.

The Party Uber Alles

After weeks of trying to create a moral panic about the fact that the DNC didn't have adequate computer security, Obama turns the narrative on its head by commuting the sentence of a person who used his position inside the military to give military secrets to Wikileaks.

The question is asked:

//Because Manning was granted clemency, shouldn’t the DNC hacker, whoever he or she is, be let off as well? Otherwise, the message seems to be that actual espionage against the United States for causes Obama seems to favor is just fine, but embarrassing the president’s party and his handpicked successor is a high crime against democracy.//

For the same reason that the Mafia wouldn't.

Of course, how could the FBI identify the Russians as the hackers without examing the computers?

Sounds like "fake news"...

....which is only a problem when it doesn't fit the narrative of the DNC operatives with press credentials.

//The claim that the “election was hacked” is a bit of a misnomer. There’s no standing allegation by U.S. officials that the Russians (or anyone else) “hacked” into our elections system or altered vote counts. //

This is the most important thing to realize about the American Left....

...thanks to the influence of Communists and former Communists, the central tenet of the Left is that Party trumps everything else, the nation, neighbors, principles, everything that is not the Party.

For eight years, the Party has decreed that Russia is not an adversary, so anti-missile defences to Poland get cancelled, there is a magical "reset button" and Obama assures Vlad that "after the election he can be more flexible."

But screw with the Party and that is serious!!!

//Barack Obama has spent the last eight years resisting the idea that Russia is an adversary of the United States. First we had the “reset”; next the cancellation of the Eastern European missile shield; then we had Obama assuring President Medvedev that he would be able to give away the store, but the Russians would need to wait for his second term; and then the presidential debate where Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s statement that Russia is our number one geopolitical rival by saying that the 1980s called, and they want their foreign policy back. In between, we had a foreign policy that was supine in the face of Russian aggression in Crimea and Ukraine.

Now, in a typically head-snapping 180-degree turnabout, Obama and his fellow Democrats portray Republicans as soft on Communism Russia. It’s a throwback to the 1970s, but with the parties’ roles reversed.

In his press conference today, Obama described the stern measures he supposedly took after learning that the Russian government was involved in breaking into Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s email account:

And so in early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that did not happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, there were going to be some serious consequences if he did not.

And in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process. But the leaks through Wikileaks had already occurred.

So all it took, apparently, was for President Obama to tell Vladimir Putin to cut it out.

This is what I don’t understand: in October 2014, the Russian government hacked into both the White House’s and the State Department’s computer systems. For an unknown period of time, weeks if not months, the Russians were reading White House and State Department emails–a far more significant security breach than the accounts of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and John Podesta. The Obama administration never did discover that its communications had been compromised, but an ally (I suspect it was Israel) alerted the administration to the Russian intrusion. The White House’s computer system was down for weeks while experts tried to deal with the Russian hack and improve security.//

Actually, this article proves both of my reasons to vote for Trump,.i.e., the press and the professional government bureaucracy would fight him.

....because they both believe in party over principle.

From the leftist The Nation:

//Fast-forward to December 2016, and one can see that there isn’t much need for a covert government program these days. The recent raft of unverified, anonymously sourced and circumstantial stories alleging that the Russian government interfered in the US presidential election with the aim of electing Republican Donald J. Trump shows that today too much of the media is all too happy to do overtly what the CIA had once paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it.

On Friday, December 9, The Washington Post, fresh from publishing a front-page story that promoted a McCarthyite blacklist, published a piece that claimed that the CIA “concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency.” The Post also claimed that “Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked e-mails,” including those of John Podesta.

That same day, The New York Times reported that “the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.” The implication being that the Russians released the DNC e-mails to hurt Clinton, but held off on releasing the RNC e-mails in order to protect Trump.

The bombshell reports—and Trump’s quick dismissal of them as “ridiculous”—have dominated the news cycle in the days since their publication.

The current fight between Trump and the CIA is of potentially of historic consequence. Never before has the intelligence establishment shown so much hostility to a newly elected president. Never before has a president shown so little deference to the CIA.//