Hacked

As progressive talking heads summarize what they characterize as a "horrible year," you'll hear the phrase "Russia hacked the election ..." It has become ingrained in the Democrat's narrative to help explain a humiliating election loss. But here's the thing: Russian may very well have hacked the DNC and John Podesta's email (although no clear evidence that it was government sponsored has been produced). The hack embarrassed the Dems by publishing DNC and Clinton Campaign emails written by Democrats in their own words. Those words provided an honest look inside these organizations and were often less than flattering.

Barack Obama was quite sanguine when evidence of a Chinese hack that impacted 20 million government employees was uncovered many months ago, but a hack of the DNC was beyond the pale, resulting in the ejection of 35 Russian operatives within the U.S. and the closure of a few safe houses. It's curious that in the former instances nothing was done, and in the latter we saw action. There's no politics in play here, is there? But back to the hack.

Just as the some fringe elements of the GOP (including Trump) tried to suggest that Barack Obama's citizen was questionable in an effort to delegitimize him, the phrase "Russia hacked the election ..." is intended to delegitimize Donald Trump's election victory. The only difference is that the Democrat claim is far from the fringe. I suppose what goes around comes around.

It's also interesting to note that of the Dems' many excuses for their election loss is "fake news." Ironically, the Russian election hacking meme is a clear example of Democrat-driven fake news. Steven Miller comments:

To be perfectly clear, there is zero evidence of actual election hacking, such as the hacking of voting machines, paper ballots or voter fraud on the part of Russia in an effort to install Donald Trump into the White House. There’s no evidence Russia employed a massive cloaking device from a secret submarine in Lake Erie, over the state of Wisconsin, where Hillary Clinton did not campaign once during the general election.

There’s no evidence Russia influenced Clinton campaign operatives to steer SEIU members on the ground away from Michigan. As of yet, there is no proof it was Russia who directed Lena Dunham to campaign in North Carolina, or the aged cast of the West Wing to stump in Ohio. There is no evidence that rural voters in Pennsylvania, whom Mrs. Clinton ignored in the final weeks of the campaign, are actually Russian spies. It is still not known whether Katy Perry is in fact a Russian agent.

If any actual electoral fraud was engineered by Putin and Russia, giving Hillary Clinton almost 3,000,000 more votes than Donald Trump is an amazing cover. But again, none of this occurred on the day Americans went to the polls. The word “hacked,” or variations thereof, does not appear in the White House statement and only once, prefaced by “allegedly” in the DHS statement. There is no evidence of any illicit activities occurring on Election Day.

John Podesta was hacked. The election was not. Podesta’s emails were stolen, not via some sophisticated cyber operation, but through a common email phishing scam, the same ones your grandparents fall for when you catch them writing a big check to that wonderfully nice and thankful Nigerian prince.

There was no forced breach of information, or Russian agents hanging from ceilings at Langley, or stealing files from offices late at night . No one broke into the DNC and stole discs in a daring midnight raid. The information was given willfully and ignorantly by Podesta and his staff. They are the ones responsible.

If the illegal attainment of leaked information is considered “hacking the election,” then file the 2012 election under being hacked as well.

So the question becomes why is our national media intent on spreading misinformation about a “hacked election”? It certainly looks purposeful, if not downright dishonest.

"Dishonest" is what the trained hamsters of the mainstream media will be throughout 2017 and into 2018, 2019, and 2020. This is simply a reality for the Trump administration. They'll have to deal with it, if they intend to accomplish anything at all.

Trump will be completely justified if he matches the media's newfound adversarial relationship with the president (rediscovered after eight years of collective swooning over Barack Obama) with an adversarial relationship of his own. It'll be fun to watch Trump try to "hack" the media.

UPDATE #1:
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Glen Reynolds comments on the Russian Hack:

If there’s any single statement that Barack Obama probably wishes he could undo, it was his mockery of Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates. Referring to Romney’s characterization of Russia as America’s greatest geopolitical foe, Obama said the 1980s are now calling, and they want their foreign policy back.

Now of course, Democrats are up in arms about the Russians, sounding like madcap John Birchers from the 1960s. As Twitter wag IowaHawk noted, they didn’t get upset when Russia invaded Crimea, they didn’t throw down when Russia shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine, but stealing John Podesta’s password via a phishing scam is apparently grounds for restarting the Cold War. Well, only one of these crimes constitutes a threat to Democrats’ political power.

It’s easy to mock the Democrats’ hysteria over all this, which seems mostly like an inability to accept that they lost an election they thought was in the bag. Instead, they blame a password-phishing scam that John Podesta fell for like somebody’s technologically-challenged grandmother. (Another IowaHawk tweet: “Breaking: State Dept expels 20 Nigerian diplomats after John Podesta fails to receive $1 million wire transfer from nephew of General Okezi.”) And, partly to cover for Hillary and to delegitimize Trump, much of the press has talked about “election hacking” in a way that suggests — entirely falsely — that the Russians were changing votes instead of (maybe) being the ones who copied embarrassing emails from John Podesta and gave them to Wikileaks. (I say “maybe” because some people, like Ars Technica’s security editor Dan Goodin, don’t think that the Obama Administration has made the case that the Russians were behind it.)

UPDATE #2:
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Kurt Schlichter, never one to mince words, pokes fun at the Democrats' Russian meme when he writes:

Anyway, their new theory – as I understand it, because it seems coherence-challenged – is that the Russians somehow forced us to vote for Trump by releasing authentic emails that revealed the depths of Democrat perfidy and the media’s Clinton collaboration. Basically, the Russians unfairly told us the truth that Democrats and their media minions wanted to deny us, and that “hacked” the election. Oh, and Trump is insufficiently mad about Hillary and Company not being able to effectively hide their web of corruption and lies thanks to John Podesta not understanding that you don’t click the link in the email from the Oil Minister of Nigeria, Crown Prince Goodfellow Scamoscammer.

Heh.