Vincent J. Curtis
16 Dec 2016
President Barack Obama is a small man who never forgets a
slight. The evidence of it abounds from
his time in office. One deeply wounding
slight to him was the issue of birtherism that was driven to a conclusion by
none other than Obama’s successor as president, Donald J. Trump.
Yesterday, at the White House daily press briefing Josh
Earnest delivered himself of this message to the media that came direct from
his boss:
“Earnest turned up the heat on Trump and his transition
over Russian interference following media reports citing CIA sources that the
purpose of Russian-backed hacking was to help Trump.
'It is just a fact – you all have it on tape – that the
Republican nominee for president was encouraging Russia to hack his opponent,
because he believed that would help his campaign.'
'It is not a controversial statement,' Earnest continued.
'I'm not trying to be argumentative. But I am trying to acknowledge a basic
fact,' Earnest said at Thursday's White House briefing.” Quoth the UK’s Daily
Mail. (“Sfunny that you won’t find this
on American media.)
Well, sorry Josh. It
is a controversial statement because it simply isn’t true. None of it is. Trump did not encourage the Russians to hack
into Hillary Clinton’s private email server because, by that point, it had been
destroyed five months previously and everybody knew it. Trump asked Putin to help out the American
media and the FBI by releasing Hillary’s 33,000 deleted emails because Trump
assumed that Putin had hacked Hillary’s private server before she destroyed it and
he already possessed them. Trump was
being his usual provocative, sarcastic self.
Trump actually pointed at the media present at the back of the hall and
said to Putin that he would become their hero, referring to the media, if he
released them, embarrassing the FBI who couldn't find a copy.
Charles Krauthammer at the time noted the clever trap that
Trump had set for the Democrats. The
standard Democrat defense was to condemn Trump for encouraging the Russians to
hack American secrets – full stop.
Nothing was to be said about American secrets being on a secret, unsecured
private server in violation of American espionage laws, out there naked waiting
to be found. The Democrat defense was
simply to brazen it out. Even Leon
Panetta, former Director of the CIA, Obama’s Secretary of Defense, and partisan
Democrat hack parroted the line, though he knew better because he is not that
stupid. Now Obama repeats it to a still
gullible White House press corps. And
still nobody wonders about the possibility of blackmail – of a US president –
that might exist in those 33,000 deleted and bleach-bitted emails.
The birther issue was started in 2008 by Sid Blumenthal, a
Hillary Clinton hack, who put it into the mind of the McClatchy News service
that it ought to look for Barack Obama’s birth records in Kenya, because he had
heard that Obama was actually born there and not in Hawaii. The search came up empty, and Obama was able
to use the issue to his advantage, saying that birtherism was a kind of racism
directed at him. Until Trump forced the
issue, Obama never took steps to put the issue to rest because he could always use
it to his political advantage as a kind of race card and a sign of nuttiness in
his critics.
In 2011, Trump forced Obama to release his authentic, long
form Hawaiian birth certificate. Trump
was apparently proven wrong, though he did a public service. Obama felt humiliated because public pressure
brought to bear by Trump forced him to do something he didn’t want to do. Famously, Obama humiliated Trump at the
Washington Press Corps dinner in 2011 as payback.
If Obama had been born in Kenya, his being president would
be illegitimate because the U.S. constitution requires that the president be a natural
born citizen. Being born in Hawaii makes
Obama a natural born citizen. If he were
born in Kenya, he would not be.
The storyline of ‘Russian hacking to aid Donald Trump’
being encouraged by the Obama Administration, first via CIA leaks and yesterday
by Josh Earnest, is Obama’s final payback on de-legitimacy. The fact that the CIA refused to meet with
the House Intelligence Committee or to brief Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) of the
Senate Intelligence Committee proves that they don’t have any evidence worthy
of the name to show (a) hacking by Russia,
and (b) with the intent of helping Donald Trump to win the election. As a mere point of logic, without a
confession from Putin himself these things are practically unprovable. And that’s why “the CIA” doesn’t want itself
subjected to examination on its evidence and findings. More to the point, even if both were true, it
in no way means Trump owes Putin anything.
It is in a way a fitting final act of his presidency that
Barack Obama undertake a whispering campaign aimed at de-legitimizing his
successor.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment