Good or Bad for the Jews

"Good or Bad for the Jews"

Many years ago, and for many years, I would travel to Morocco to visit uncles, cousins, and my paternal grandmother. Some lived in Tangiers;...

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

The Year of Trump

2017 is on! It clearly will be the year, good or bad, of President Trump. There can be no doubt that nobody will doubt who is President.

The year starts with the hacking story. The Dems, their prog media allies, and their Twitter trolls continue with a garbled account accusing the Russians, Mr. Putin, in particular, of doing something to the US elections. That "something" is a bit confusing. At first, we saw vague statements about the Russians "hacking" into the voting machines in a bid to favor Trump. Once that did not pan out, the losers of the 2016 elections moved on to make different allegations but always leaving the first one sort of floating there. We heard that the Russian intel services broke into the DNC and, apparently, provided all the juicy tidbits they found there to creepy Julian Assange. From his lair in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London the Aussie Mastermind carefully manipulated the information provided by the Russians to throw the election to Trump. Not clear why either the Russians or Assange would want Trump elected, but that's the charge.

As noted before (here) the Obama misadministration has gotten some of the US intel agencies to issue a vague and highly imprecise report that claims to provide proof of Russian "hacking." Obama, suddenly finding his backbone, lost for the past nearly eight years, kicked out 35 Russian spies from their compounds in New York and Maryland. It still remains unclear what it is these Russians supposedly did except, perhaps, maybe, just possibly, figure out that John Podesta's email password was "PASSWORD." Yes, you need a world-class espionage service for that. The report, I would note, never actually alleges that the Russians passed any info to Assange--odd given how we are being told on the side that Wikileaks is a Russian front.

Let's review the basics, yet again. Do the Russians spy? Why yes, yes they do. They spy a lot. So do the Chinese, and they do so much more effectively--notice, for example, how their new weapon systems always seem to look just like ours. The Chinese, let us not forget, also broke into OPM's databank and made off with millions of active and former US government employees' private information (the Diplomad and Diplowife among them, I would note.) No Chinese spies were sent packing; no hissy demands that China "cut it out." The North Koreans broke into a Hollywood studio and messed with their data in retaliation for a terrible movie that nobody saw mocking the Dear Leader. Lots of people, state actors as well as private and corporate criminals, spy; lots of them break into computer systems and steal data. I guess, however, it's only important when that theft is of emails from the DNC revealing the dirty tricks of the DNC and the complicity in those of many media outlets. That's worth a war with Russia!

I do not like Julian Assange. I think he's an anti-American creep to his core, but then I can say the same thing about Obama. I would note, furthermore, that Assange has a much better track record for accuracy than does Obama. To those who demand we believe Obama simply BECAUSE he's the President, I would say, well, that's not how it works; they know it from their own track record of not believing, for example, President Bush on Iraqi WMD.

Anyhow, that's the 2017 the Dems are hoping to have in their ceaseless quest to deligitimize Trump and the 2016 elections.

Trump will be at the center of it all, and it is critical that the Republicans in Congress do not panic, do not seek to gain that "strange new respect" from the New York Times and others; in other words, the Republicans must not become John McCain. If we can avoid that, then we might just have a very good year.

19 comments:

  1. I am a network engineer, and have been for over 20 years. So, I have seen a lot of evolution in the Internet, and a lot of “hacking”.
    I read the FBI report, and like previous commenters, I agree, it is weak sauce. It is possible of course that the Russian espionage departments were involved in the DNC and Podesta email hacks. But in the case of the DNC hack. I am much more inclined to see this as an inside job. It differs from Podesta. Where he acted on a Phishing email of the same sort that everyone on the Internet with an email address receives from time to time. In his case, it may have been targeted specifically at him, but all he had to do was delete it like almost all of us do. So, that hack to totally on him.

    The DNC is different, because we saw emails to and from multiple parties, so it wasn’t just one person’s account that was hacked by an outsider, it was likely a dump from the email server. Which is much harder to obtain from the outside, not impossible, but very difficult. Because you need to obtain the administrator level access to get into the server database of email. You can’t easily Phish the administrator account. Which points more to either bribery, blackmail of an insider, or simply a disgruntled insider. Assuage has claimed through his shady former UK ambassador that they received the DNC dump from a party in DC. This supports the insider hack theory.
    To go a bit conspiracy nut, there is the “Botched Robbery/Homicide” of Seth Rich right after the DNC hack became public, and Assuage playing wink and nod that Seth Rich was the leak.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I slept on your comment last nite. I am not an expert, but the Podesta hack was into one gmail acct. They wouldn't have had a reason to hack Google's Gmail servers. The DNC had a physical server. Exfiltrating all it's data would make sense. Yes, a server is harder but your logic above is fuzzy to me. I would assume the NSA knows if the entire contents of the DNC server were traansmitted via the internet (hack) vs offloaded to a "floppy" - leak.

      BC

      Delete
  2. At this point they've gone beyond just shooting themselves in the foot with this whole: "hey everybody, you can't trust us with important things like email!"
    As far as I can tell, they've taken a very long look at that foot and decided to empty the clip.
    There's a reason big companies don't divulge incursions unless absolutely necessary.

    - reader #1482

    ReplyDelete
  3. So when Obama was asked what he did when he first found out the Russians were hacking the DNC (going by his account 18 months ago), he said he told them to "stop it" and "cut it out".

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This whole Russian hacking story is evolving in such an amateurish way to guarantee that it must be contrived. I don't recall ever seeing a government hidden agenda being so blatantly obvious. But, then again, didn't Obummer promised that his administration would be the most transparent ever?

    ReplyDelete
  6. One thing I'd suggest is that Mr. Trump refrain from making Twitter comments that sound like he's somehow supportive of Russia. It's entirely possible that Moscow isn't behind, or complicit in, any of this...but at this point, I'm not convinced that the president-elect knows much more than anyone else does on this score.

    The true facts might or might not emerge eventually, but there's no point in handing ammunition to his opponents in case he turns out to be wrong.

    Plus, I think it's truly in his interest to avoid being seen as a friend of or an apologist for Russia. It's necessary for him to be seen as clear-headed and hard-nosed, ready but not eager to drive a hard bargain with Putin.

    Some of this is just optics. But as we all know, perceptions often carry more weight than reality itself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I suspect he is going to be much more realistic about Putin than Obama or Hillary have been. They go from "Reset buttons" to promising to "be more flexible after the election" to trying to blame him for Hillary's loss and threatening. Trump has been doing business all over the world and with many scoundrels. So has Tillerson. Time to calm down. Much of this is just stirring up the usual Democrat suspects.

      Delete
  7. Right! Except for the fact that Obummer is moving large numbers of our Special Forces to the Russian border. Now is not the time for such grandstanding by our BIC (boob in chief).

    ReplyDelete
  8. (i) You're assuming that the continuing coup attempt won't work. (ii) You're assuming that They won't just have him shot.

    ReplyDelete
  9. "WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition staff has issued a blanket edict requiring politically appointed ambassadors to leave their overseas posts by Inauguration Day, according to several American diplomats familiar with the plan, breaking with decades of precedent by declining to provide even the briefest of grace periods."

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/01/05/no-extensions-for-state-dept-officials-president-trump-delivers-first-private-sector-reform-example-to-career-public-sector-officials/#more-126718

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. with Obama's shenanigans on foreign policy as a lame duck, who would want *any* of htem around!?!?!

      Delete
  10. Anonymous at 1:45am
    Under the circumstances it's the only thing to do.

    ReplyDelete
  11. The intelligence people don't like the people they're spying on to know how the intelligence people know something. They could compromise sources, or new technologies, or whatever.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous high sources are saying the "Intelligence Report" was a joint wok of Hillary Clinton's staff, Baghdad Bob, the Queen of Hearts and Joe Isuzu.

    ReplyDelete
  13. German media was very anti-Trump, so why haven't German diplomats been expelled for Germany trying to alter the election in Clinton's favor? Ditto French, British etc .....

    ReplyDelete
  14. "I do not like Julian Assange. I think he's an anti-American creep to his core"

    If he is an anti-American, I want more anti-Americans. Without him, Clinton would very likely be President and CIC in 2 weeks,

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. By all accounts Assange and Snowden did tremendous damage to our foreign national security operations. The only argument I've seen made, is that exposure of phone call metadata snooping 'is worth it'... which is an extremely dubious claim to me.

      I don't think the DNC leak killed Hillary's campaign... the leaks really didn't even coincide with any nudge her polls, lagged or otherwise. The FBI investigation probably had more of an effect, but I highly suspect her 'shoot the messenger' response did her more harm than any leak.

      "i'm going to attack this father of a slain soldier to prove to everybody that I don't want to be President!" - Donald Trump

      "I'm going to one up you in showing everybody I don't want to be President, DONALD, by attacking this FBI director who's investigating my crimes!" - Hillary Clinton

      Delete