David Burge (aka @IowaHawkblog ), long admired on Twitter for his scintillating wit and impressive ability to condense the latest news – sordid and otherwise – into 140 characters or less, has graciously provided a succinct summary of the facts behind the Russians-hacked-the-election hyperbole.
Trust me, there’s no need to listen to any of the mainstream media’s propaganda on this story. Here’s all you really need to know about what happened ~
1/ John Podesta, like 100% of everyone who has ever had a email account, received a password phishing email. He fell for it.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 30, 2016
3/ whatever the case, the password purloiners downloaded his emails, which eventually got into the hands of Wikileaks, who made them public.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 30, 2016
5/ At the time of their release (Oct) they were hardly covered by any media, and largely dismissed as a big fat nothingburger.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 30, 2016
7/ Fast forward to December. The October nothingburger has now magically transformed into "vote hacking" and "election hacking."
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 30, 2016
9/ This is not Alex Jones or angry conspiracy kook Facebook uncles, it's the NYTs, the WaPo, our beloved State Radio.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 30, 2016
11/ none of this is a defense of Trump, or his garbage kleptocrat pal Putin. It's an indictment of our garbage narrative-driven media.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 30, 2016
[Sorry – due to the Retweet feature on Twitter, point # 11 is listed twice]
12/ it shouldn't have to take a drunk internet nobody to point any of this out, but hey, here we are.
<end thread>— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 30, 2016
And there you have it.
Adding further credence to Burge’s recap, even the lefties at Rolling Stone have their doubts about the White House version of Hacking Gate ~
At one point we learn that the code name the U.S. intelligence community has given to Russian cyber shenanigans is GRIZZLY STEPPE, a sexy enough detail.
But we don’t learn much at all about what led our government to determine a) that these hacks were directed by the Russian government, or b) they were undertaken with the aim of influencing the election, and in particular to help elect Donald Trump.
The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up.
If the American security agencies had smoking-gun evidence that the Russians had an organized campaign to derail the U.S. presidential election and deliver the White House to Trump, then expelling a few dozen diplomats after the election seems like an oddly weak and ill-timed response.
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Related:
No, Media, the Election Wasn’t ‘Hacked’ — Stop Saying It Was
