STABBED IN THE BACK

Summary: Bernie Sanders deserves better than his supporters. Yesterday, in a magnificent, unity-building gesture akin to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s similar gesture in 2008, Bernie moved Hillary’s nomination by acclamation. Unfortunately, many of his supporters haven’t been willing to follow Bernie’s lead. They been pitching a fit on all the various media about how the election was “stolen” from them, and a great many of them have evinced a determination to throw their votes and their support to the Kremlin’s candidate, Donald Trump. To justify such behavior, the intransigents have tried very hard to fabricate a Dolchßtolegende (a stab-in-the-back narrative) that the entire primary process had been “rigged.”

On the Hillary side, a similar Dolchstoßlegende to take shape, based largely on the manner in which the so-called email scandal that has already claimed the political life of Debbie Wasserman Schultz has unfolded. Increasing evidence points to the infamous Wikileaks as having obtained the data it dumped the day before the convention from sources within the Russian intelligence apparat. While Bernie’s Dolchstßlegende is largely a fantasy of his disgruntled, intransigent, over-the-top supporters, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being largely true. Bernie diehards and Trump trolls (and there is a frightening degree of overlap between the two) insist either that there is no “proof” of Russian involvement or that the substantive content of the emails, ostensibly “proving” that Hillary is somehow of “corrupt,” outweighs the criminality of the circumstances under which WikiLeaks and its West-hating, Hillary-despising cofounder, cowardly Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor currently hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, obtained the emails from the Russian intelligence apparat which had hacked into the DNC servers.


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Bernie Sanders displayed astonishing nobility of spirit yesterday by moving, on the convention floor in Philadelphia, that Hillary Rodham be selected by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party. It was a magnificent gesture, that like Hillary Clinton’s similar gesture at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, was intended to heal the breach, lay groundwork for party unity, and moreover, to establish the foundations for the infrastructure of victory in November.

I was saddened, but not altogether surprised, that many of Sanders’s delegates in the convention hall, and many intransigent Berniebots across the country, angrily rejected Senator Sanders’s impassioned calls for unity and chose to demean themselves and to dishonor that nobility of spirit by engaging in what can only be described as a Trumpertantrum, protesting in the streets of Philadelphia, chanting the Trumpian trope of “lock her up,” and turning their backs on former President Bill Clinton when he addressed the convention.

Such behavior is unforgivable, unforgettable, and inexcusable. When the candidate to whom you have devoted yourself calls on you to behave like adults, to bear the seemingly unbearable, and to buck up and bear a hand for the sake of the country, to boo him, or to shout that he is a “sellout,” is dishonorable behavior of the worst sort. For not only did these intransigents dishonor the Senator, his nobility of spirit, and his loyalty to a party to which he came very late, but into which he poured himself heart and soul, it also dishonors the intransigents themselves.

To attempt to exonerate their guilty behavior, the intransigents have eagerly fabricated a Großer Dolchstoßlegende, a great stab-in-the-back narrative which attempts to excuse Bernie’s performance by casting doubt on the fundamental legitimacy of the process by which Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first female nominee for president of a major party in American history.

What a long way we’ve come since Abigail Adams insisted that her husband “remember the ladies” during the sessions of the Continental Congress which adopted and approved the Declaration of Independence; how far we’ve come since Sojourner Truth asked her immortal question “ain’t I a woman?”! What an amazing journey it has been since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848! How profound the distance since the Constitution removed sex-based barriers to voting with the 19th amendment, 96 years ago this August 18. What a long way we’ve come to that moment in Philadelphia when the last crack in the glass ceiling opened wide and sent that barrier to equality crashing to the ground!

Yet, to the diehard Sanders intransigents, pitching an earsplitting snit and storming out of convention hall, or chanting “lock her up!” outside in the streets, living down to the stereotype of spoiled children of privilege, this enormous step for full, first class, female membership in the commonwealth and body politic was nothing more than the triumph of the vagina over the penis. It carried the ugliest possible overtones of misogyny, sexism, and worse, Trumpian treason.

And so, all of the ancient bullshit claims of a rigged election were dusted off and waved in the Democratic Party’s face. The claim that the primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton has been denied by Senator Sanders himself on numerous occasions, and it has been debunked by just about every reputable traditional and digital media publication out there. The only people still trafficking in the rigged election dolchstßlegende are conspiracy theorists of the radical left, the American equivalent of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency that almost destroyed Britain’s Labour Party in the late 70s and early 1980s, Donald Trump, or other minions of the right wing scream machine which have a vested interest in casting doubt upon the basic legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

When people like Alex Jones, the Breitbart organization, or Trump trolls on social media ramp up the Hillary hatred, and that right-wing Hillary hatred finds echoes among the Sanders intransigents, we may justly wonder whether these Sanders intransigents are simply too obtuse to understand anything at all about American politics, or whether, like Susan Sarandon, they are so excessively privileged that a possible Trump victory will have no consequences for them, and therefore that Bernie Sanders is nothing but political cover for them to indulge their Hillary hatred, or whether they are in fact trolls of the other side trying to spread disinformation among us to break our unity and cause us to fall out among ourselves.

If the Bernie Dolchstßlegende suffers the disadvantage, and to just about every Dolchstßolegende of being false, and demonstrably false, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being eine wahrhaftige Dolchstoß, (a real stab in the back narrative). When WikiLeaks dumped its 20,000 or so emails which had been purloined from the DNC server, it became clear fairly quickly that a number of things that occurred. First, the emails did not demonstrate systemic corruption nor did they invalidate the substantial majority that Hillary had garnered in the primary election. To say otherwise, as the Sanders intransigents began to do, that the 3.8 million more votes that Hillary had garnered in the primary should be disregarded, was an act of banana Republican political immaturity. 

 Again, that whole line of argument has been extensively rebutted and debunked in numerous traditional and digital media sources. We need not burden the record here with an extensive explanation of why the system was not, in fact, “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton. We can actually take Bernard Sanders’s admission itself that the system was not “rigged” as being dispositive of the issue. It is as good as what the Federal Rules of Evidence call an “admission of a party opponent,” that is, hearsay which is an exception to the rule against hearsay because it comes from the mouth of someone with authority to make the statement, and which statement is arguably against his own interest.

 But, wait! say the Sanders intransigents the emails display personal animus on the part of certain DNC staffers. As friends of mine on both sides of the debate might put it “no shit, Sherlock!” After the vituperation and personal abuse showered upon the DNC and its outgoing chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it’s not surprising that some of the emails in question, of which fewer than a dozen are any kind of “smoking gun,” should be somewhat embittered in their tone. And as for the infamous Debbie Wasserman Schultz email which said, and some of substance, that Bernie won’t be president, the intransigents would have us ignore the temporal context of that email, sent as it was after the April primary in New York State which narrowed Sanders’s path to the nomination almost impossibly narrow. Wasserman Schultz, the intransigents notwithstanding, wasn’t demonstrating some kind of malicious predisposition toward Hillary Clinton, she was simply stating an emerging fact, albeit one that was uncongenial to the intransigents of the Sanders campaign.

But no matter what Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails may have said about Bernie Sanders, who, because of the antics of his supporters, had become very hard to like at that stage of the campaign, what we are here to litigate is not the contents of the emails at all. Despite the Sandernistas’ reliance on the substance of the emails, the issue that needs to be litigated is the criminality of the circumstances by which WikiLeaks obtained possession of the emails. Because if the emails were obtained unlawfully, then their contents are what the legal profession would refer to as “fruit of the poisonous tree,” and subject to being excluded from evidence.

What is a good rule for courtroom evidence is, in this case, a good rule for the so-called email scandal. What we must explore instead are the criminal circumstances surrounding the chain of custody of the purloined emails, as well as the motivations of the prior custodians of the emails once they left the possession of the Democratic National Committee.

Because there is now probable cause to believe that the hacked emails were hacked by hackers associated with or in the employee of the Russian intelligence apparat, from which they were passed on to the ever-obliging WikiLeaks and its West-hating cofounder, cowardly, Hillary-despising Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor now hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. (It is, candidly, somewhat of a mystery to me why Britain has not cut off diplomatic relations with Ecuador, declared her ambassador persona non grata at the court of St. James’s, and, just as importantly, cut off power, water, and sewage to the embassy. I daresay, such legitimate diplomatic pressure might be enough to force the Ecuadorians to relinquish Mr. Assange.)

The theft by Russian hackers of the emails from the DNC is itself a criminal offense, and indeed, tantamount to an act of war against the United States by the Russian Federation. When the Russian intelligence apparat handed those emails over to WikiLeaks, that not only compounded the crime, but it was also in effect a further act of war by which the Russian government attempted to intervene in a muscular and easily detectable way in the conduct of an American presidential election.

To make matters worse, this morning, The Donald delivered himself of a press conference in which he essentially invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email servers again. If nothing else, this should justify a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia (which traditionally handles national security prosecutions,) to initiate proceedings targeting Donald Trump for violating either the treason laws or the Espionage Act of 1917. Since turnabout is fair play, it is delicious to contemplate the possibility of one of the presidential candidates in fact being indicted. Instead of “lock her up,” there now appears to be ample critical mass to justify saying “lock him up.”

As the federal government expands the scope of the national security investigation now underway, we may expect that hopefully the net will begin to tighten around the person of Donald J. Trump. I posted earlier that “Trumpism is treason.” As more and more traditional and digital media begin to expose the nature of the Kremlin’s support for America’s true Manchurian candidate, I feel some schadenfreude, but I also feel a disturbing apprehension that far too many of Trump's willing dupes are prepared to turn a blind eye to systematic treason at the highest levels.

We need to conduct investigations that would make the McCarthy years look like little boys in short pants, because this time, unlike that time, the threat is real.

Citoyens! La patrie est en danger! -Georges Jacques Danton, French Rrevolutionary leader.

TANTAMOUNT TO TREASON: WHAT WE NOW KNOW ABOUT THE KREMLIN'S CANDIDATE, DONALD TRUMP

Summary: Donald Trump’s campaign may be about to self-destruct. As more and more revelations begin to surface suggesting close linkages between Donald Trump and the Moscow Kremlin, those red flags, all puns intended, that I raised about three weeks ago are now being seen and waved by other, more “respectable” sources. The recent Wikileaks publication of roughly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee has all the hallmarks of an operation initiated by, and planned by, Russia’s intelligence apparat. From CNN to Talking Points Memo to Forbes to defenseone.com, numerous media outlets in the West, together with the Hillary Clinton campaign itself, are connecting the dots and discovering a trail that leads right back to the Kremlin. One headline in defenseone.com this afternoon reads “How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President.” 

What is clear is that a Russian kriegßpiel is very much in progress against the West. In many ways, we are at war right now with Russia. Naïve Democrats, too conditioned by fear of what happened with Joseph McCarthy to regard any form of calling Russia out as unacceptable, need to understand that the evidence is far clearer now than it was 60 years ago. Again, a kriegspiel is very much underway against the West, Russia is using every malign instrumentality it can to secure the election of Donald Trump, a useful idiot it thinks it can control. We are at a point where failing to support Hillary Clinton for president is very close to being treasonable.

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In the last 48 hours the Donald Trump campaign has begun to show a new kind of vulnerability, one that we had never expected in an American political campaign. Media sources from CNN to Forbes to Talking Points Memo to defenseone.com have begun to connect the dots linking Trump Tower with the Moscow Kremlin. The Clinton campaign has also begun to connect those dots, and as the dots come together, we begin to see evidence of malign attempts on the part of the Russian government to influence the outcome of this election. Three weeks ago, had anyone suggested that Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence apparat were trying to influence the outcome of an American election, “right-thinking” Democrats, conditioned to reject anything that smacks of McCarthyism, would have said such a soothsayer his or her tongue for uttering such a heresy.

 I was almost fed my own tongue for suggesting, last month, in my post of June 29, entitled “The Disastrous Ramifications of Brexit: Russia's Kriegßpiel Against the West” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-disastrous-ramifications-of-brexit.html), that part of the reason for the success of Brexit was that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his minions within the Russian intelligence apparat had attempted successfully to influence the outcome of the Brexit referendum. My fellow Democrats, conditioned by the history of American McCarthyism in the 1950s, were quick to denounce my ideas as being “unhelpful.”

Unhelpful to whom? I responded. At the risk of sounding like Donald Trump congratulating himself for the Pulse nightclub shootings, I can’t resist a certain measure of schadenfreude, a certain temptation to say “I told you so.” Because ultimately, the evidence before us points not only to malign Russian intervention in our election, but also to the treasonable nature of Donald Trump and of the Trump campaign. In a previous post, entitled “Donald Trump’s Treasonable Protection Racket,” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/07/donald-trumps-treasonable-protection.html) I suggested that Donald Trump’s unwillingness to defend the Baltic state members of NATO constituted evidence of treason. 

Again, I was pooh-poohed by all the bien pensant Democrats who read my post. And again, I must confess to feeling a certain measure of schadenfreude.

However, the fact that we are betrayed at the highest levels isn’t limited to the treason being committed by members of the American right. Many of us in the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party have noted with increasing dismay the tendency of diehard supporters of Vermont Independent Senator Bernard Sanders to echo and repeat the often poisonous Hillary-hating tropes that find such a ready home in the campaign of the Kremlin’s own candidate, Donald Trump. We find, indeed, that some of the Sanders diehards, the so-called Sandernistas, speaking from a standpoint of excessive white privilege, have gone so far as to state very publicly that they would prefer four years of Donald Trump to one day of Hillary Clinton.

And, of course, the same over-the-top Sandernistas pitched an earsplitting snit when Hillary Clinton Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Yet, the whines that Tim Kane wasn’t “progressive enough” soon proved to be bullshit. It wasn’t so much that Sandernistas didn’t think Tim Kaine was progressive enough, though some of the stupider members of that tribe probably lapped up such nonsense with their silver spoons, while applying nonsensical purity tests that even God himself could not pass, but that more subtle, clever, and malignant Sandernistas realized that Tim Kaine was exactly the kind of progressive who could draw votes from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who could induce them to come home to Hillary.

And because Tim Kaine was indeed a progressive choice, Trump moles in Sanders world could not run the risk that Tim Kaine might actually be seen for the progressive choice he represents. Something had to be done. And so, against the possibility that Hillary might choose a genuinely progressive candidate, even if also a cautious one, the Sanders holdouts and the Trump apparat quietly let it be known that they believed that Tim Kaine would be Hillary’s choice. And once Moscow became aware that Tim Kaine was Hillary’s choice, it gave WikiLeaks the green light to dump the 20,000 emails which Russian hackers had obligingly provided to WikiLeaks to hold in case some development like Hillary’s selection of Tim Kaine should occur.

Because the WikiLeaks data dump was timed very carefully to drop a turd into the DNC’s punch bowl to counteract Hillary’s announcement of her vice presidential candidate. No doubt instructions also went out from the Trump organization and from such foolish Sanders supporters as former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner to pitch a fit over the veep selection itself.

And certainly, this Russian offensive against Hillary Clinton’s campaign has scored one victory already. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned, effective at the end of the convention, as Democratic National Committee chair. This represents a gift to the Kremlin and Donald Trump. To the extent that Bernard Sanders and his people have been responsible for procuring DWS’s departure, it is not unreasonable to suggest that they have allowed themselves to become useful idiots and willing dupes for Vladimir Vladimirovich. In such case, we ought to appoint another Vermonter as chair of the DNC. We should bring back Howard Dean, who was a brilliantly effective Democratic National Committee chair. Bringing back Howard Dean, and acknowledge Hillary Clinton supporter, will send a powerful message to the Kremlin and to Bernard Sanders that the Democratic Party won’t take such bullshit lying down.

At all events, the Democratic Party needs to conduct a thoroughgoing purge of the Russian sympathizers in its midst, and it needs to insist that a similar purge be conducted throughout the nation. Not since the days of Charles Lindbergh have we seen such obvious treason being perpetrated in the context of an American political election. And while the Republicans love to chant “Hillary is a traitor, lock her up!” it is more than ever apparent that the true treasonable conspiracy aimed like a dagger at the heart of America is the one emanating from the Kremlin and from Trump Tower.

 I leave to the labors of abler commentators than I the recitation of the detailed mechanism by which Trump and the Russian government have made common cause together. But we do know now that Donald Trump is the Manchurian candidate, and that the revelations of the extent to which the Russian intelligence apparat is deploying all the tradecraft that it can to try to secure his election as President of the United States has given the Democratic Party in general, and the Hillary Clinton campaign in particular a stick with which he may ultimately be bearbaited and beaten to death. Let’s not do the typical Democratic thing and be too afraid to unwrap the gift this represents. Instead, let’s open up this priceless gift, and not be afraid to be “opinionated, brash, fearless, partisan, hectoring, rude, cunning and unfair,” as the late John Mortimer, QC put it in his Rumpole stories. Above all, let us, as Rudyard Kipling put it “make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man!” If redbaiting is no longer an option because Russia is no longer communist, then let us never be afraid to engage in a little baiting of the Russian bear. After all, the Puritans didn’t oppose bearbaiting because of the pain it gave the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave the spectators.

 Let us also not be afraid to forthrightly declare that we are at an unprecedented pass in American history, where, for the first time, opposition to a particular presidential candidate, in this case, Hillary Clinton, is in fact tantamount to treason.

Then, let us set about the pleasurable enterprise of bearbaiting Donald Trump and his campaign to death. Until. There. Is. Nothing. Left. 

#NeverTrump.