Where There's Smoke, There's Smoke

It must be so much easier just to toss stuff in the air and not care where it lands, rather than place it neatly away in an organized space.  That's the only way to explain the Democrats' sudden interest in (shhh, don't say anything loud) ... Russia.

As much as I try, I simply cannot come to understand what is being thought may have actually happened in regard to the 2016 campaign and what Russia may or may not have been trying to do.

I heard one commentator today actually state that there was no question that the Russian leadership had interfered with the 2016 election specifically to get Donald Trump elected and to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Democrat candidate.  This was stated, as if it were categorically proven fact.

But it leaves us several questions to answer, the first of which is a simple "Why?"

Barack Obama told the Russian president during the 2012 campaign that "after the election, I will have more flexibility," presumably to take actions that the Russians would like.  Hillary Clinton, who had already sold a quarter of USA uranium to the Russians, who was endorsed by Obama, was the candidate of the same party as Obama, and who was a fairly obvious wimp on foreign policy, was the candidate in 2016.

What possible motive would the Russians have for wanting anyone other than Hillary Clinton to be president?  Donald Trump had campaigned on being a tough defender of the USA and its people.  He certainly stated his openness to working with Vladimir Putin on various issues, but he certainly wasn't going to be selling them another 20% or so of our uranium.

Hillary Clinton had obviously shown herself, as Secretary of State, to be willing to prostitute herself, to sell out the country, in order to make money for herself.  How in God's name would any reasonably intelligent Russian leader not prefer that the Americanskis elected Hillary Clinton, who would run the country however best it would be for herself?

So there is that.

Then there is this.  We know that there was successful hacking of the Democratic National Committee by someone.  We also know that the Republicans were hacked, but the attempt failed. The DNC hacking got to John Podesta's emails, which ended up on WikiLeaks and embarrassed the Clinton campaign, to the extent they could be embarrassed (I sometimes think of them as incapable of that emotion).

We know that candidate Trump jokingly asked the Russians to go find, somewhere on the Internet, the 30,000 lost emails that Hillary bleach-bitted off her private email server.  We also know that he wasn't asking the Russians to actually hack that server, because when he made the joke, that server was already unplugged and was up on a shelf in an evidence locker at the FBI.  So he pretty much figured that hacking was mostly the province of the Russians.

In terms of, you know, actual facts, that's all we know right now.  We seem to hear that the Russians were trying to disrupt the election, but we know that if they tried anything, anywhere, actually to affect the results of the voting, they failed.  There is zero evidence, anywhere, of anything being changed as far as the voting.

Similarly, there is zero evidence, anywhere, of any motivation except to disrupt the campaign and the election, perhaps to show us they were capable of doing so, and make us mistrust our own process.  That is not to say that they had a preference, just that they could make a little mischief and be an uninvited player.  We have seen zero evidence that they preferred one candidate; as I noted, from a geopolitical perspective, their preference would have been Hillary, not Trump.

All that makes the foofaraw in the press that much more silly.  It is, according to this week's morality, treasonous if any public official with an (R) after their name has ever been in the same room with a native Russian-speaker.  We don't know why that is supposed to be true, but it apparently is.

Barack Obama can promise the world to Moscow on a live, hot mic but that's just peachy.  Hillary Clinton can sell a quarter of our uranium to the selfsame Russians, but it was Our Lady of Stronger Together who did it, so hey, it was just a little bit of uranium, we can spare it.  Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) can go ballistic about Jeff Sessions, then say that she had never met with Russian officials, but then have pictures of just such a meeting pop up within hours, but she's OK too.  Same with Chuck Schumer.  No problem.  Just a doughnut.

Well, there is a problem, and that's my point.  What does anyone actually think the Russians did, and what is anyone actually saying that any Republican did, to help them do whatever it is that they are supposed to have done?

It is a kind of FBI thing that they prefer to investigate actual criminal activity.  If I were at the FBI, and I were handed the "case" of all this as the lead investigator, I would have a first question -- What does anyone think happened, criminally?  You know what I mean?  I'm still trying to figure what the crime was, and the left is already screaming for a special prosecutor (hint: the special prosecutor-authorizing legislation expired a decade ago).

All we get is smoke.  We keep hearing that "When there's smoke, there's fire", but no one seems to be able to explain what the fire actually is, what criminal activity anyone, anywhere, is actually being accused of having done.  Shoot, forget the accusation part, just tell me the darn crime!

I have stepped away from this far enough to gain that perspective.  I simply don't see anything there, let alone enough to be somehow more important than dumping Obamacare, reforming immigration, simplifying and cutting taxes, you know, the things that Donald Trump was elected president to do.

Lots of smoke, no fire.  No "there" there, so it seems.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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