by Sandy » Tue Apr 04, 2017 10:22 am
Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes have both kept track, and put together a time line and a connect-the-dots chart of contacts between Trump campaign people and Russian "agents," tracing the money trail to Manafort, Tillerson and Flynn, and matching up the Trump campaign announcements of contents of wikileaks dumps within minutes of their release. It's posted on their pages. Maddow has been particularly detailed following press releases and details put out by the FBI, and picked up on Clinton Watts. There's no question that the Russians interfered, or that several Trump campaign surrogates had direct contact with them. Whether Trump engineered and masterminded it, or whether that was left up to some of the crooks and propagandists in his organization remains to be seen. But I think we are going to see some things that will make Nixon and Watergate look like child's play.
It is unfortunate that the political polarization brought about by the extremist right wing media over the past 30 years or so has pushed something as serious as Russia interfering in the election process to the point of affecting its outcome into the same partisan box. There have been fears and speculation ever since electronic balloting was invented about the possibility that results could be hacked, machines programmed to favor a candidate regardless of the votes, or just the fact that while an audit can match up the number of voters with the number of ballots cast, it cannot determine who the person voted for once the ballot is cast. Combine that with dumps of propaganda claiming to be hacked emails of one of the campaigns, (which should have been immediately disavowed and ignored by the Trump campaign at any rate instead of pounced on and comments issued) and this should have been something which horrified both parties. The response, first and foremost, should be to immediately take steps to prevent such interference in the future. This is something that has done permanent damage to our democratic republic, and while security measures can probably be put in place to prevent tampering, the stuff like wikileaks and other propaganda has to be dealth with. I don't deny that I would be pleased with the buffoon and Pence having to resign over this, or be impeached and removed from office, along with draining the whole swamp of crooks and thieves they brought with them, starting with Bannon and Conway, but that's secondary to restoring the integrity of the electoral process.