Hack Attack Bipolarity

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

Rumors consume the news cycle that the Russians have stolen our electoral legitimacy, and as is typical, partisan battle lines are drawn long before a semblance of facts are in. The irony would be rich, if it did not have the potential to worsen the most dangerous confrontation in human history: Hillary Clinton set up an unsecured email server in her commode closet, violates email security procedure to a degree defined as “reckless” by the head of the FBI, and now the Democrats want new sanctions against Russia.

Why? Wait for it… they “hacked” her chance to win the election, because the Democrats’ email systems were unsecured. And this is after their introspection on the electorate’s judgement that they are not fit to lead.

Remember, the American people have absolutely no real knowledge of any of the hacking accusations. It is probable that, once again, vague intelligence is being manipulated into a policy-sized menace. And both parties misread the mood of the electorate enough to dare say “Trust us.”

It is reasonable to conclude that Americans can no longer have anything like objectively factual reviews of national security intelligence because of rabid partisanship. This election hacking controversy is only the latest go-around. We can have investigations until we are blue in the face, but the information that comes out of an investigation is only as good as what goes in, and our partisan distractions have warped our intelligence lens unaddressed for three quarters of a generation.

Our bent ability to evaluate facts is our true national security menace.

It should terrify Americans that we have to rely on British investigations to get to the truth of things. Their investigations, not ours, reveal the nonsense of our decision-making process in the violation of the sovereignty of Iraq and Libya, which set a torch to what was already the world’s most volatile region. It is reasonable to think that that no investigation of the Libyan fiasco was possible so long as one of its principal architects, Hilary Clinton, was believed entitled to inherit the Presidency (by fiasco, I refer not to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and the security contractors, but to the other hundreds of thousands of people killed or made homeless in our second attempt at Arab cultural-values molding. Our third, in Syria, should be our “three strikes and you’re out,” but it won’t be).

Look at the irony of the philosophical end-swapping: now to Democrats Russia is a menace we must confront?! Remember the derision candidate Romney was met with when he addressed Russia as our number one enemy in the Presidential debates last election cycle? Now the Republicans (at least the Trumpkins) are free and easy about Russia sticking their finger in our eye?! If they did. This is a flipping bipolar manifestation of our partisan mental illness. George Orwell, the spiritual father of this blog, said it best, as always:

We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Orwell’s point is that when facts are inconvenient to a political narrative in an all-powerful State, the facts need to change. The political calculus evolves to eclipse all. The high-school E.D. Nicholas who read 1984 would be stunned at the prescience.

This could be a case where, rather than accept responsibility for their own incompetence, the Democrats turn up the temperature on relations with a foe that has the power to reduce us to cinders. Wars have been started before as distractions sensible only to the political calculus of the elite players (Britain and Argentina in the Falklands being the latest example).

Never mind the pot-calling-the-kettle-blackedness of the interference accusation, considering America’s reflexive political interference in the affairs of nearly every country in the world from Iraq, to Iran, to Africa to South America. We supported President Yeltsin, and Putin would call that interference. Maybe it’s high time Americans came to know what it’s like to have another country interfere with us. Empathy, after all, is a factor in wisdom.

A truly hacked election would still implicate the US government in failure without a nefarious Russian “other:” when I bought my wife a present in Venice, the where, the who, and the instant I made my transaction, was knowable by my bank; I still have the receipt. And that was ten years ago. Yet, in spite of near-comprehensive knowledge of Americans’ movements and communications, the issue of proper voter ID and electoral security continues to vex the perceived legitimacy of our elections since “Gore Vs Bush” in 2000. Proper change, once again, paralyzed by total partisan focus.

It should also be remembered that hacking, like espionage, is a normal day-to-day endeavor of all nations carrying on the pursuit of their interests. Americans hacked Angela Merkel. This author finds it hard to believe that there is a new degree to its menace in November of 2016.

Then there is precedent: people rightly are skeptical when precedent is discarded and an issue shoe-horned into a political advantage. In the Federal Office of Personnel management hack, which compromised the IDs of 22.1 million Federal employees, it was the Democrats who emitted nothing but a yawn. No political advantage to be gained by fighting China right now, you have to suspect.

This blog’s father will also remind us that words carry precise concepts. So, to put on my words matter hat: a “hack” of our election would be if the Russians had broken into our voting software and changed outcomes. It is not the Russians finding something in John Podesta’s computer because he set up his own server in his commode. Or his use of something obvious as his password, like “SlaveOfClintonCrimeFamily.” A new policy of confrontation with a nuclear armed crime-nation need not be crafted to address the idiocy of the latter. It is best addressed by holding John Podesta accountable, the same way I would be, had I exposed my employer to risk by circumventing their expensive computer security. But, when was the last time a politician from either side of the isle accepted responsibility for anything? The near-impossibility of holding politicians accountable, combined with locked-in failure to adapt, are your author’s main themes in these pages, and philosophical bedrock for libertarian alternative proposals for solutions.