90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, December 12, 2016

Fake News: CIA Says Russia Preferred Trump

The Washington Post has unflaggingly stirred up hysteria over so-called "fake news," so it's extra-ironic that the media giant is one of the country's foremost purveyors of the same. In the Post's world, a bunch of guys with Dorito-stained fingers who blog in their parents' basements have done everything from manipulating the election to provoking a nutcase into an attack on a D.C. pizzeria. Meanwhile, the Post's banner headline on Saturday was the innuendo-filled and poorly sourced announcement "CIA: Russia favored Trump," which sounds like fake news, too.

If it's true that the CIA concluded that Russia deliberately intervened in November's election to tilt it toward Donald Trump, that ought to worry Americans, but not because Trump is a Russian mole or Vladimir Putin's agents stuffed electronic ballot boxes. Rather, it is cause for concern that American intelligence analysts are either not very bright or politically corrupted enough to really believe such poppycock. Meanwhile, the Post and much of the mainstream media, in their mania to discredit Trump, will publish almost any sort of "news" nowadays, even if it's as fake as the nonsense that makes up much of the blogosphere.

The source of the Post's "scoop" is unnamed: "officials briefed on the matter." In the story, the damning evidence is vaguely traced back to a September briefing of congressional leaders by a trio of Obama appointees: FBI director James Comey, Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson, and counter-terrorism adviser Lisa Monaco. Alert readers will note that none are actual intelligence professionals, while all are practiced political hacks. Comey's pre-FBI experience was mostly as a government lawyer, and his corruption in favor of Obama during the Clinton email scandal is well known. Johnson, like Comey, is a lawyer, but with close ties to the Democratic Party, who did turns in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Monaco is yet another Democrat lawyer who...

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"Hard-Core Clinton Fanatic" Manufactured "Viral Fake News" That MSNBC Used To Discredit Wikileaks

The phrase “Fake News” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that). Now we have an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored. That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s...

Be careful what you wish for … you just might get it. Jill Stein didn’t get the recount she wanted in Michigan, but she did get the state to take vote-integrity issues seriously. Meeting in its lame-duck session, the state House of Representatives passed a tough voter-ID bill that includes $3 million for funding of free state identification and birth certificates after over 18,000 voters cast ballots without identification in the presidential election:

Michigan’s Republican-led House on Wednesday night approved a strict voter identification proposal over strenuous objections from Democrats who argued the plan could disenfranchise properly registered voters.

Michigan voters without photo identification could still cast a provisional ballot under the controversial legislation, but they would have to bring an ID to their local clerk’s office within 10 days of an election in order for their vote to count.

Current law requires a photo ID too, but also allows for voters to sign an affidavit under oath that attests to their identity and eligibility. The House might have had ample reason to wonder about abuse under that system when looking at the distribution of the practice. The Detroit News’ Jonathan Oostling reports that almost half of all such votes took place in heavily Democratic Wayne County, and almost 6,000 in the city of Detroit alone. That seems oddly disproportional, given that Wayne County accounted for just 16% of the state’s total.

It’s worth noting that Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes, well below that total of non-ID ballots. That might tend to bolster Stein’s general complaint about potential voter fraud, but a recount wouldn’t be able to determine whether those ballots were cast fraudulently anyway. Ballots are cast secretly, so they do not contain any identifying marks. Once cast, a ballot from an ineligible voter is indistinguishable from legitimate ballots, and a recount would count them again, too. If the recount is about integrity and not the outcome, then Stein and her allies should be cheering this change in the statute, assuming it...