With all the mystery surrounding the WikiLeaks dump of embarrassing Democratic Party emails, only one thing is clear—that party, including its presidential candidate, is seriously inept when it comes to cybersecurity, dangerously so. Every one of their servers, legal or not, is apparently leaky.
The media will never admit this but in the modern digital world, they are nitwits. If the Democratic Party were a bank, there’d be a run.
What is not clear is who is up to the mischief and why. WikiLeaks took credit without revealing a source. The hacker “Guccifer 2.0” has stepped forward, but U. S. intelligence agencies are claiming with “high confidence” that Vladimir Putin’s Russian government is behind the hacking. Russia denied this and, not long after that, Eric Snowden, said by some to be in league with the Russians, expressed anger with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange for the extensive leak. As the old joke goes, “Who’s on first?”
But let’s assume, arguendo, Putin is the culprit. What would be his purpose in monkeying around with a U. S. election? Who would he want to be our next president?
The conventional wisdom circulated ad nauseum by our mainstream media is that it is Donald Trump. He and Vladimir are said to have a “bromance,” having said a few admiring things about each other (usually excerpted by the same media to make Trump look bad, as is their wont on practically everything). Donald is reputed to have a “man crush” on strong leaders — a form of projected self-love, I suppose — and perhaps there’s something to that. We don’t know, especially since he has never acted on it.
Now let’s look at his Democratic opposition from the Russian/Putin point of view. How have the Russkies fared in their attempt to reconstruct the Russian Empire/Soviet Union under the regime of Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton-John Kerry, where there have been multiple actions to examine?
Pretty well, I’d say. In fact, amazingly well.
It began with the “reset button” presented by Hillary Clinton to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in 2009. The look on Lavrov’s face during this childish charade—evidently Hillary’s idea—told the whole story. (Sucker, he must have been thinking.) Exactly five years later, the Russian Federation had invaded the Ukraine and annexed the Crimea. What did the Obama administration do about that other than huffing and puffing? Zero.
Of course before then (2012), Obama had had his famous open-mic slip to Medvedev, whispering to the Russian president to inform Putin that he (Obama) would have more flexibility vis-a-vis Russia AFTER Obama’s election. Evidently, Putin got the point.
Meanwhile, in Syria, the civil war continued and expanded (2011 to the present). That country’s dictator, Bashar Assad, was, as everyone slightly awake knows, Russia’s client. Russia for years had a key foothold in Syria, its huge airbase just outside the port of Latakia. During the Bush administration the Russians were relatively quiescent. But now the mass-murdering Assad was on a rampage with reports he was gassing his own people with chemical weapons.
The world was appalled. Obama drew his famous red line. No more gassing. But Assad continued to gas —children’s corpses were splayed on the ground—and Obama did nothing. Another zero.
What do you imagine Putin thought about that? You don’t need a PhD in Russian studies to figure it out. I don’t have one, but I have been to the Soviet Union (twice) and the Russian Federation (once). He and most of the Russian leadership would regard Obama-Clinton-Kerry as pathetic weaklings, easy to manipulate, basically a joke. And they would be pretty much right. No Reagans there, that’s for sure, moving to break up, or even slightly impede, the “Evil Empire.”
Russia is now stronger in the Middle East than it has been in years.
Now on to Trump. My best guess is that the Russians would regard him as an unknown. No one knows, probably not Donald himself, how he would react in certain situations. Talk is just that. But his personality is that of a person who does not take things lying down, to put it mildly. No doubt the Russians and their intelligence agencies have taken note of that. That’s what they do—profile.
Further, my own experience with the KGB (now the FSB) that I wrote about in this book led me to the realization those kind of intelligent agencies don’t like surprises. They are conservative in nature.
So it seems highly unlikely to me that Putin or the Russians would be rooting for Donald Trump to be the next president. As that other Donald (Rumsfeld) put it, there are known knowns and known unknowns. Trump is a known unknown. Hillary Clinton—the admitted third term of Barack Obama—is a known known. And she—like her pals Barack and John—hasn’t been any trouble.
Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His book—I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already—is just published by Encounter. You can read an excerpt here. You can see a brief interview about the book with the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal here. You can hear an interview about the book with Mark Levin here. You can order the book here.
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