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Title : The ultimate in "kompromat": What does Paul Manafort know about hacked voting machines?
link : The ultimate in "kompromat": What does Paul Manafort know about hacked voting machines?
The ultimate in "kompromat": What does Paul Manafort know about hacked voting machines?
Not long ago, a guest post by David Jay Morris included a few words about kompromat.Like Joseph, I’ve been coming to the conclusion that nothing else adequately explains the extraordinary way the leaders of the Republican Party, especially in Congress, have been falling into line behind Trump.The same idea has occurred to me, and to a number of other people. Mainstream pundits don't like to talk about this scenario, so it falls to us -- the outsiders, the outcasts -- to examine the notion.
What I’ve been wondering about, however, is if personal, one-by-one kompromat – mainly of the sexual or financial variety, one would suppose – is enough to explain such a rapid and wide-spread phenomenon. Do Trump and/or his minders in Moscow just have an extensive dossier of individual misdeeds, or is there something more there? Something party-wide whose exposure would seriously threaten the survival of the whole Republican Party and brand?
One candidate for this might be concrete evidence of the Republican tampering with election tabulating machines and software since 2004 or earlier that many of us have long suspected. Could the Russian penetration of state voter databases and other systems been either aimed at this, or else just serendipitously yielded (or pointed them to) such evidence?
If election-rigging is real -- and we're talking here about hacked vote tabulators, not in-person voter impersonation (which is, for the most part, a myth) -- Paul Manafort would probably know about it. There is good reason to believe that such fraud occurred in the Ukraine, where Manafort ran an election for pro-Russian thug Viktor Yanukovych.
Aided by high-priced Russian political consultants, Yanukovych ran for president of Ukraine in 2004, and seemed to have won.We have no clearer evidence of election hacking. And Manafort was there. Even if he was not party to the actual hack, he surely knew about it.
But the election was tainted by charges of fraud and corruption — most against Yanukovych and the Party of Regions — and an attempted assassination. A month prior to balloting, someone poisoned Yanukovych's main rival, pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko, and nearly killed him. On Election Day, Yanukovych, who had trailed in polls by double digits, won by three points, sparking accusations of voter fraud.
The government voided the election results and scheduled a do-over.
If he knows about fraud there, then he may well know about fraud here.
If cornered, Trump will expose the truth about GOP election rigging.
I put the previous sentence in boldface because it offers the briefest possible summary of my theory.
No, I can't prove it; I can only beg you to consider it. It explains a lot.
How else to account for the obsequiousness of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and so many others? A number of these people clearly cannot stand Donald Trump, yet they obey his every whim. Whenever Trump says "Blow me," each GOP leader falls to his knees so rapidly as to punch two evenly-spaced holes in the concrete. The only first-rank Republican who routinely defied Trump was John McCain, a famous advocate of clean elections.
Ideology fails as an explanation. Much of what Trump has done -- running up a massive deficit, slamming immigration, igniting a trade war, paying billions to farmers hit hard by that trade war -- goes against libertarian ideology.
We keep hearing that Congressional Republicans fear Trump's base, but the explanation also doesn't work. Support from the base would shrink if the truth about Trump seeped into the right-wing information bubble. If the Republicans did not keep strict control over the congressional investigations, the inquiries could uncover Trump's known history of criminality. We know that some Trump officials have offered perjured testimony.
For a while during election season, Fox was "kinda, sorta" anti-Trump. It's clear that Rupert Murdoch disdained the guy. Think about it: Just two people -- Devin Nunes and Rupert Murdoch -- could fracture Trump's base, if they chose to do so.
In short: Congressional Republicans should be in a position to tell Trump what to do -- yet they don't. They take marching orders from him.
Why the subservience?
And why did this happen a month ago? There was a bill to make elections cleaner -- a bill which originally had bipartisan support. Then Trump (who, without offering a shred of evidence, had screamed about rigged elections in 2016) demanded an end to the bill. Dutifully, the GOP leadership killed it.
Now step back and take in a larger picture.
On issue after issue, Americans prefer Democratic policies to Republican policies. They increasingly favor Medicaid-for-all. They even strongly turned against Trump on immigration.
No, I am not sympathetic to those progressive purists who have deluded themselves into thinking that all Americans love socialism, tofu, free abortions, nationwide gun confiscation, taxes on churches, trigger warnings on everything, and the mandatory enrollment of all pale-skinned high school students in White Self-Hatred courses. I'm quite aware that this country is much more conservative than the BernieBros think it is.
I'm simply pointing out the undeniable fact that, according to the polls, Democrats outnumber Republicans.
Yet the Republicans control everything.
We know that election hacking is technically possible -- in fact, some say it is easy. See here and here and here and here and here and here and here and...oh, hell. I could cite another hundred stories, all written by respectable authors. Teevee pundits (even on MSNBC) usually pretend that those articles and investigations do not exist; if they did not maintain that pretense, they would not be invited to appear on TV. I refuse to wear that particular blindfold.
Don't forget this memorable headline:
Russian agents hacked US voting system manufacturer before US election – reportPutin admitted in Helsinki that he wanted Trump to win.
Again: The Republican leadership killed a bill that might have gone some ways toward solving the problem. Why shouldn't I view that action as an admission of guilt?
Occam's razor suggest that the simplest theory is the likeliest to be true. My theory has the virtue of simplicity -- without, I hope being overly simplistic. I'm not asking for uncritical acceptance of this idea.
Just...consider it.
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