What Goes Around...
      Hillary said the other day that Putin hacked the Democrats' email because he has a “personal beef” against her.
    You're damn right he does. Hillary’s been trying to overthrow him just as she and/or her successor John Kerry have lawlessly toppled the leaders of Honduras, Libya, Ukraine, Iraq and Afghanistan (the latter two repeatedly) and are now trying their damnedest to bring down Assad in Syria, not to mention various democratically elected Latin American leftists.
      In any event, it’s Hillary not Putin who’s been toppled. Was her downfall God answering Putin’s prayers, or thanks to the talent of Wikileakers and Russian hackers, or was it from the most obvious of causes, the arrogant cluelessness of Hillary and the Democrats?  All of them, I would say, but mostly the hubris of the Dems.
    They ran a hapless campaign against Trump and already, with the Donald and a Rep Congress yet to take power, the Dems are promising their usual pusillanimous opposition to anything to the right of their business as usual politics.  It’s movements to their left that infuriate  them. Trump would have to disguise himself as Ralph Nader to stir up some real rage by the Dems.
    There are two battles looming. One is the resistance to Trump and the Trumpen element by everyone and anyone in this country who loathes and fears him.  The other is the gathering conflict within the Democratic Party between its corporatist, banker-loving right wing and its so-called progressives who range from wimpy centrists to Sanderista leftists. It’s anyone’s guess who will win.
    Back to the hack, the NY Times, as paper of record, will occasionally acknowledge our leaders’ sins of the past.  On Sunday, December 18, the Times put electoral shenanigans by us, the good guys, in perspective with the following:
     “…it is worth remembering that trying to manipulate elections is a well-honed American art form. The C.I.A. got its start trying to influence the outcome of Italy’s elections in 1948…in an effort to keep Communists from taking power. Five years later, the C.I.A. engineered a coup against Mohammad Mossadeq, Iran’s democratically elected leader, when the United States and Britain installed the Shah.
    ‘The military coup that overthrew Mossadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,’ the agency concluded in one of its own reports, declassified around the 60th anniversary of those events, which were engineered in large part by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.
     'There were similar interferences over the years in Guatemala, Chile and even in Japan, hailed as a model of post-World War II democracy, where the Liberal Democratic Party owes its early grip on power in the 1950s and 1960s to millions of dollars in covert C.I.A. support."
       Of course. it's only wrong when they do it, not when we do it.