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Election 2016: How About You Whine a Little, Democrats?

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Can someone please call a waaaahmbulance for Paul Krugman? At a little after 9pm on November 8,  the economist and New York Times columnist fired the starting gun on America’s quadrennial whinefest: “Btw, Jill Stein has managed to play Ralph Nader,” he tweeted. “Without her Florida might have been saved.”

Early the next morning, about the time Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump to concede the presidential election and congratulate him on his victory, the New York Daily News ran 400 words or so on the same note: “The vote totals between the Republican and Democrat in battlegrounds such as Florida and Pennsylvania were close enough to have been swayed if minor party voters had supported Clinton.”

Wow! What a concept! If people who didn’t support Clinton had supported Clinton, Clinton would have won! This is news?

Let’s talk about who’s really responsible for Donald Trump’s victory.

First we have the people who voted, in plurality numbers in states disposing of a majority of electoral votes, for Donald Trump. Yes, really. Trump voters are largely responsible for Trump winning the election. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Running a close second: The Democratic Party. They could have offered voters Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee, Martin O’Malley, or Rocky de la Fuente. But noooooo … instead, they nominated one of the most loathed and mistrusted American political figures of the last half century. What could possibly go wrong? They found out on Tuesday, didn’t they?

Those of us who supported third party candidates (I cast my vote, in Florida, for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson) didn’t owe our votes to the Democratic Party or to Hillary Clinton. If they wanted our votes, they should have gone to the trouble of EARNING those votes.

Instead they stomped their feet and demanded that we waste our votes on the candidate they supported instead of the candidates we supported, because … well, just because. And now they’re throwing themselves on the ground and holding their breath until their faces turn blue because they didn’t get their way.

No, I don’t expect either of the major parties to learn anything from this outing. They’ll continue to ignore the concerns of third party voters every four years, then cry a river when those third party voters ignore them in turn. The Democrats made their bed. Let them lie in it. Lying seems to be something they’re pretty darn good at.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Janet Reno: Justice Delayed was Justice Denied

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Janet Reno ordered the FBI’s 1993 attack in Waco, in which 76 men, women and children were murdered using chemical weapons and fire. [Image public domain, provided by Wikimedia Commons]
In the early hours of November 7, Janet Reno died at the age of 78 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Her niece “confirmed to CBS News that Reno died peacefully at home surrounded by family and friends.” It’s unfortunate that, unlike many of her victims, she was permitted to shuffle off this mortal coil a free woman, unpursued by the hounds of justice. Janet Reno had a lot to answer for.

As state attorney for Dade County, Florida in the 1980s, Reno helped kindle a wildfire of moral panic in America over alleged widespread ritual child sex abuse, leading witch hunts in which children and witnesses were bullied and even tortured into making up the lurid stories Reno and her “expert” child psychologists wanted to hear. People went to prison for crimes that they had not committed — in fact, crimes that hadn’t actually occurred at all. Some may still be there.

Instead of finding herself fired, disbarred and prosecuted for the damage she’d done , Reno was appointed to the position of Attorney General of the United States by president Bill Clinton in 1993. She became the first woman to serve in the position.

She promptly established her approach to the new job, ordering the  FBI’s 1993 massacre, with fire and chemical weapons, of 76 men, women and children at the Branch Davidian  community outside  Waco, Texas, a killing spree for which she publicly took “full responsibility.”

When someone admits to complicity in, let alone “full responsibility” for, 76 murders, it’s reasonable to expect a lengthy prison sentence or perhaps even death by lethal injection to follow the confession. Instead, Reno went on to become the longest-serving US Attorney General of the 20th century.

Another highlight of her tenure was the abduction of young Elian Gonzalez from family in Miami and his return to Cuba. Gonzalez’s mother had risked and lost her life bringing Elian to freedom in Florida. Reno handed him back over to the Castro regime.

Since the mid-1990s, I had devoutly hoped to someday see Janet Reno either brought before the bar of justice — in an individual criminal prosecution or perhaps a mass trial a la Nuremberg — or, at the very least, in perpetual flight and hiding like unto her spiritual exemplar, Adolf Eichmann. Her peaceful death “at home surrounded by family and friends” dashes those hopes.

Janet Reno successfully evaded real responsibility and liability for her actions to the very end. Good riddance.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Wikileaks and the Podesta Emails: Two Things

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English: Demonstration in front of Sydney Town...
Demonstration in front of Sydney Town Hall in support of Julian Assange, 2010, December 10 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As final voting in the 2016 US presidential election approaches, questions continue to swirl around Wikileaks and its release of an email archive copied from the personal files of John Podesta, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. It would be impossible, in the space of a single column, to fully consider the content and implications of those emails. There are, however, two relevant questions which those interested in the matter should carefully consider.

First, are the emails authentic and unaltered?

Clinton and her surrogates don’t want to answer that question. They stick to claiming that the mails haven’t been authenticated and hinting that they may have been altered.

The facts: Not all of the emails can be authenticated as to origin and content. But some can be, and some have been. As Bob Graham of Errata Security points out, many of the emails are digitally signed using the Domainkeys Identified Mail verification standard, which can be used to verify that email comes from the server it claims to come from and has not been modified since leaving that server. To date, no one has publicly demonstrated that the origin, or so much as a comma of the content, of any of the Podesta emails has been altered. So far as we can tell, they’re the genuine article.

Secondly, is the Podesta email hack an attempt by Vladimir Putin to affect the election?

Clinton, her campaign, and various media friends are working overtime to convince the public that the Russians are out to get her. In her final debate with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Clinton claimed that 17 US intelligence agencies say so. Fact-checking site Politifact confirms her claim … sort of.

Those 17 agencies (speaking as one through the Homeland Security Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence) don’t offer any EVIDENCE for their “confident” conclusion, just a broad claim that the email hacks “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian directed efforts.”

Could the Russian government be behind the leak? Sure.

Is there any particular reason to believe the Russian government is behind the leak? That comes down to who you find most credible.

The US intelligence community, which claims to know that the Russian government hacked John Podesta’s emails, has a record. That record includes missing the 9/11 hijackers and claiming that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons. Its claim on this matter should probably be taken with several grains of salt.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says that the Russian government is not linked to the Podesta emails. Assange and Wikileaks have a record, too. Ten years. Ten million documents released. Number of times caught faking or lying: Zero. Love them or hate them, Wikileaks has proven itself a reliable and believable source.

Conclusion: The emails are almost certainly authentic and unaltered, and the Russian government is probably not behind their disclosure. If your vote is going to be affected by the Podesta emails, it should hinge upon their content, not upon doubts as to their authenticity or provenance.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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