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Democratic Party Files Suit Alleging Russia, the Trump Campaign, and WikiLeaks Conspired To Disrupt the 2016 Election (cnbc.com)
The Democratic Party is suing Russia, the Trump campaign and the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks for conspiring to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. From a report: The multi-million-dollar lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court says that "In the Trump campaign, Russia found a willing and active partner in this effort" to mount "a brazen attack on American Democracy," which included Russian infiltration of the Democratic Party computer network. The Trump campaign, according to the lawsuit, "gleefully welcomed Russia's help." The suit says that "preexisting relationships with Russia and Russian oligarchs" with Trump and Trump associates "provided fertile ground for [the] Russia-Trump conspiracy." The common purpose of the scheme, according to the Democratic National Committee, was to "bolster Trump and denigrate the Democratic Party nominee," Hillary Clinton, while boosting the candidacy of Trump, "whose policies would benefit the Kremlin." Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the party's suit "is not partisan, it's patriotic."
Sometimes, I ask people if we would be doing all of this Russia stuff had Hillary won? When I do, I get the strangest look as if they'd never even thought of it before. You kind of see the facial expression as they progress from suprised, to the realization that the answer is "no, we wouldn't care about any Russian collusion had our chosen candidate won." All this hand-wringing about Patriotism and American Democracy ... had said interference been in their favor, not a word would be uttered. In fact, we all know they'd be shouting down anyone who brought it up as a bunch of backwoods tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists. SNL would be running end-to-end sketches about redneck Republicans crowing about "Russian Collusion". It's also ironic that this time, it's the Democrats decrying that foreigners are influencing our elections. These are the same people who think having to present ID at the polling place is xenophobic. Affluent Democrats used to be our intellectual elite. Now, they're just as easily lured down the path of blatant hypocricy, and they are just as blind to it as the religious right has ever been. Self-interest and nraccisim completely surpress what should be the ability to see contradictions with clarity, and reduce all people, regardless of political afliliation, to defacto tools of whichever powerful interest seeks to use them. The USA no longer has an intellectual elite. We no longer have any identifiable party which can can establish a claim to the moral high ground. Instead, we have two intensely self-interested factions taking positions and feigning endless outrage to establish themselves within the heirarchy of the (usually inherited) idiology group. As cliche' as it is to reference the movie Idiocracy, it's becoming increasingly clear that it was an extremely optimistic portrayal of this nation's future.