Hillary Fans Cold War Flames to Obfuscate Email Leaks

Hillary Clinton is dangerous. Everyone knows she was one of the leading Democrats pushing for the Iraq War. That alone did not compel war criminals Henry Kissinger and John Negroponte to endorse her candidacy for president:

She supported the 2009 coup in Honduras which caused violence resulting in a refugee crisis we shamefully fear-mongered and ignored. Libya is a shambles since the assassination of Gaddafi which Hillary supported and defiantly insists was a success. She threatened to attack Iran. She supports opposing sides of the civil war in Syria. Her position on Israel/Palestine is to the right of every current and former US president.

Rather than deal with the substance of leaked emails, Hillary, her campaign, and much of a parroting corporate media are evoking Red Scare, McCarthy-ite tactics. They are waving the contents off as Russian propaganda unworthy of dissemination. Those reporting on the damning leaks have been castigated as tools of Putin. Just the New York Times, the Intercept, The Young Turks, the International Business Times, and a few others are reporting the leaks without caveat. Despite Wikileaks’ 100% record of authenticity – and Clinton’s own admission of authenticity during a presidential debate – the Podesta leaks have been brushed off by Clinton surrogates as Kremlin-doctored fakes. Or as inconsequential.

Worse, Cold War flames are being fanned for partisan and personal political gain. Without providing a shred of evidence, Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama have accused Russia of meddling in our presidential election. They are claiming that Donald Trump, Vladamir Putin, and Julian Assange are in cahoots to undermine Hillary’s campaign. And that Russia is behind all of the hacks – the DNC, dozens of state voter databases, and Hillary’s campaign staff emails.

Here’s their case: Guccifer 2.0, who claimed responsibility, is Romanian (that’s, like, Russia-adjacent?). The hacker(s) used tactics known to have been used by Russian hackers in the past. Ex-KGB Agent Putin is the marionette of dimwitted Trump, who is vulnerable because he owes money to Russian banks, having been black-balled by most in the US. Trump-henchman Roger Stone has ties to Julian Assange of Wikileaks, who clearly has disdain for Hillary. Also, Assange lost journalistic free speech rights when he conspired to hold the emails for maximum impact on the presidential election and should face extradition (or worse). John Kerry didn’t pressure Ecuador to cut his internet. John Podesta is a private citizen whose privacy was violated. And Russia committed a cyber attack against the US.

Whether some or all of that is accurate is a completely separate from the substance of the emails. (And given WMDs, the Gulf of Tonkin et al, I'm not inclined to believe them simply out of hand.) No one cares that the Pentagon Papers were stolen. Or Donald Trump’s tax returns. John Podesta – of the Podesta Group, the third most influential lobbying group in the world – is one of the most powerful men in the world. Hillary Clinton is in the verge of becoming the Leader of the Free World. While I personally disagree with the manner in which Wikileaks publishes everything up to and including Podesta’s risotto recipe, many revelations in the emails are of great public import and very much needed daylight.

After all, former-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was pressured to resign when the DNC hack showed that she used her position to tilt the scales in favor Clinton’s campaign over that of Senator Bernie Sanders (before going back to work for Hillary’s campaign). We saw proof that Hillary’s State Department gave political favors such as ambassadorships and approval of arms deals to Clinton Foundation donors.

The Podesta leaks continue to roll out by the thousands. We’ve learned that Hillary was fed a debate question in advance by CNN contributor and now-interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile. We see the Clinton camp feeding stories to friendly journos and being given final approval of stories in advance; and being given interview questions in advance, which also were subject to campaign approval. We learned that she assured Wall Street executives that her public stances do not necessarily reflect her real, private positions which she shares with them. There is evidence of illegal coordination between the Clinton campaign and pro-Hillary super PACs Priorities USA Action and Correct the Record.

Hillary, along with her surrogates in the media and her online army of mercenary trolls, do not wish to deal with these uncomfortable truths. Instead, they obfuscate and saber-rattle.

This is extremely dangerous and will have lasting effects. An adversarial relationship with Russia is a path toward mutually assured destruction. President Reagan promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move another inch eastward toward Russia. We now occupy their border. We are in a constant state of reverse Cuban Missile Crisis and Americans don’t know or care.

Donald Trump is a fascist mad-man. He has said that Japan and Saudi Arabia should have nukes. Trump is a belligerent bumbler, but he is not actively pushing for WWIII with Russia. He has said that he wants to work with Putin to defeat ISIS (Daesh). We can’t work with them when we are fear-mongering and threatening retaliation. We should let Russia go back to burning their money in the Middle East for a while.

Hillary wants a no-fly zone in Syria – which would require boots on the ground in order to enforce. Daesh doesn’t have any planes in Syria, or anywhere else. Russia has planes is Syria. Would Hillary start WWIII by shooting down a Russian pilot for inevitably violating our nonsensical no-fly zone?

Hillary Clinton has called for a military response to a cyber attack. They are calling these leaks a cyber attack. They are blaming Russia. Thanks to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, we are closer to nuclear war than at any time in a generation. At least.

The Cold War is resurrected. For political expediency.