U.S. Representative Jim Himes, who just won re-election to office, has been pushed over the edge by Donald Trump, according to a story in the New York Post.
“What finally pushed me over the edge, Himes said in an
interview on CNN’s New Day, “was when the president-elect of the United States
criticized the CIA and the intelligence community. Can you imagine what the
leaders in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran are thinking as they watch the next
president of the United States delegitimize and criticize his own intelligence
community and stand up for the defense of Russia, one of our prime adversaries.”
Mr. Himes must have been standing very close to the edge,
because he believes that Mr. Trump’s remarks on the CIA report show that the
President-Elect is unhinged: “We’re five weeks from Inauguration and the
President Elect is completely unhinged.” In plain-speak, “completely unhinged”
means he’s nuts. Among Democratic politicians
still suffering from painful election losses – Republicans, this election
season won the House, Senate and White House, a trifecta – the expression may indicate
a general unease with the results of the election, rather than a serious appraisal
of Mr. Trump’s mental health. Wounded politicians under stress are occasionally subject
to hissy fits.
We should be thankful that the CIA, unlike Caesar’s wife, is
not yet above criticism. Mr. Himes failed to note in his press response that
reports issuing from the CIA and the FBI were in conflict. The FBI’s
investigation found no unimpeachable evidence that Russian intelligence
services – which, like their counterparts at the CIA, engage in hacking – had
materially affected the U.S. elections. The CIA instructed members of Congress
that Russian intelligence services did engaged in hacking, perhaps through
intermediaries, but hard evidence supporting the charge has not, and probably
will not, be made public, principally because the CIA as a rule safeguards top
secret information more diligently than did former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, whose loss to Mr. Trump has unhinged many a Democrat.
Mr. Himes will appreciate the distinction between spying,
which may include acquiring data by hacking, and election interference through
the manipulation voting data. In fact, it would be nearly impossible for
Russian spooks to manipulate election votes, because polling machines carry separate
computer chips. Mr. Himes has not charged Russians with manipulating voter
data, to be sure, but the charge he does make is broad and amorphous enough to
leave in the public mind the notion that foreign entities have tampered with
our near sacred voting process. It was Stalin who pointed out that it’s not the
votes that count in an election but rather those who count the votes. It’s
possible that Putin may agree with Stalin on this and other matters of statecraft.
“The leaders in
Beijing and Moscow and Tehran,” we know, are all expert in the fine art of
hacking, as is the CIA -- one hopes. China in particular has masterfully
exploiting data it illicitly gathered from American businesses, which permits
it to produce products – cheap drone knockoffs, for instance – it then underprices
and sells to countries such as North Korea, Iran and Syria, all announced
enemies of the United States, a continuing practice that really should push
American politicians over the tolerance edge.
Fine distinctions are lost in Mr. Himes’ formulation. And of
course nothing Mr. Trump has said concerning the data made available by the CIA
to select Congressmen should convince Mr. Himes that Mr. Trump ought to be
committed to an insane asylum. When such wild exaggerations pop out of Mr.
Trump’s mouth, he is called on the carpet for it by media folk who preserve a
mystic silence in the face of Mr. Himes’ equally stupid remarks.
Some Republicans and many Democrats have urged that a
special prosecutor should be appointed to examine hacking by foreign entities
and their bearing, if any, on elections. Mr. Himes is not new to investigatory
work; he serves on The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,
which conducts oversight of the United States Intelligence Community. He must
know that the proper venue for the investigation of possible voter interference
by foreign entities lies within the political jurisdiction of appropriate
Senate committees.
Timorously peeking out of Mr. Himes’ campaign hoopla is a
serious point. Mr. Trump should be more concerned than he appears to be with
Vladimir Putin’s ambitions affecting Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and his
bosom buddies in the Middle East, which include Bashir Assad, Syria’s mass
murderer, and the ayatollahs in Iran who, despite Mr. Obama’s velvet glove
treatment, continue to finance terrorist organizations with the planeloads of
cash given to them by Mr. Obama as a side agreement to a deal struck between Mr.
Obama and the Iranian regime; suspiciously, the dark deal arranged between Iran
and the United States was never referred to the Congress for its advice and
consent.
Neither Mr. Himes nor any of the six other members of
Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation were advised by Mr.
Obama that plane loads of hard cash, easily transferable to Hamas, a militant organization
that grew out of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement in the 1990s and
the early 2000s, were in the dead of night delivered to terrorists that had conducted
numerous suicide bombings and other attacks against Israel. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal's silence on matters affecting Israel in particular is crushing. Mr. Blumenthal is Jewish. Had Mr. Himes been
advised that American taxpayers were clandestinely supporting a heavily armed
anti-Israeli terrorist group, presumably he might rightly have been pushed over
the edge.
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