I Was Right About the December Surprise, But For the Wrong Reasons
I have observed in the past that the media will run negative pieces about legislation they favor, but only after the legislation is passed and the information is not longer useful to the debate. I suppose they do this to retroactively create a paper trail for being even-handed. So I hypothesized that we might see a December surprise once Hillary won, raising issues about her more forthrightly than they were willing to before the election.
Well, I was sortof right. We are seeing a December surprise -- the silly Russian hacking story being pushed by the Clinton campaign and the White House -- but for completely different reasons. These stories are clearly to try to de-legitimize Trump's election, either just as general battle-space preparation or more specifically ahead of the Electoral College vote.
By the way, speaking of fake news, it strikes me there is an interesting bait and switch in how this story is presented. The story itself is about the appropriation and publication of the emails of Democratic insiders. To my knowledge, no one has claimed the emails have been altered or faked, so one could argue that most of the damage is self-inflicted on Democrats -- if they had not been writing about inciting violence at Trump rallies, there would be nothing salacious to leak.
But the media shorthands all this as just "hacking" which I suspect many low information voters think refers to actually altering vote tabulations. Certainly this is the assumption that Jill Stein and all the suckers who donated to her money-hole recount effort ran with. But of course there is zero evidence of this and it is almost impossible to imagine happening in any kind of wholesale manner. But I think that some in the media and many in the Democrat camp are purposely throwing around the "hacking" term in the hopes that people will get this false impression.
Postscript: I have a new standard we should apply to any government regulatory effort aimed at a private company selling a product or service thought to be fraudulent: No private individual can be prosecuted for selling any product or service that is less of a scam than Jill Stein's recount eff0rt (which, oh wait, may get spent on something else, anything else they want). Ordinary people are being suckered into giving money to this on completely false, really absurd, principles. It infuriates me when politicians get all pious about, say, Exxon misleading the public about global warming when they sell crap like this. At least when I pay my $3 to Exxon, I get a gallon of gas that actually runs my car as promised. What will any of these donors get from Stein's effort?
