Senior U.S. senator pushes Trump on Russia, French election
Source: Reuters
Tue May 9, 2017 | 10:53am EDT
A senior U.S. lawmaker pushed President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday to respond to concerns that Russia was responsible for a hacking attack on the campaign of French President-elect Emmanuel Macron.
"Mr. Macron’s victory in Sunday's election does not diminish the need for the Trump Administration to take this attack seriously and to work closely with the French government to bring the perpetrators to justice and prevent similar attacks from taking place in the future," Senator Richard Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, wrote in a letter to administration officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.
Jeff Sessions, Trump's attorney general, has removed himself from probes of Russian election interference after failing to disclose his meetings with Russia's ambassador to the United States.
"Quite frankly it is the height of irresponsibility that President Trump still denies Russia's act of cyber war against our election," Durbin wrote in the letter, seen by Reuters. Durbin asked for information, including how the administration was responding to such attacks, and said Trump's attitude could result in inadequate efforts to help U.S. allies and U.S. states protect against future Russian hacking.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-cyber-congress-idUSKBN1851SL?il=0
= new reply since forum marked as read
so it stinks to high heaven that Comrade Casino* and his republican Kabal of Komplicit Kronies are doing everything they can to bury the truth.
* republican Draft-Dodger-in-Chief
When RT was launched, or Sputnik. But they said bad things about the right people. So it was all good.
When nuclear weapons treaties were torn up. But it was Bush II's fault. So it was okay.
When Russia was playing geopolitical resource games with Europe, esp. Ukraine. But it counted NATO influence, so it was all good.
When the first weapons from Russia started showing up in Afghanistan. But the war of imperialist aggression against innocent Muslims had gone on too long, and who really cares, anyway, when Americans are going without. So it was all good.
When Ukraine was destabilized. But all DU could talk about were cookies and a phone call from somebody with no power to somebody with no power. But, "American imperialism" and "CIA!" So it was all good.
When Crimea was occupied and annexed in some highly irregular elections. But self determination. So it was all good. There's no military solution.
When some large stores and banks in the US were hacked by Russian hacker groups operating in SW Russia. Or maybe E. Ukraine, the border was all but non-existent in real terms.
When the Donbas was destabilized and weapons that weren't in Ukraine's arsenal started showing up. Hey, self determination. Pity the poor Tatars, but anti-American. So it was all good. Anyway, there's no military solution. (And, oh, that's E. Ukraine, where Russian gangs could operate.)
When Russia started supporting it's Eurasian outpost in the Middle East. But hey, there was no possible military solution. Except Aleppo. Um, maybe it wasn't all good.
Even now, it's viewed as pro-Trump. The anti-Trump stuff coming out of the Kremlin is ignored. Because Putin's pro-Trump. We cite ambiguous evidence from last fall, less ambiguous evidence from last summer, and dig into what people were doing a decade or two ago. Because it's all pro-Trump. Except that the reports we like to cite say that the pro-Trump bit was late. It was tertiary, not even secondary.
It was anti-America, and has been for a decade. When Russia, it was said, was in no way the foe of the US.
It's like Syria was a partner for peace in 2007, when it was politically expedient--except that the government didn't change from 2007 to 2011, when it became an oppressive dictatorship. The only thing that changed was domestic American politics. Being pro-Assad meant being anti-Bush II, so people were pro-Assad. Oops.
In the same way that those who rejected the idea of Russia being a foe of the US weren't being pro-Putin, they were being blindly anti-(R). The key word being "blindly."
The second goal was personal, as befits a budding dictatorship: It was anti-HRC. The anti-HRC crap started far earlier than the pro-Trump stuff. In fact, Bernie supporters lapped it up every bit as much as the RW did. It was partisan warfare during the primaries, and any news that provided sufficiently large caliber ammo was licit. Even if it was stamped, "Сделано в России." ("Made in Russia."
I've been feeling that nausea for a decade or more. It's nice that people have finally caught on. It's sad that they only caught on because it's now politically appropriate. When there's something personal that they lost, when there's something personal, either in terms of identity or power or $ that they could have gotten but didn't get. When it's venal. It's also sad that now everything tends to be viewed through an anti-Russian lens without questioning, because it suits the kind of broad-brush smearing that we Americans so often use instead of thought. It's like being in the 1950s and 1960s all over again. Or the '80s, when it was bad to call a socialist government fighting a half-dozen proxy wars and supporting dictators in a dozen countries an "enemy," the term provoked derision, and many believed that the USSR, for all the GULag crap, was still better than the US. Pinochet! (Hey, Zimbabwe makes him look like a juvenile delinquent, and no more. But Zimbabwe only became okay to diss about 6 years ago when Mugabe grew clay feet.) In the '80s Reagan was the bad guy, not Hunchie (oops, "Gorbie" ... Gorbachev = "Hunchbackson" . Now that Russia's got a moderately RW government, it's okay to fear the russkies. Except not all Russians are evil.
Russia, to be honest, is less of a world threat now than it was in 1985; for world threat, China's taken the lead and Russia's a distraction. And the only reason it's any kind of domestic threat is because Americans blindly feast on whatever news, fake or real, suits their political fancy and nurtures their sense of grievance and deprivation. Whether it's playing to the racist anti-Obama right or the partisan anti-Trump left, it's the same malaise. We emote, we rage, we feel deprived and slighted and humiliated, and only sometime later, when it's all too late, we stop and think, "Wait a minute, I have a frontal cortex that's capable of rational thought. Maybe I should listen to it first and keep my hormones in check." I mean, it's a good thing to keep hormones in check when you're on a date, it's a good thing to keep them in check when you're in a polling booth.
Pogo was right. We've met the enemy and he is us. And, in a democracy, that's pretty much always going to be true.
