And finally......

Just to complicate things yet more, the latest release of secret CIA documents from Wikileaks includes detailed discussions of how the CIA copies the “fingerprints” of Russian and Chinese hackers and uses them in their own hacking to cover their trail. Which means, in essence, that all the claims the government has been making over the past few years about Russians or Chinese being responsible for this or that hacking - including the hacking of the Democratic campaign – are highly suspect.  If the CIA can leave misleading “fingerprints”, one assumes the Russians and the Chinese can too, since they seem to be better at this that the US is.  But in fact, it apparently could even have been the CIA itself doing the hacking, or just about any other government or group.

Of course it is obvious that the Russians, the Chinese, the French, the Israelis, a few of the wealthier criminal groups, and not a few bored teenagers in their bedrooms have been hacking US government sites, just as the CIA and NSA and the FBI and the Army and…and… and … are doing their best to hack into foreign sites, including even those of our own allies. This whole “hacking” issue is a distraction – yes, of course it goes on; we do it and they do it. Get real!!  Congressional outrage over hacking is just useless political posturing.

Obama had eight years to get something effective done about this problem, and to get the government to protect its secrets better.  But even his Secretary of State (Hillary) was using an unsecured server for classified material – hardly a good model for the rest of the government. Maybe Trump will do better. I notice that he is smart enough NOT to use electronic messaging or email – except for Twitter when he wants to make something public.

There is more…….

So now the word circulating in Washington is that the Obama administration did indeed request a wiretap warrant for Trump’s phones from the secret FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance) Court, and was refused the first time, but reapplied to another FISA judge and it was approved. It is not clear if Obama knew about this, but his attorney general, Loretta Lynch certainly knew because she signed off on all such applications.

Both Obama and General Clapper have issued “non-denial denials”, meaning they have issued very carefully worded statements that leave open the possibility that someone else in the administration ordered the wiretaps, while at the same time claiming they knew nothing about it. If such wiretaps were approved it is almost inconceivable that both Clapper and Obama would have not known about it, but they were probably insulated enough from it that they can plausibly deny knowing and no one can prove otherwise.

It is still too early to know if these claims are accurate or just more “fake news”, but I notice the more liberal journalists are giving this story as low-key exposure as they can, which suggests they are worried that the Democrats may have a big scandal waiting to burst on them.

Meanwhile the House Intelligence Committee has asked the Justice Department for FISA records on wiretap requests. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  

Wait a minute.....

Trump claims the government wiretapped his campaign, presumably on the orders of someone high in the administration (Obama?).  Obama denies it, as does Gen James Clapper, who was Director of National Intelligence under the Obama administration. Clearly this is another of Trump's paranoid claims........or is it?

Mike Flynn was ousted from his position as National Security Advisor in the Trump administration when the intelligence community (illegally) leaked phone conversations they had recorded between him and the Russian ambassador. And where was Flynn when he had these conversations?  In Trump Tower! So in fact conversations from Trump Tower, from Trump's campaign headquarters, WERE being wiretapped!

Looks like perhaps Trump isn't paranoid.......

Gee, liberals are upset…

Liberals are upset that Donald Trump’s administration is ramping up the deportation of illegal immigrants; that his administration is actually going to follow the law and deport people who aren’t supposed to be in the country, just like most other nations in the world do.  Following the law; what an outrageous concept! Certainly not something the Obama administration did with immigration.

Liberals are upset that Donald Trump is going to leave it to the states to decide the transgender  bathroom issue. What an outrageous concept – that perhaps Americans in different states are different enough that a big brother one-size-fits-all federal rule doesn’t work. That perhaps Colorado doesn’t see a problem with public marijuana smoking but Iowa might. That perhaps California is less up tight about bathrooms than Maine. That perhaps Wyoming worries less about gun ownership than New York. That perhaps not everyone in the nation agrees with liberal orthodoxy. Amazing! Who would have thought it?

Liberals are upset that Trump’s executive order barred Syrian immigrants for 120 days, while vetting procedures were reviewed. I guess they thought Obama had a better process – he barred almost all Syrian refuges for years. Liberals are also upset at the 50,000 a year cap on refugees, even though that was essentially the same cap under George Bush and under all but Obama’s last year in office.

Liberals are upset that Trump still wants to build a wall on the Mexican border.  I guess they object to his finishing the 700+ mile wall that the Obama administration already started. Oh, I guess if Obama did it is was OK, but if Trump does the same thing it is outrageous.

There are valid things to complain about in this new Trump administration, but the liberal complaints about just about everything he does are wearing thin, and making the liberal political class (and the liberal media that feeds on it) look pretty hypocritical.

Recommended: Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity

Samuel Huntington, who died in 2008, was a liberal Harvard professor of political science. In 1996 he published a controversial book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (see my book list in the sidebar) in which he argued that the coming century would see conflicts along the borders between major cultures and civilizations. The liberal academic world didn’t like this view, which clashed with the current groupthink best expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that history had come to an end and the world would now settle down into a more or less permanent state of peace and liberal democracy. With the resurgence of Russian and Chinese expansionism, and the Middle East religious wars, we now know that Huntington was right and the liberal academic fantasy was wrong.

Fast forward to 2004 and Huntington published his last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, referred to in Hanson’s piece The End of Identity Politics recommended in my previous post.  Again his argument went against the current academic politically correct thinking, and again he was roundly criticized for not supporting the current multiculturalism fad.

His argument is complex and nuanced and one should read the whole book to get the full force of his position, but in short he worried that the current trend of identity politics, of multiculturalism, of encouraging groups to separate out into tribes (LGBTQ, Hispanic, Afro, women, Asian, etc, etc) was a dangerous path. That what had held America, a land of immigrants, together was the adoption of a more or less common identity as Americans, wherever we all came from originally, and to destroy that was to invite the sort of Balkanization and civil tensions (even civil wars) that have plagued other nations with unassimilated and resentful immigrants in their midst (think of the EUs problems right now).

The book is highly relevant right now, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat and Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, an event which has exposed the sharp cultural divisions in the country between the largely costal liberals and the more conservative rest of the country.

Recommended: The End of Identity Politics

Victor David Hanson has another thoughtful piece today worth reading: The End of Identity Politics. America is a nation of immigrants, yet it has succeeded up to now in avoiding the Blakanization and resulting civil strife that so many other countries are facing, because all those immigrants welded themselves within a generation or two into Americans, with a single common language and a more or less common culture. They ceased to be Irish or Polish or German or ..or...or and became "Americans"

Identity politics threatens this process, because it encourages people to see themselves first and foremost as some special, separate group, not like other Americans. Democrats in particular, and Obama and Hillary Clinton especially, thought this was a useful useful political lever (it was for Obama, but not for Hillary Clinton). But it is a dangerous road that leads to the sort of divisions that can bring down a nation.

Recommended: Trump and the Crisis of the Meritocracy

Glenn Reynolds has a perception piece in today's USA Today: Trump and the crisis of meritocracy. It goes along with what I have been saying about the "establishment" going crazy, not so much because of Trump's proposed policies, many of which have been proposed by previous presidents and are in fact supported by at least half the nation, but because he threatens the ruling elite - the insider "meritocracy" that runs the country and fancies itself smarter than the rest of the country.

Trump's election certainly highlighted the growing divide in the nation between the cultures of the better educated urban coastal communities and the cultures of the more rural, working class remainder of the country, a divide that has been growing more obvious over the past decade or two, but hasn't (until now) gotten the attention of the insular political elite.  Reynolds points out that this sort of divide has brought down empires before, and may well bring down America if we don't find some resolution to it.