Democrats Desperately Embrace McCarthyism

The latest story alleging that Russia was behind the DNC email hack (David Sanger and Eric Schmitt, "Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C.") largely regurgitates the story from the previous day by David Sanger, "F.B.I. Examining if Hackers Gained Access to Clinton Aides’ Emails." Proof that Russia is to blame boils down to some metadata in Cyrillic found on documents released prior to the WikiLeaks dump last Friday:

Preliminary conclusions were discussed on Thursday at a weekly cyberintelligence meeting for senior officials. The Crowdstrike report, supported by several other firms that have examined the same bits of code and telltale “metadata” left on documents that were released before WikiLeaks’ publication of the larger trove, concludes that the Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., entered the committee’s networks last summer.

The G.R.U., a competing, military intelligence unit, was a later arrival. Investigators believe it is the G.R.U. that has played a bigger role in releasing the emails.

In an essay published on Lawfare, a blog that often deals with cyberissues, Susan Hennessey, previously a lawyer for the National Security Agency, called the published evidence about Russian involvement “about as close to a smoking gun as can be expected when a sophisticated nation-state is involved.”

Mr. Assange’s threat to release documents, she wrote, “means, put simply, that actors outside the U.S. are using criminal means to influence the outcome of a US election. That’s a problem.”

One point to keep in mind here is the timeline. The DNC first announced it was hacked in June. (See David Sanger and Nick Corasaniti, "D.N.C. Says Russian Hackers Penetrated Its Files, Including Dossier on Donald Trump.") The documents with the telltale Cyrillic fingerprint (why is it that only hackers from the FSB or GRU can leave behind metadata in Cyrillic?) were not part of the WikiLeaks trove. Assange has intimated that the DNC server was hacked by more than one party. According to an interview he conducted with CNN:

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday his whistleblowing website might release "a lot more material" relevant to the US electoral campaign. 

Assange was speaking in a CNN interview following the release of nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by suspected Russian hackers. 

However, Assange refused to confirm or deny a Russian origin for the mass email leak, saying Wikileaks tries to create ambiguity to protect all its sources. 

"Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are," Assange told CNN. 

The Kremlin has rejected allegations its behind the hacking, calling suggestions it ordered the release of the emails to influence US politics the "usual fun and games" of the US election campaigns. 

"This is not really good for bilateral relations," Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, added.

Obama and the FBI will not make any direct allegations of Russian involvement out of fear of 1) escalation of a cyberwar when U.S. defenses are in poor shape and 2) proof possessed by the Russians of U.S. meddling in Russia's political system.

But what is really boundary crossing in all of this -- one really has to go back to days of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy -- is the accusation that a presidential nominee of one branch of the duopoly is basically an agent of Uncle Sam's great Cold War foe, the Russian Bear.

Donald Trump is being made out by the Democrats and their facilitators in the media to be the new Alger Hiss, an Alger Hiss not as a State Department bureaucrat but as the leader of a major party ticket. It is so bizarre and far fetched -- server hacks instead of microfilm in hollowed-out pumpkins -- it speaks of a power structure that is cracked beyond repair.

Its shrill desperation also points to more dirty secrets yet to be revealed.

Can Hillary Lose? Yes, If Somehow the Gender Gap Narrows

Friday afternoon my coworker alerted me to the WikiLeaks dump of 20,000 emails from Democratic National Committee that proved conclusively the already obvious, that the DNC had been engaged during the primary in active electioneering on behalf of Hillary.

My coworker's question to me was whether I thought this would make the news. My answer was completely wrong. I said that since the prestige press has been a co-conspirator with the DNC all along in booming Hillary, the story of a lack of neutrality at the national committee would be buried.

With the news yesterday that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was lowered surgically on her sword by Team Hillary (good story by Jonathan Martin and Alan Rappeport, "Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Resign D.N.C. Post"), it is likely that more damaging salacious tidbits will be regurgitated from the WikiLeaks trove.

Not a promising turn of events on the eve of the party's national nominating convention, particularly after the skillful roll out of corporate Dem, Obama buddy and former DNC chair Tim Kaine as Hillary's VP choice. Thanks to the seamless collaboration between the press and Team Hillary, much of Friday and nearly all of Saturday the news seemed to snap back to a prior era of tranquility and stability, and this despite the Munich shooter (mass shootings are becoming as common as fender-benders these days).

The fact that the baleful specter of Putin is now being invoked to explain the email leak (see "As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue" by David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth) is proof that the Clintons are running scared. Sanger and Perlroth make the argument for Hillary in the second-to-last paragraph of their story that Trump's campaign is an offshoot of Putin's Cold War with the United States:

Intrusions for intelligence collection are hardly unusual, and the United States often does the same, stealing emails and other secrets from intelligence services and even political parties. But the release to WikiLeaks adds another strange element, because it suggests that the intelligence findings are being “weaponized” — used to influence the election in some way. The story has another level of intrigue involving Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman. Working through his lobbying firm, Mr. Manafort was one of several American advisers to Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Russian-backed leader of Ukraine until he was forced out of office two years ago. Mr. Yanukovych was a key Putin ally who is now in exile in Russia.

Whether or not Russian intelligence was the source of the hack of DNC servers is water over the dam at this point. The damage has been done. The Philadelphia convention has been wrong-footed. Berniacs will find a second wind. Already the Sunday march against Hillary is being reported to have been larger than any public rally in Cleveland last week. There will be a negligible, if any, windfall for the Dems following the GOP's woeful convention, an enormous lost opportunity given that Hillary could have sewn up the election with a well-managed, strong show in Philadelphia.

Charles Blow in his column this morning, "More Damned Emails," reports that Hillary's unfavorable rating is 54%, which is 4-points lower than Trump's. But what is truly noteworthy about the numbers Blow quotes is the percentage of people who find Hillary untrustworthy -- 67%.

The milieu that provides the soil for this distrust is one of pervasive economic insecurity. According to Thomas Edsall's last piece, "The Apotheosis of Donald J. Trump":

Capitalizing on legitimate discontent, Trump is both the exploiter and the beneficiary of stagnating median household income, declining productivityand gross domestic product growth, as well as a worldwide refugee andimmigration crisis.

Economic issues are arguably foremost. For the majority of men and women dependent on wages to stay afloat, the past 16 years have been marked by setbacks and uncertainty of historic proportion.

Jon Hilsenrath and Bob Davis, writing in The Wall Street Journal, put it this way:

"After 2000, the economy would experience two recessions, a technology-bubble collapse followed by a housing boom, then the largest financial crisis in 75 years and a prolonged period of weak growth."

Full-time workers’ median weekly earnings in constant 2016 dollars have hardly budged: $774.85 in 2000, $788.87 in 2015.

According to the American Psychological Association, some 72 percent of adults reported experiencing financial stress in 2014. More than half reported that their incomes were not enough or barely enough to make it from month to month.

The cost of housing — rent, mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance, repairs, upkeep, utilities — has been growing steadily. The “affordability cutoff” for rent is generally set at 30 percent of income. In 1960, less than a quarter of renters paid more than 30 percent of their income; by 2013, that percentage has risen to just under 50 percent.

The growth in housing costs in our post-Lehman meltdown world doesn't get the attention it deserves in terms of why it is we all feel so insecure. Yes, there are the innumerable foreign wars and seemingly constant terrorist attacks. But living paycheck to paycheck with the knowledge that you will forced out of your home if you get a layoff inspires fear and loathing right up there with being the victim of violence.

So can Trump win? Unless there are more damning leaks and smoking guns, something so damaging it will start to whittle away Hillary's commanding lead among women, I think not. As Edsall explained in a column two-week's back, "College Men for Trump":

We often overlook the pro-Trump leanings of white men with college degrees, in part because white women with four-year degrees back Clinton 57-35 percent, and most reports combine the total. When both sexes are counted, Clinton leads by six points. The gender gap this year is historic.

The race to the bottom will continue.

Hillary Wins

Any doubt should be put to rest this morning about Stathis Kouvelakis' statement mentioned a couple weeks back, that with the erosion of support for major parties throughout the West the corporate media has filled the void to prevent a more precipitous collapse of the status quo. On the eve of the final day of primary voting, the Associated Press preordained the outcome and announced that the Democratic nominee would be Hillary Clinton (Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy, "Hillary Clinton Has Clinched Democratic Nomination, Survey Reports").

Based on the polling, it did not appear as if Hillary was in any serious danger of losing California to Bernie Sanders, particularly given the fact that last week she received the endorsement of longtime California Governor Jerry Brown. So this AP "rush to judgment," as the Sanders campaign is calling it, seems like paranoid overkill. Possibly the intent is to create a situation in the six states voting today where Hillary will walk away with enough pledged delegates (the AP report had to do with superdelegates) to prevent Bernie from contesting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Sanders has predicted that Hillary will not have enough pledged delegates after today's vote, and that, on this basis, he will march his children's crusade to Philly.

One thing is certain, to me at least. This primary campaign has illuminated the extent to which U.S. society is a closed one. It took a billionaire schooled for decades in the most brutal, omniscient media market on the planet to break through. But, if last week is any indication, Trump will be sliced and diced before August is over.

Hillary, competing in her fourth presidential campaign, did several things well, given how tarnished a candidate she is. Though her Super Tuesday "Southern strategy" did not work exactly as planned, because it was designed to knock Bernie out of the race, it will likely end up providing her the margin of victory she needs in pledged delegates; also, it cemented the narrative that black voters overwhelming favor her. Most importantly, Hillary proved an adroit manager of Democratic Party machinery, including the big international unions, and the corporate media monopoly.

Bernie Surging

Bernie Sanders is forecast to win today in Wisconsin. Assuming this is the case, the April 19 primary in New York is shaping up to be a worst case scenario for Hillary and the Democratic Party. As recently as March 29, Clinton was polling 67% to Sanders' 24% in the Empire State; now that has narrowed to 54% to 38%. 

A Wisconsin win for Bernie will maintain momentum from his dominant 70%-30% March 26 weekend victories in Alaska, Washington and Hawaii. That weekend is more and more looking like a turning point. It turns out, based on the results of the Clark County Democratic Convention over the weekend, that Sanders actually won Nevada. If you take into consideration the taint of Coinghazi in Iowa, Sanders won the first three election contests against the Democratic establishment.

No doubt he lost in South Carolina and other Southern Super Tuesday states. Bernie has problems connecting with a majority of the black electorate. In an odd, lengthy, premature frontpage post-mortem in yesterday's paper ("Early Missteps Seen as a Drag on Bernie Sanders’s Campaign" by Patrick Healy and Yamiche Alcindor), none of the undeniable shortcomings of the Bernie 2016 campaign -- the consistent reticence to attack a corrupt Clinton; an initially light travel schedule -- amount to a hill of beans compared to Sanders' poor performance with African Americans.

Bob Kerrey, the ex-senator from Nebraska and Vietnam war criminal, does get in a few good quotes though:

Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1992 and who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton in the current race, said Mr. Sanders might be winning now if he had relentlessly pressured Mrs. Clinton since last fall over her closed-door speeches to Wall Street banks, her role in the finances of Clinton Foundation programs, and other vulnerabilities. Mr. Sanders did not raise the paid-speech issue, after long resistance, until late January. 

“Making the transcripts of the Goldman speeches public would have been devastating” to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Kerrey said. “When the G.O.P. gets done telling the Clinton Global Initiative fund-raising and expense story, Bernie supporters will wonder why he didn’t do the same.”

***

Mr. Sanders also refused to attack Mrs. Clinton over her use of private email as secretary of state, which is now the focus of an F.B.I. investigation. Criticizing her email practices could have played into Democrats’ concerns about Mrs. Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness, and some Sanders allies thought it could be a potent issue. But Mr. Sanders basically took it off the table at their October debate when he said, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” Sanders advisers cheered that line, seeing it as a sign of their candidate’s integrity, but other Democrats said he had misjudged the issue. 

“The email story is not about emails,” Mr. Kerrey said. “It is about wanting to avoid the reach of citizens using FOIA” — the Freedom of Information Act — “to find out what their government is doing, and then not telling the truth about why she did.”

Sanders stumbled in Ohio and Arizona. (Shenanigans in Maricopa County likely padded Clinton's victory in Arizona.) But the torpidity of Hillary, her being held in revulsion by a large plurality if not outright majority of voters, has repeatedly allowed Bernie to concoct new victory narratives, the latest being a come-from-behind upset victory in the state that Hillary represented in the U.S. Senate.

The way the Democratic primary has gone so far, its topsy-turvyness, even if Sanders wins New York Pennsylvania still could very well vote for Hillary.

I see a dead heat shaping up with aporia being the hallmark of the Democratic Party going into its summer nominating convention in the City of Brotherly Love.

Michigan Post-Mortem

The results from yesterday's primary election in Michigan are an indication that we are headed to another Bush v. Gore-type standoff in the fall. Trump won, and he won by double digits -- 36.5% to Cruz's 24.9% and Kasich's 24.3%. But added together, his opponents won nearly 300,000 more votes in the Wolverine State than the celebrity billionaire. This points to something that Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin noted in their post-election frontpager this morning, "Bernie Sanders Wins Michigan Primary; Donald Trump Takes 3 States." Trump's negatives are on the rise:

Even before the votes were counted Tuesday, there were new signs that resistance to Mr. Trump’s candidacy within his own party was growing. The number of Republicans viewing him unfavorably spiked to 46 percent in a Washington Post-ABC poll released Tuesday, the highest figure recorded in that survey since Mr. Trump entered the race last year.

This percentage will likely grow as next Tuesday's GOP Battle of Armageddon takes shape. The Republican strategy is to block Trump from running the table next Tuesday. If Trump manages to win in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, his chances of avoiding a brokered convention and cinching the nomination are great. To prevent this, the Republican Party is concentrating its anti-Trump attack in Florida and Illinois. The problem for the GOP is twofold: 1) Rubio has collapsed as a viable alternative; and 2) Ted Cruz remains the most dominant "next man up."

With the Rubio charade thankfully retired by voters in Mississippi and Michigan, I'm sure that Republican power brokers would love everyone to get behind Ohio governor John Kasich. But Ted Cruz blocks the way with his Super PAC millions.

So the dynamic -- Cruz a solid number two stifling the emergence of an acceptable mainstream alternative -- that has led to the rise of Trump remains in place. Barring a surprise showing from Kasich, Trump sweeps next week. Let the coronation begin.

On the Democratic side, Bernie won a solid come-from-behind victory in Michigan. He did it by outworking Hillary on the ground and, like Trump, by hammering home the message of how trade agreements backed by ruling elites like the Clintons gutted the industrial backbone of the country. According to Yamiche Alcindor and Patrick Healy in "Trade and Jobs Key to Victory For Bernie Sanders":

Mr. Sanders pulled off a startling upset in Michigan on Tuesday by traveling to communities far from Detroit and by hammering Mrs. Clinton on an issue that resonated in this still-struggling state: her past support for trade deals that workers here believe robbed them of manufacturing jobs. Almost three-fifths of voters said that trade with other countries was more likely to take away jobs, according to exit polls by Edison Research, and those voters favored Mr. Sanders by a margin of more than 10 points.

This is good news for Sanders going into next week's contests in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. (Bernie seems to be largely conceding Florida and North Carolina.) Hillary managed to win more delegates last night because she trounced Sanders in Mississippi. And even if Sanders manages to win all three industrial states next week, but Clinton continues to rack up lopsided wins in heavily African American Democratic districts, Hillary will likely come away with more delegates.

But that shouldn't be the thing that concerns us. After next week the remaining segments of Hillary's Dixie firewall are all finished and the calendar is much more favorable to Bernie. The march to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia will be weary and woeful for Hillary. She will arrive in the City of Brotherly Love exactly what she is -- a bloated political cadaver kept in a state of animation by untold millions in corporate cash.

The American people are in for a real treat this July. We will bear witness as the duopoly attempts to subvert the results of the primary election season.