Bigger than Watergate

More relevant to the Clinton/Obama/Trump issue, the emptiness of the self delusionary fantasies embracing the Democrats is becoming more visible every day.

Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake said the partisan criticisms of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) are "absurd" because the same people "cheered" leaks that were damaging to Gen. Michael Flynn.

Lake said many on the left complained to officials that Nunes violated ethics rules by discussing the existence of such intelligence reports involving Rice.

But, he added that such complaints were "absurd" because those same groups were "cheering" when the similar unmasking of Flynn forced him to leave the Trump administration.

He said the publicized leaks about Flynn were "far more significant" than the fact Nunes made references to findings about Rice because the congressman didn't disclose anything contained in those reports.

Lake said many of the ethics complains against Nunes came from groups funded by or related to progressive investor George Soros.

The sappy true believers can't deal with the evident fact that a very large segment of our population became fed up with the hapless policies (both foreign and domestic) and the continued undermining of our historic values at the hands of inept former leaders, unable to see their own ( rather severe) limitations.

Are you saying that the interference didn't exist? Or are you saying that it was going on but it didn't affect the outcome? There may be a class of "sappy true believers" who think it cost Clinton the election but it's really disingenuous to assume that anyone who questions the Russian activities feels that way.

I've noticed another similar tack people will take — saying that if there was no collusion with the Trump campaign there's no issue. There's plenty of evidence that Russia tried to disrupt the campaign and admitting this doesn't mean questioning Trump's legitimacy. I'm surprised that, with a few exceptions, there's so little outrage on the part of the GOP when a foreign state inserts itself into our electoral process — whether or not it accomplished its goal.

Who do you think had more influence on the election...

But, unless a voting machine was rigged, electronic votes hacked or voters paid to vote, the election was not interfered with.

Have you watch Trevor Noah at all? He is nothing but a 30 minute anti-Trump hatefest. anyone watching that show could be turned against Trump. Did you watch MSNBC, CNN, NBC News, CBS News during the election? They all tried very hard to disrupt the campaign in Hillary's favor. George Soros and Rupert Murdoch both tried to disrupt the campaign. My neighbor with his "Vote Hiollary" sign tried to disrupt the campaign.

Electioneering isn't the same as attempted disruption by a hostile state.

Never mind the fact that Putin had, with the aid of Clinton and her political aides, gotten financial control of most of the active Canadian uranium mines, achieving a near monopoly on the mineral,..

Quote:

The sappy true believers can't deal with the evident fact that a very large segment of our population became fed up with the hapless policies (both foreign and domestic) and the continued undermining of our historic values at the hands of inept former leaders, unable to see their own ( rather severe) limitations.

Are you saying that the interference didn't exist? Or are you saying that it was going on but it didn't affect the outcome? There may be a class of "sappy true believers" who think it cost Clinton the election but it's really disingenuous to assume that anyone who questions the Russian activities feels that way.

I've noticed another similar tack people will take — saying that if there was no collusion with the Trump campaign there's no issue. There's plenty of evidence that Russia tried to disrupt the campaign and admitting this doesn't mean questioning Trump's legitimacy. I'm surprised that, with a few exceptions, there's so little outrage on the part of the GOP when a foreign state inserts itself into our electoral process — whether or not it accomplished its goal.

"We aren't going to let somebody sitting in the Kremlin, with bots and trolls, try to mix up our election."

"By the time they finished with me, I was Typhoid Mary", she said, attributing her sharp decline in popularity to sexism directed against women who display ambition.

whether or not it accomplished its goal.

The subjective denial that increasingly appears to be the driver behind the increasingly ludicrous Democrat claims of Russian "interference" in our election is starting to look ridiculous to even casual observers. The sappy true believers can't deal with the evident fact that a very large segment of our population became fed up with the hapless policies (both foreign and domestic) and the continued undermining of our historic values at the hands of inept former leaders, unable to see their own ( rather severe) limitations.

IN their minds Hillary & co, couldn't possibly have lost the election and led her party to Defeat in both houses of Congress and a large majority of States. It must have been the result of an evil foreign conspiracy. Leaks confirming a continuing DNC conspiracy to hack both the Democrat primary and the election, can't possibly be an indicator of pervasive corruption among themselves, and must instead be a further indicator of the "vast right wing/(Russian) conspiracy" that is out to destroy themselves ( and in their eyes, all that is good in the world).

We now know that, in the weeks immediately following the election, then President Obama took the highly unusual step of releasing NSA communication surveillance data to functionaries of all seventeen Federal intelligence agencies - a step that at once expanded the circulation of once closely held and highly accountable information to hundreds of functionaries in multiple agencies, and a step, taken for no apparent or so far identifiable reason, that vastly expanded the opportunity for unaccountable leaks. In parallel, and at the same time, Obama's in house liar in chief and former Bengasi spokeswoman, Susan Rice, suddenly involves herself in the details of "unmasking" the names of American participants in communications routinely monitored by the NSA and thereby including it in the now more widely circulated material

This is all "Top Secret/Special Compartmented Information) (TS/SCI) and the various Federal agencies maintain physical facilities (called skiffs) where it is kept and can be viewed. Obama's act multiplied the number of skiffs with access to this info and thereby the number of people with access to them. Included here was the State Department skiff, to which (it is reported) that Hillary Clinton and her staffers still had access.

Suddenly we are flooded with indicators of a vast Russian conspiracy to defeat Hillary and, as it was suggested, done in collusion with the Trump campaign. Perhaps, as the theory suggests , Putin lived in such fear of yet another "reset" button from the fatuous Hillary that he favored Trump.

Never mind the obvious facts that; the leaked DNC material was all true and evidence of a very real effort by the DNC and sympathetic media to hack the election; that the FBI had warned the DNC of the intrusion attempts and the inadequacy of their IT security; that the FBI had detected similar attempts on the RNC that failed due to better security, Never mind the fact that Putin had, with the aid of Clinton and her political aides, gotten financial control of most of the active Canadian uranium mines, achieving a near monopoly on the mineral, and that no U.S. national interest was served by her assistance to him. And, finally never mind that no substantial mutual interest or activity between Trump and Putin has yet been found in the midst of all the furor.

Susan Rice may want to stop giving interviews at this point.

While Rice's ascent in Democratic foreign policy circles is the stuff of legend, she has also demonstrated a completely unhelpful tendency to say the wrong thing to the media. And it's come back to bite her twice just this month.

The most recent example was highlighted Monday by The Post's Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler. In an NPR interview three months before Syria's government allegedly used chemical weapons on its own people last week, Rice had hailed the Obama administration's success in removing such chemical weapons. “We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile,” she said.

...

In the eight-plus years since then, it's not as if Rice has been a constant presence on TV. The PBS interview she gave last month, in fact, was her first interview since the end of the Obama administration. And yet, in both that interview and one conducted in her final days in office, she said something that later turned out to be careless and imprecise, at best.

I think Kessler said it well when he said of Rice's chemical weapons claim: “The Obama administration had a tendency to oversell what was accomplished, perhaps because Obama received so much criticism for not following through on an attack if Syria crossed what Obama had called 'a red line.'”

That defensiveness also seems to characterize her comments about incidental surveillance of Trump associates and the Benghazi situation, in which the Obama administration had failed to thwart a terrorist attack on Americans abroad.

But you can certainly go too far when you are trying to see and project the best of a set of circumstances, and Rice is now finding that out the hard way — again.

Susan Rice is a liar and that’s the truth. What’s amazing is that it has taken years for the major media to admit it, despite epic evidence. Even journalists have a breaking point -- in this case, false statements about deadly chemical weapons.

Rice’s lies have angered conservatives for years. Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer nicknamed the former national security adviser the “liar in chief,” according to The Blaze.

Rice’s willingness to misrepresent what happened during the Benghazi attack was so amazing, that she repeated it on five separate Sunday morning news talk shows. It was a lie that might make Pinocchio proud. But it took her lies about Syria to do just that.

The Washington Post gave Rice four Pinocchios (out of four) in the paper’s liars scoreboard for bogus claims about removing Syria’s chemical weapons. The Post criticized her for comments she made during a Jan. 16, NPR interview. It looks bad for Rice that a paper so blatantly anti-Trump as the Post would criticize her for such willful deceit.

The paper’s Fact Checker called Rice’s statement “problematic” before spending 1,400 words proving she lied. “She did not explain that Syria’s declaration was believed to be incomplete and thus was not fully verified — and that the Syrian government still attacked citizens with chemical weapons not covered by the 2013 agreement. That tipped her wordsmithing toward a Four,” wrote Glenn Kessler.

The article cited several examples where Syria had continued to use chemical weapons. “Kerry’s “exit memo” to Obama, released 11 days before Rice’s remarks on NPR, acknowledged that Syria continued to use ‘undeclared’ chemical weapons,” emphasized Kessler.

The New York Times mentioned the same NPR quote in a April 9 story about Obama’s failure to remove WMD from Syria. Here is Rice’s now famously false comment:

“We were able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished. … We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”

The Times’ Peter Baker showed how nuanced Rice was trying to be to make that explanation. “Publicly, Mr. Obama’s advisers sometimes referred to ‘known’ or ‘declared’ stockpiles to qualify their claims, and sometimes did not. But from the start of the deal, there were discrepancies in Mr. Assad’s weapons declarations.” That’s terrifying, given Rice’s involvement in the Iran nuclear deal which relies on similar reporting by a terror state.

Baker then detailed the times that Syria had used chemical weapons against its own citizens -- after the Obama administration said they were 100 percent gone.

Rice’s involvement in lies is nothing new. She’s been caught up in the Benghazi scandal from the beginning. She went on "Face the Nation," falsely claiming, “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

Rice also drew fire for defending an Obama administration effort to spin the Iran deal. A Times profile of Ben Rhodes, whose brother David is CBS News president, detailed plans to deceive the public. Remember, this isn’t a conservative outlet. It’s The. New. York. Times.

Here’s the Times’ quote:

“The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false.”

Her response was classic Rice -- more denials. “There was nothing hidden. There was no effort to or reality of misleading,” said Rice, according to the Daily Caller. “There is nothing that Ben or the president or I or anybody who was involved in explaining the Iran deal to the American public said that wasn’t factually correct. The notion that there was any ball to hide or spin to put on it, I think, is really misguided.”