Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Much like those poor, stranded Japanese WWII soldiers marooned on tiny Pacific islands still waiting, Arisaka in hand, for the US Marine Corps to land there in 1995, the Left is still trying to win last year’s election; for them, the war never ended. Like the soldier clings to his bolt-action rifle still after all those years, driven mad by decades of solitude, the Left clings to its favorite scapegoat, Russia, equally mad from months of grasping at straws.
For a brief flicker of an instant this week, it appeared the Left finally found a straw it could hang on to when a series of emails exchanged last June between British entertainment publicist Rob Goldstone and Donald Trump Jr. came to light. In those, Goldstone told Trump about Russian pop star Emin Agalarov’s desire to share with him some incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton that surfaced from a meeting between the pop star’s billionaire father and the “Russian Crown Prosecutor.” The Trump family already knew Agalarov from their previous involvement with the Ms. Universe pageant and Donald Trump Jr., being ostensibly not all that bright, eagerly accepted the offer.
Goldstone and Trump Jr. exchange a few more emails, which the New York Times reprinted chronologically, before they set up a meeting between a Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Trump Jr. along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. Veselnitskaya was, according to The Hill, granted special visa parole by then Attorney General Loretta Lynch to defend a client in an asset forfeiture case in New York. The Justice Department couldn’t explain why she was still in the USA in June for her meeting with Trump Jr. or her other lobbying efforts directed against the Magnisky Act – a series of sanctions against Russia enacted in 2012 after the death in 2009 of a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnisky, who claimed to have evidence of fraud during Putin’s reign. In retaliation, Putin suspended the ability of American couples to adopt children from Russia.
Turns out, Veselnitskya had no evidence against Hillary to offer anyone and used her face-time with Trump Jr. et. al. to continue her lobbying efforts against the Magnisky Act, which also included the screening of a film at the Newseum in Washington D.C.. Five days after her meeting with Trump Jr., Veselnitskya got herself a front row seat to a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting on Russian policy. Her reason for being in D.C. clearly had nothing to do with trying to help the Trump campaign defeat Hillary Clinton.
In response to this non-revelation, the Left has claimed vindication for hysterically pushing its “Russiagate” narrative, asserting that this apparent willingness on the part of Trump Jr. to collude with a Russian amounts to Russia having hacked the election. Somehow. Or, at the very least, this all makes Trump Jr. a naughty boy. Fair enough.
In reality, an attorney with spurious connections to Russian oligarchs colluded with the Trump campaign to change a law in June of 2016 – well before the whole “Russiagate” hysteria began, some five months before the election was held and some seven months before the inauguration. In other words, no one in the room with Veselnitskaya was in any position to help her cause. It’s little wonder why Trump Jr. said he was irritated by the whole thing – he’d been hoodwinked into a meeting under false pretenses.
Now, however, let’s pretend that Veselnitskaya actually had some dirt on Hillary and passed it on to the Trump campaign and they used it to damage her already-shot reputation. So what? What would the expected quid pro quo be; the repeal of the Magnisky Act? Who cares? On the scale of shady international dealings, that one would rank well below Obama’s deal to allow Iran to continue nuclear weapons development while pretending not to.
Is anyone actually willing to believe the Hillary campaign wouldn’t have accepted any damning information against Trump from anywhere or anyone if they thought it would help Hillary win? This is the same campaign that colluded with the Democratic National Committee to torpedo the campaign of Bernie Sanders – it would be foolish to put anything past them. Of course, they lost and ostensibly no one offered them any evidence against Trump, so now they’re stuck with the task of having to manufacture all said “evidence” themselves.
And, it bears repeating that there was, in fact, no benefit to the Trump campaign to come from this meeting that the news media is all aflutter about this week. Furthermore, American politics in the last twenty some years has become a completely bare-knuckle affair, nothing short of assassination should come as a surprise to anyone who watches this political theatre we call government. Given the size and global reach of our economy and the power of our oligarchs, the stakes are final-table-high when it comes to election day. We would be naïve to assume foreign powers aren’t trying to tilt our elections their way to what extent they can and haven’t been since long before 2016.
Rest assured, dear readers, that I get exactly no pleasure from even appearing to be defending Trump, his administration or his progeny. The federal government of the United States, those of the fifty states, and the government of the thousands of counties, townships and municipalities on this continent are inherently indefensible, regardless of who’s running them. But, sadly, we’re stuck with having government as far too many people simply can’t imagine life without it.
The natural result of having criminal gangs running our lives is that they tend to act like criminal gangs with an absolute monopoly on power. Such gangs only concern themselves with maintaining and expanding their power, both within their own nation’s borders and beyond. Of course, the mainstream media doesn’t report the world in this harsh light of reality, preferring to couch their stories in the accepted narrative that fits the state’s needs. I am not defending anyone here. I’m criticizing the absurdity of the Left and the mainstream media’s complicity therein as well as pointing out the burden that having a government naturally entails.
Yes, government is a burden and I for one am tired of the ludicrous indignation expressed by politicians and civilians from both sides of the aisle, aghast that Russia would dare try to “interfere” in our elections. Seriously? The United States has more than “interfered” with the elections of other sovereign nations – we’ve deposed their sitting heads of state and installed puppets friendly to our oligarchs. That’s how criminal gangs operate on a global scale. Pretending the United States has any reasonable expectation to be immune from the same international espionage it’s heavily engaged in is as ludicrous as blaming anyone other than Hillary Clinton for her losing the 2016 election to the second-worst candidate in history.
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