The Democratic Socialists, the Democratic Party, and the tactic of critical support

In a previous post, I explained why I disagree with a statement put out by the New York City DSA criticizing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for saying that she would support all the Democrats in November. I think it was OK. She has made her differences with the establishment Democrats perfectly clear, and no one who pays the slightest attention to politics could possibly believe that she supports Cuomo's policies.

But unless she went out of her way to denounce Cuomo in the general election, her support for his candidacy will be taken for granted: she is his running mate. And her denouncing Cuomo would not have made any sense to the people socialists are trying to reach.

But is it true that her statement about “rallying behind all Democratic nominees” in effect “erases” the message of the insurgent candidates against the party establishment, as the criticism of her asserts?

I don't think so. I believe people who follow politics in the slightest understand Ocasio represents a very different political approach from Cuomo's, despite what she said.

I want to suggest that the way to analyze this situation, from a Marxist point of view, is as an application of the tactic of "critical support."

Lenin, writing about Britain right after the Russian Revolution, urged his British comrades to back Labour Party candidates. He explained that "I want to support [Labour Party Leader] Henderson in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man."

What does that mean? That the objective of your “support” is precisely to hasten the day when someone like that won’t be able to fool enough people to stay in office.

Does this mean you really secretly want Cuomo's Republican opponent to win? Absolutely not. You really do want Cuomo to win, to show, for example, that he has no solution for the health care insurance crisis.

You might think, after two terms Cuomo has already shown that plenty!

But the issue is not what you or I understand, but how millions of ordinary people see things. They have barely begun to think through ideas like single payer medicare for all, a living minimum wage of $15 an hour, free college tuition, driving big money out of politics and especially how those things can be achieved.

The idea is to tell working people that don't yet agree with your more radical program that you won't stand in the way of what they view as a lesser-evil candidate like Cuomo in a two-way confrontation with the more reactionary candidate. 

Can't this be confusing, running in opposition to what Cuomo stands for, supporting his socialist opponent in the primary and then turning around and saying "vote Cuomo on November 6"? Actually, that is pretty standard in American politics. And Bernie Sanders did the same thing in 2016, and both clarity about his program being different, and his reputation for integrity, did not suffer in the slightest.

But why do this at all? Why not simply run as independents, as Bernie had always done before 2016? It's just a tactic, isn't it?

Two reasons:

First, Bernie has been an exception, unique. There have been hundreds, possibly thousands of campaigns run as independents or third party candidates in the last few decades, and I can't remember one that had even a smidgin of the support Bernie has garnered locally in elections before 2016. There have been a few other "independents" who have made it to Congress, but these have been traditional politicians who for some reason were on the outs with their party machines, not politically independent.

Second, because Bernie's 2016 campaign, not as an independent, but within the Democratic Party, changed things. It set a new pattern, created a new model. Millions of people rallied to his banner to support not just a candidacy, but become part of a movement. The big jump in DSA membership after the June New York congressional primary confirms that this is the shape the movement is taking right now. What we need to do is understand what it means..

As I explained in this post, I think what is involved is working people trying to grope their way to uniting as a class, to fight for a program that defends our interests.

To really do that, what we need is our own party, a workers party, not necessarily in the form of a ballot line (which is what most people in this country think of when you say "party") but a national organization or movement that acts in a coherent way explicitly in the name of working people.

But isn't it a contradiction to try to do that within the oldest capitalist party in existence, the Democratic Party? Absolutely. But we can't simply reject the contradiction. It must be overcome, the movement has to work its way through it. And there really is no point complaining that things ought not to have developed this way. They did.

In there any historical precedent for this, a working class movement gestating within a capitalist party? Actually that is not so unusual. But there is one historical example that I think is worth delving into, and it comes from the founders of the modern socialist movement Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Frederick Engels in the 1840s

The experience was recounted in 1884 by Engels in the article, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung," dealing with events decades before, during the revolution of 1848.

The context was that towards the end of 1847, Marx and Engels  succeeded in convincing a group called The League of the Just to become the Communist League and adopt the Communist Manifesto as its program.

The Manifesto had just been published when a revolution broke out at the beginning of 1848 in France and soon spread to Germany. At Marx's initiative, the Communist League, composed mostly of Germans in exile, dissolved. The reason was that Germany was divided into many different states and principalities, making it impossible for a group to offer more than general guidance and ideas, but Marx believed a newspaper --the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-- was a better instrument to do that. Engels explains:

The proletariat [was] undeveloped ... having grown up in complete intellectual enslavement, being unorganised and still not even capable of independent organisation.... Hence, although in point of fact the mortal enemy of the [bourgeoisie], it remained, on the other hand, its political appendage.... Thus, the German proletariat at first appeared on the political stage as the extreme democratic party. 

In this way, when we founded a major newspaper in Germany, our banner was determined as a matter of course. It could only be that of democracy, but that of a democracy which everywhere emphasised in every point the specific proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe once for all on its banner.

I think the analogy with our days is in the extreme political underdevelopment of the American working class and what has been until now its "complete intellectual enslavement." Thus, now that the U.S. working class is beginning to come onto the political stage, it does so "as the extreme democratic party." The coincidence of the name "democratic party" is accidental, of course,  but the political similarity is not.

And note: this is not about a lesser evil strategy. Nor is the point to reform or transform the Democrats; it is about the working class being transformed through this and other experiences, cohering ever more clearly and consciously as an independent political force.  

What is most striking is that Engels says when Marx and his friends began their work in Germany, "our banner was determined as a matter of course." It could only be that of the working class movement that was beginning to emerge but was not recognized as such and instead viewed as the left of the bourgeois-democratic forces. Engels concludes:

If we did not want to do that, if we did not want to take up the movement, adhere to its already existing, most advanced, actually proletarian side and to advance it further, then there was nothing left for us to do but to preach communism in a little provincial sheet and to found a tiny sect instead of a great party of action.

That's the choice. We either accept the movement as it is as our starting point in order to help it go further, or we can stand on the sidelines shouting "correct" slogans at it.

And if we accept the movement as it is, it means accepting the tactic that Bernie pioneered in 2016, and that tactic of necessity implies going along with the results of the primary. We don't have to actively campaign for the likes of Cuomo, but we have to understand that from where Ocasio Cortez is now situated, it makes sense for her to have said what she did even if we as the DSA would not have put out a statement like that.

Socialists are getting a much broader and more sympathetic audience by running as Democrats given this new motion among working people, but offering "critical support" to traditional Democrats is an inescapable part of the tactic. It is built into the situation.

But we do so honestly, openly and transparently. We don't pretend differences with corporate Democrats have disappeared. We don't suggest the "lesser evil" is really OK after all. But we don't break with the working class people who are evolving towards political independence by trashing them for voting for Cuomo (which is the effect of denouncing him and opposing a vote for him).

--José G. Pérez

International Declaration against Fascism

[The following manifesto against the ultraright in Brazil is being circulated with a request that people add their names to the list of signers by emailing freelulabrasil@gmail.com and sgeral@mst.org.br.]

We, women and men, united in our commitment to democracy and human rights, express our unequivocal rejection of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, a contender in the second round of Brazil’s presidential elections on October 28.

The positions that this candidate has defended throughout his public life and during the current electoral campaign are based on xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic values.

This far-right candidate openly defends the violent methods deployed by military dictatorships, including torture and assassinations.

Positions such as these are a threat to any free, tolerant and just society.

In the second round of the election, the people of Brazil will be making a choice of paramount importance, between liberty and pluralism and retrograde authoritarianism, with a lasting impact, not only for Brazil but also for Latin America, the Caribbean and the rest of the world.

We call on Brazilians to reflect on the gravity of this pivotal moment in history.

There can be no neutrality in the choice between democracy and fascism!

Russian woman indicted for criminal conspiracy to commit free speech

In a new attack on freedom of speech, Trump's Justice Department has indicted a Russian woman for a conspiracy to post things on the Internet that the U.S. government doesn't like.

"The strategic goal of this alleged conspiracy, which continues to this day, is to sow discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in our democratic institutions," G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement.

This campaign was focused on "a wide variety of topics, including immigration, gun control and the Second Amendment, the Confederate flag, race relations, LGBT issues, the Women’s March, and the NFL national anthem debate."

"Members of the conspiracy took advantage of specific events in the United States to anchor their themes, including the shootings of church members in Charleston, South Carolina, and concert attendees in Las Vegas; the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally and associated violence; police shootings of African-American men; as well as the personnel and policy decisions of the current U.S. presidential administration," the Justice Department said in its press release.

It also praised the "exceptional cooperation" of Twitter and Facebook, making it clear that the Internet giants have become subsidiaries of the political police.

You might say, "but constitutional guarantees are only for American citizens" or "only apply within the United States." But that's not so. The First Amendment doesn't give any rights. It protects them by prohibiting the government from interfering with them.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Congress shall make no law. It is an absolute, categorical mandate. And the amendments adopted after the civil war extended the prohibition to all levels and branches of the government. Which part of "no law" doesn't the Justice Department understand?

The freedom of speech that is being attacked is our freedom of speech: there is only one. Consider, for example, the strategic aim of this conspiracy: "to sow discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in our democratic institutions."

That description could well be applied to what I do day after day on Radio Información. I don't just sow discord or undermine, I promote protest and denounce the fraud of American democracy. Here are some things I've said just in the past week or so.

• They guy who lost the election is sitting in the White House. 
• Fewer than 600,000 people in Wyoming have the same representation in the Senate as the nearly 40 million people in California. 
• Republicans got 1.4 million fewer votes than Democrats in House races in 2012 but had 33 more seats.
• The Supreme Court is a committee of unelected politicians with lifetime terms that function  like a permanent constitutional convention accountable to no one.
• We have more than a half million elected positions, the huge majority of which are noncompetitive and simply filled by diktat by the dominant local machine. 
• For the more important positions, these are for sale to whatever stooge of the rich got the most bribes (so-called "campaign contributions").
• In a very few cases, the very rich buy both major candidates but let the people freely choose which one is better at fooling them.
• In other countries, at least they have the decency to pretend the guy they're shoving down  your throat got the most votes.
• American democracy? I think it's a great idea.

There's not a single activity that's been in  the press on the woman's supposed crimes that isn't simply organizing and paying people to say nasty things about the U.S. government, U.S. policies and U.S. Society. 

--José G. Pérez

The New York City DSA's infantile, sectarian criticism of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

The New York City Democratic Socialists of America has issued a statement censuring comrade Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for saying in an  interview with CNN that she “look[s] forward to… us rallying behind all Democratic nominees, including the governor, to make sure that he wins in November"

It is unsigned but presented as a "NYC-DSA Statement" and it castigates Ocasio Cortez  for having violated "a responsibility to name our enemies."

"An endorsement for Cuomo suggests that working people across New York should accept him as an ally," and worse, Ocasio Cortez "erases the real distance between insurgent socialist candidates and the Democratic Party establishment."

The most troubling thing is that this statement reeks of factionalism, of people being lined up in some private little group built around an important “principle” like we must “name our enemy,” or that DSA members “who seek to speak on behalf of working people” must defend X, Y, or Z position. And it is a very transparent attempt to drive AOC out of the organization.

But the DSA is not and must not become a faction – and no one should be required to act as if they were in one. The DSA is the beginning of a party, and a party is not a faction.

A party, a genuine party represents a class, section of a class or some other social force. In the case of parties based on working people, ideally it is defined by its base, not what it says on some paper, but what its adherents believe and want. You can tell the DSA is the beginning of a party from the way people are joining – on pure class instinct and identification.

A faction is defined by its ideas. It’s borders are not set by class interest but by agreement with a whole litany of positions. No matter how big it is, a faction that sets itself up as a separate, independent organization with a position on everything under the sun that you have to accept is not a party but a sect.

Viewed as a whole, the far left in the United States mostly wasted the entire last 100 years precisely on this mistake.

We called it “Leninism,” and “building a party of a new type,” and only in the past decade or so have many of us learned that this was a bureaucratic fabrication and not what Lenin thought at all. In his very last major work, Left Wing Communism: an infantile disorder, Lenin wrote:

History, incidentally, has now confirmed on a vast and world-wide scale the opinion we have always advocated, namely, that German revolutionary Social-Democracy ... came closest to being the party the revolutionary proletariat needs in order to achieve victory.

Not "a party of a new type."

Alexandria was entirely within her rights to speak as she spoke. Even if the organization had adopted a position to not vote for "all Democratic nominees," an anti-endorsement, so to speak, she would still have been entirely within her rights to express her own views.

As for the specific infantile stupidity of creating a principle that you must never say vote for X if X is a bad person, people might want to read the Lenin pamphlet I just quoted, especially the part on "critical support."

In a separate post I will take up the question of electoral tactics, and then this idea of publicly pillorying one of your own members, without bringing charges, without giving her a chance to defend herself, on the basis of unstated rules about what you must and must not say if you are a candidate, or perhaps just if you're a Latina who is a candidate.

--José G. Pérez

The kidnapping of 43 Ayotzinapa students: We do not forgive. We do not forget

What does a country reap if it sows bodies?

September 26 is the fourth anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the  Ayotzinapa School for Rural Teachers, one of a series of such colleges set up in the wake of the Mexican Revolution.

For decades the successive Mexican governments have been in conflict with the schools and their mission to train teachers for Mexican rural communities and especially for Indigenous peoples. This has been true above all of the Raúl Isidros Burgos school of Ayotzinapa in the combative State of Guerrero, where Genaro Vásquez and Lucío Cabañas, two of the most important leaders of the armed resistance to the Mexican State during the dirty war of the 1970s that followed the Tlatelolco Plaza massacre of hundreds of students On October 2, 1968.

The 43 stuidents were kidnapped the night of September 26 by the police of the city of Iguala acting together with other government institutions and the drug cartels that supply and are financed by the U.S. market. This is just one incident of many that have cost the peoples of Latin America tens of thousands of lives due to the U.S. "War on Drugs." This half-century long fraud is used to as a weapon of imperialist domination of Latin Americas and domestically to repress and dominate the Latino and Black communities.

--José G. Pérez

A dishonest sliming of the DSA and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

On August 31, Counterpunch published a bizarre and dishonest racism-baiting attack on the Democratic Socialists of America by Andrew Stewart.

“Grappling with the racism of the DSA’s Founders” has the peculiarity that three of the five “founders” of the DSA --described by Stewart as “its early leaders/thinkers”—in reality had nothing to do with the DSA. So much so that one of them –Max Schactman—had been dead for a decade by the time DSA was founded in 1982.

The other two, Albert Shanker and Bayard Rustin, were close associates of Schactman. Rustin was the head of the Socialist Party and its successor organization, Social Democrats USA. Shanker was president of the New York teacher’s union from 1964 to 1985 and a close friend of Schactman’s, though as far as I know not actively involved in socialist groups like the SP during those years.

By the early 1970s these three were the political enemies of the figure most associated with the DSA’s founding, Michael Harrington.

Harrington and those three had all been part of the Socialist Party, a political current of anti-Stalinist socialists. Over time, the SP’s anti-Stalinism increasingly became plain right-wing anticommunism and even in domestic politics the group shed most vestiges of its socialist past, coming out against the antiwar movement and the Black movement.

But a small part of the SP led by Harrington resisted the drift to the right and instead began to move to the left under the impact of the antiwar and other protest movements of the 1960s, leading to a split in the early 1970s between the progressive minority that founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, one the organizations that eventually joined to found of the DSA, and the right wing majority which, to make clear that they were not socialist and not a party became “Social Democrats USA” in 1972.

Max Shachtman: right-wing social democrat
supposedly cofounded DSA 10 years after he died

Stewart lies by saying the three from the right wing were founders of DSA. They were not. The purpose of the lie is to then saddle DSA with political responsibility for Schactman’s rabid anticommunism, Shanker’s reactionary teacher’s strike in New York in 1968 against Black and Latino control of the schools in their neighborhoods, and Bayard Rustin’s attacks on Black nationalism taking advantage of his well-deserved prestige as the key behind-the-scenes organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

And if you insist that DSA is somehow responsible for the actions of those who years before the DSA existed were in the same group as Michael Harrington, then why not give DSA the credit for the 1963 "I have a dream" March of Washington, Shachtman’s leading role in resisting the rise of Stalinism in the 1920s and 1930s, and the things Shanker did to defend the legitimate interests of New York Teachers?

The reason, of course, in that this is an outrageous frame-up, the sort of thing I’d expect from Fox News or Inforwars, not a web site like Counterpunch.

Stewart also brings up Harrington’s opposition to the founding Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. But Harrington later reversed course and the DSA was founded by the fusion of DSOC with the New American Movement, a group descended precisely from the early SDS.

Stewart begins his Philippic by trying to shield himself from the obvious criticism that this construct of his is based on events from a half century ago, has nothing to do with the real world DSA of today by admitting as much:

OK, with a serious dose of honest humility and respect, I will admit readily that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership is doing some great stuff at the grassroots level.... So this polemic will be relegated entirely to the founding generation of Democratic Socialists of America and its early leaders/thinkers.

But he continues by assailing the DSA’s electoral work with the paper-thin disguise of countering “a meta-narrative” supposedly being foisted by Jacobin and other outlets. According to Stewart, this story holds that after decades of failed efforts by everyone from the Greens to the SWP and the Communist Party, in its first try the DSA “has finally … brought socialism into the mainstream electoral realm,” and concluding in ironic bold type: “And with that, dear comrades, we shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!”

And, of course, of course, of course, he proceeds to deconstruct to his own fabrication:

I am compelled to recall the great quote of Amilcar Cabral, “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” … Unfortunately, we are not on the verge of a great socialist electoral upsurge.

But Stewart has nothing but his own straw man compelling his recollection of “the great quote of Amilcar Cabral,” (by which I assume he meant to say, “a quote from the great Amilcar Cabral” instead of implying that only once in his life did Cabral say anything memorable.)

Despite his disclaimers, the real target of Stewart’s attack is not people who have been dead for decades but today’s DSA. It has just reached 50,000 members and has growing political impact and recognition.

He betrays that the electoral success of some DSA members is a special concern (and provides another example of his dishonest methods) by recommending to us to his “recent dismantling of the mythic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez candidacy over at Washington Babylon.”

That story, “How Long Was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Planning Her Run For Public Office?” slimes her by implying she is a Kennedy family puppet.

It takes off from a tweet from her that mentions in passing her internship in Senator Ted Kennedy’s immigration office and leads to a Stewart rant about “the political circus known as the Kennedy family” and especially “the ne’er-do-well Patrick,” a carpet-bagging Boston Brahmin who had the temerity to move to Rhode Island and get elected to Congress.

But soon he remembers that he meant to talk about Ocasio-Cortez and not the Kennedys.

“An internship in Ted’s office was a great career booster in government agencies and/or the Democratic Party,” he snarks, adding:

Ocasio-Cortez worked in Kennedy’s office from early 2008, when she was 19, until his death in the summer of 2009. Prior to that, she was active in the National Hispanic Institute’s Lorenzo de Zalvala Youth Legislative Session.

Actually, in “early 2008” Ocasio would have been 18, not 19, since she was born in October 1989. And, of course, there’s that week-long Youth Legislative Session summer camp and never mind that the name is “Lorenzo de Zavala” and not “Zalvala” with an extra “L” as Stewart would have it. But what are facts to the rapier thrusts of this polemicist?

Put those two together, the internship and the summer camp, and the conclusion is supposedly inescapable: “this is the resumé of someone who wanted to run for public office as a teenager.” And worse.

I’d even have to wonder if she joined DSA because she saw a wellspring for free interns and staff for a campaign she has been planning since the Dubya administration.

Of course! The woman is so brilliant that she foresaw the radicalization of working class millennials that powered her campaign on the cheap even before the economic depression that sparked the radicalization had taken place. And so she positioned herself to take advantage of it by attending a “Boy’s State”-type summer camp in high school.

But despite that, don’t give Stewart all that bull about her brilliant primary victory.

Certainly the “miracle primary victory” narrative is partly mythological horse shit. AOC had connections within the Democratic Party and would have been able to target a vulnerable but liberal district like Joe Crowley’s…. That’s the MO of a Kennedy operation top-to-bottom, I’ve watched them do it forever.

So that explains it. Why is this woman sitting at the table instead of waiting on it, her previous job? Because Massa put her there.

I mean, you don’t really think a young, working-class Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx could have done it herself, do you?

I only have one more thing to say to Stewart about his attack on the DSA’s “racism”: for your next hatchet job, try getting a cleaver made of firmer stuff than bovine excrement. So you don’t get splattered.

--José G. Pérez

Will Russians hack elections again?

Well, if they do, it won't be "again."

There has been no evidence presented that the Russians did anything in 2016 save the normal spying all the "great" powers do to each other. And what they are accused of doing makes no sense. For example, we are told that the Russians had penetrated the Democratic National Committee (DNC) network by the summer of 2015, but all the FBI did was call the DNC computer help desk which did a quick check and finding nothing, forgot about it.

There was a second penetration of the DNC severs in the spring of 2016, which took much of the same material as the first one but was so incompetent that even the DNC noticed. Crowdstrike, a computer security firm was called in.  That led to the first very successful penetration finally being spotted, and both were supposedly cleared by completely nuking and rebuilding the DNC network (including each and every computer) in mid-June. Three days later, the head of the private security firm that cleared the system, who happens to be a Russian emigre who is active in anti-Putin groups, published all the details in the firm's blog.

Several things. First the FBI considered this sort of spying routine and could not even be bothered to walk the half mile to the DNC offices to discuss it with them. The reason they thought it was the Russians is because data was being sent to an IP address they thought was connected with Russia. That was all.

And having completely owned the DNC network by capturing or creating an admin login, Putin (and supposedly he ordered it personally) sends in a second group, who are so incompetent even the hapless DNC staff notices. That's simply not believable. It is a violation of the most obvious norms for spying to send in a second operation on top of one that already is getting *everything*.

The penetration is so sensitive that a private security firm headed by a Russian national takes care of it, not the FBI, NSA or CIA. Really?

And then contrary to even the most obvious principle of counter-espionage, full details are put on a blog three days later by the anti-Putin Russian who --what a coincidence!-- says it was Putin. And that way Putin can know how much we know and how we figured out it was him.

Meanwhile at Hillary headquarters top dog John Podesta gets an email claiming his gmail password has been compromised and please click here to change it. An aide checks with someone more competent in computers who tells them to follow this other link to change the password (the real link to Google) and to turn on two-factor authentication. So Podesta's people dig up the original phishing email, follow the fake link, give away access to the email account, and do not turn on two factor authentication.

This, we are told, was a sophisticated Russian attack called "spear phishing." But actually what was really involved is that Podesta and his people were brain dead. There can be no security mechanism that can cope with that level of stupidity.

Russians? It was probably a middle school student having fun with her iPad. Or the equivalent. Because a really serious intelligence operation would have used the penetration to get access to Hillary's network. But they didn't. They just took Podesta's emails from gmail servers.

Then the Russians take the stuff and leak it. The Russians could have leaked the secret contracts showing the DNC was in the tank for Hillary in February or March. Their slogan would have been  "Anybody but Hillary." But if they were going to try to knock her out, that was the moment to do it. Either that, or in October, with a classic October surprise.

But instead they give it to Wikileaks in the middle of the summer. They could have leaked it to the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian -- none of them would have refused the material and the Russians could easily have covered their tracks. The obvious explanation of why it went to Wikileaks is because almost certainly it wasn't the Russians but a lone hacker, perhaps an inside job, and Wikileaks has ways to receive leaks securely and anonymously, which major press outlets do not.

Well, the Russians were pretending to be a lone hacker. But if this was their cover story, it is idiotic to let the false story they were developing get in the way of using the devastatingly compromising material they got on Hillary in the most effective way.

The Facebook plot is even more ridiculous. The Kremlin was going to spend literally thousands of dollars, perhaps hundreds of thousands, to influence an American election. Really? A billion dollars or more were spent on the election. And the Russians supposedly thought they could make a difference?

And, again, absolutely no evidence of the nefarious Russian schemes has been given to the public.

Could the Russians have done anything more serious? You be the judge:

A couple of weeks ago at the annual Defcon hackathon in Las Vegas it took an 11 year old girl 10 minutes to hack into a  replica of the Florida statewide election system. Someone else took only two minutes to hack the voting machines being used in 18 states. Of course it's not fair to compare. The two minute hack was done by Rachel Tobac who is an adult and has her own security firm.

Supposedly the Russians, determined to have Trump instead of Hillary, passed on the obvious and multiple vulnerabilities that had already been covered in the U.S. press and instead focused on trolling with a half dozen invented characters and a couple of stolen identities which they needed to pay for Facebook Advertisement.

For sure. I honestly and sincerely believe that Ms. Goody Two Shoes, KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin, could not bring himself to steal the election and merely sought to influence the outcome.

Not.