The Democratic tantrum over Russia and WikiLeaks

In all the debate over the origin of the Hillary-killing WikiLeaks emails, a simple point is seldom if ever made: Even if Russian hacking did bring them to light (somewhat unlikely), so what? 

In any campaign, information comes from many sources, ranging from the good to the bad to the ugly. The critical factor is not the messenger but the message. If an evil man tells you 2+2=4, guess what? It’s still true. 

{mosads}Democrats are behaving as if the WikiLeaks revelations were somehow contrary to the rules of the game, as if, like evidence collected illegally by a policeman, the emails should not have been admissible in the court of public opinion. Yet there’s no campaign rule stating, “Truths revealed by questionable sources using sleight-of-hand shall not be considered.”

An analogy: imagine the Secret Service received information illegally obtained evidence that there was going to be an assassination attempt on the president. Would they take precautions based on it or ignore it because of its origin? Couple this tantrum with a separate one — that we operate based on electoral votes and not a popular one — and it’s clear liberals just make it up as they go along, much like a little child saying “That’s not fair!” when not getting their way.

There’s no doubt WikiLeaks influenced the election and cost Hillary Clinton votes. Yet would the left have complained if President-elect Trump had been the target? Note also that WikiLeaks just slightly offset the influence of the establishment media (e-media), the Democrats’ de facto 24/7 public-relations team. 

In his 2011 book Left Turn, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose noted “a well-known poll in which Washington correspondents declared that they vote Democratic 93 percent to 7 percent.

“Using objective, social-scientific methods, the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is,” Groseclose told U.S. News and World Report’s Paul Bedard, Instead, we see only a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass — a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see.

“That bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal,” he added. “Media bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election … if media bias didn’t exist, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama 56 percent to 42 percent [in 2008], instead of losing 53-46.”

I think the e-media’s influence is even greater. Whatever the case, though, there’s no rule stating the e-media cannot scheme and use lies to advance Democrats. And there’s no rule that the alternative media can’t use truths revealed via a scheme (involving hacking or, more plausibly, a leaker) to advance Republicans. The term “campaign” originated with warfare and, well, as Frank Smedley wrote, “All’s fair in love and war.”  

In reality, the Democrats damn themselves with their hacking charge. They’re essentially saying, “We were too incompetent to secure our systems or react properly to known intrusion attempts, and our true dirty face was revealed. Avert thine eyes! How dare you gaze upon our stupidity and corruption!” 

Additionally, there was reportedly a Russian hacking attempt on the GOP as well. It appears it didn’t work because they actually know how to secure their systems. So what exactly is the argument for having Democrats in charge of national security? 

One nice thing about small children is that they’re less likely than adults to exhibit guile. And it would be refreshing if, like a wee kid, the Democrats would give their honest answer as to why they feel the WikiLeaks revelations shouldn’t have been considered: “Just because!”

Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) is a conservative media personality whose work has been published on The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, and American Thinker. He has also contributed to college textbooks published by Gale – Cengage Learning, and is a frequent guest on radio and television. 

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