If you haven't heard of Reality Winner, read this.
Reality Winner -- her real name -- was an Air Force vet working for a civilian contractor when she read last year that Russian hackers had never succeeded in penetrating American voting systems. She knew better. So she did what Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt (Deep Throat) did when they caught their government lying. She leaked.
She is getting ready to go to prison for five years and three months. As Will Bunch, who wrote the column for Phillynews.com, said:
So far, history is repeating itself. The nightmare of a foreign power like Russia trying to tip the scales of a weakened American democracy and install Donald Trump in the White House is the political scandal of the century, and yet two years into it, the only person convicted of a felony and sitting in a jail cell is the woman seeking to expose part of the cover-up.Truth goes to prison, and the guilty send it there.
President Obama, as Bunch points out, set the all-time presidential record for prosecuting people for leaks (8) while earning my eternal sneer for overlooking the sins of the American Torture Gang. (One of the gang's members appears to be the current Supreme Court nominee, according to Sen. Patrick Leahy.)
The current administration will break the record, no doubt.
We are currently undergoing the suspense of waiting for Vladimir Putin's BFF to pull the security clearances of six people, two of whom don't have security clearances. His press spokesbabbler says it's reasonable to take away the clearances of former government employees who know a lot because they said mean things about the president.
She added that they had "monetized" their government knowledge, presumably by writing books and consulting. Of course, if they blab any secrets they know, they still go to prison, clearance or not. But we can't have "monetizing" government jobs going on if it distracts from the president's shameless promotion of his golf courses, hotels and rich folks' club.
So, shut up, whistleblowers. Muzzle it, retired intelligence officers. And "put her in prison," as the attorney general chuckled when it was chanted by an audience of teen-agers whom he was telling to stick by their convictions, which were being drilled into them at a conservative reeducation center.
The attorney general: That's the guy who kidnapped thousands of kids, and can't even send ransom notes for a few hundred of them because some of their parents went home, and our government doesn't know where home is. But we have the kids!
There are some more kids we are holding because we -- sort of privately; anyway with nothing we'd call due process for ourselves -- decided their parents are unfit.
The person to be put in prison, btw, was the loser of the last presidential election.
Two more years to muzzle the lyin' fake news media. The muzzle is coming from the Banana Republicans as surely as the Russian hacks we'll be told didn't happen.
I am sorry to admit that I had forgotten about Reality Winner. If Trump could pardon Joe Arpaio, I hope the next president will pardon her. Provided that we get someone with some integrity. If we don't, we're screwed.
ReplyDeleteJoe Arpaio, what an awful human being.
ReplyDeleteThere are multiple levels of issues here. I agree that a paranoid government prosecuting a whistle-blower with laws intended for terrorists is one of those issues.
Another issue, touched upon by the Philly columnist but deserving further consideration, is that the law itself stacks the deck against the person being charged. That's just not right.
Shifting the country in the right direction means shifting Trump voters in another direction and I really don't know how to do that. I'm an engineer, not a psychologist. We retirees have a monthly lunch. We worked for the Dept. of the Army but originally in the Frankford Arsenal in Northeast Philly, closed in 1977 by the Brach Commission. We are heavily Catholic and split evenly between those who vote Democrat and Republican. That was a source of discussion but no more. Not it is trump and anti-trump. The Republicans, no matter their initial dislike of Trump, 100% voted for the beast. So now neither side brings it up. We on the anti-trump side consider the others to be crazy. And what can you do for a crazy person if all you know is mechanics, optics and electronics? What can you do if someone had their brain glued to Fox News? Sad. Sad for the whole country and the world.
ReplyDeleteNOW it is trump vs. anti-trump.
DeleteStanley, are the other retirees in your group also engineers? Would be interesting to know how people trained in science could support Trump without suffering a deafening amount of cognitive dissonance; considering how he is a climate change denier, wants to neuter the EPA, and would like to sell rights to exploit the national parks to the highest bidder. And Fox promotes about as much fake science as they do fake news.
DeleteKatherine, I may try to communicate with them about these things again. One guy is actually actively engaged in land preservation in the Poconos. But he does have Hillary derangement syndrome. Thing is, you can be an engineer and be specialized. Also, engineers are not scientists. They use science in a specialized way to produce little regions of order within the more disorderly universe. But they don't necessarily try to understand the world on its own terms as in climate change. Half of us get it. The other half is ideologically driven. One guy's around 80. He has solar panels, a Tesla. He's a churchgoing Catholic. He gets it. Others don't. Personally, my style of engineering tries to anticipate problems and mitigate risk. That is how I think about climate change. To tell you the truth, I wish climate change WAS baloney. It's just not, unfortunately. I have spent years trying to understand how climate change physically works and had to overcome some misconceptions of my own. I follow the ongoing science on Real Cimate. But few bother.
ReplyDeleteI might add that we DID work for the military though that doesn't automatically mean you're a right wing bonehead. One surprise to me was how many Jews became so. I always associated them with progressivism but not no more. The netanyahu effect?
DeleteStanley, given the support for Trump from active military, it is not surprising that people who once worked for DOD in some capacity would also.
DeleteBut I don't understand why, especially among retired and active duty military. Trump evaded the draft, said he knows more than the generals do (after all, he went to a military academy for high school), and has grossly insulted McCain who was a hero - not because he escaped from capture, but because he refused to be allowed to escape his prison and torture simply because his father was an important officer. He wouldn't leave his men, the others in the prison.
I literally cannot talk with family and friends who support Trump. If we need to communicate because of extended family “business”, it is by email. Most live far away, but not all. Two of them are siblings, and their support of Trump has made me believe that the current unofficial estrangement will be permanent.
Once upon a time I was an economist, focused on international economics and development. I am not a trade expert, but I do know a lot more than the average voter who supported Trump. He made no secret of his isolationism and his desire to smash international trade - international trade that has lifted most, if not all, boats, both in the US and in our partners' countries, and has dramatically reduced global poverty – the percent of the world’s population who are the poorest of the poor is now in the single digits for the first time ever. Anyone with basic economic understanding would know that the kind of tariff war he was proposing would hurt a whole lot of Americans, far more than it would help. They voted for him anyway. Several Trump supporters, acquaintances not close, repeated the "take him seriously, but not literally" mantra to me. Well, they should have taken him at his word.
I used to read economic reports and dry data on a daily basis. His latest lie about the "historic" nature of a 4.1% rise in GDP finally got me on the soapbox, and I spent 3 hours on an email explaining Macro 101, and Theory of Trade 101 to a few family members. Just so they would have some solid data. Not the violently pro-Trump members though. I don't even bother with them.
I did it for myself. To blow off steam. As you know in your own field of expertise, those who prefer Trump's lies to truth won't care, even when shown the data. The economy is too complex for one person to manage, even for groups of economic and business advisors, even for stable geniuses (especially stable geniuses who are economically illiterate). Some do the right thing because they understand what to do, some just luck out, including getting lucky with the timing of the business cycle and their terms in office.
I have pretty much given up on trying to get Trump people to deal with the facts. They prefer the spin of Fox (which they ALL watch, some with the TV on ALL day. It drives me crazy, but at least I can get them to turn off the sound so that we can have a conversation).
I see little hope, although it seems that the thousands of GOP voices that are now terrified by the prospects of a trade war (we can't bail out EVERYONE, and it won't stop with the farmers) got him to back off a bit with the EU.
Trump is knockinhg himself out Trumpeting a 4.1 rise in GDP for the second quarter. Obama got plus 4.6 in both the 4th quarter of 2011 and 2nd quarter of 2014. AND he followed that 2014 quarter with a 5.2 the next quarter.
DeleteThe 5.2 was followed by a 2%. Trump has already created what economists like to call "strong headwinds" to work against him in the coming year.
To paraphrase something my mother used to say, Trump would rather lie for credit than tell the truth for cash.
DeleteAnne, I have no idea why military individuals would vote for trump but I've heard of it from those still working. I would be tempted to tell them that whatever sacrifice and good they did for the country, it's a shame they cancelled it out by voting for trump. Maybe it's a good thing I'm out of the business.
DeleteSome of you may be interested in this tactic. Today I attached a photo of a soldier carrying one of the boxes of allegedly "human remains" from North Korea to an email. You may have noticed they were wrapped in the United Nations flag.
ReplyDeleteI turned myself loose as an irate veteran (true enough) damning the president who brought our troops home under a "foreign flag," which, by the way I wrote, could have been confused with meaning North Korea's. I went on and on about our draft-dodging president desecrating the "bodies" of our "heroes" and our flag.
The Subject line was "Before you send this to me." At the end of my rant, I said you won't get an email like this to send to me because the president who allowed this wasn't Obama. But if it had been Obama, you would be spreading this email to all your friends, living or dead. And, btw, last time North Korea returned remains, there were dog bones and ancient Asian bones mixed in. And btw, there were two "last times," and we didn't have to cancel military exercises for them.
With all-cap words and colored type. And lots of exclamation marks.
Delete"...all-cap words and colored type." Tom, you could make money as a bot on Facebook. Don't forget to add "Bet I can't get a single like! Share with all your friends! "
Delete