We are somewhat amused by the hue and cry from Democrats – led by President Obama himself – over the possibility that the Russians may have hacked the e-mail accounts of several high ranking Democrats in the course of the presidential campaign and released the information for all the world to see. Indeed, the president has imposed economic sanctions on Russia for just this reason.
It’s not that we are particularly comfortable with the notion that a foreign power might have intruded on the secrets of our elected officials. But wasn’t it just days ago that Mr. Obama and his secretary of state intruded even further on Israel’s political process by colluding with Israel’s enemies – both inside and outside the UN Security Council – with a view to forcing anti-settlement policies on Israel? And wasn’t it just a short time ago that the president pulled out all the stops in an effort to prevent Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection?
And we are troubled by the fact that the president has said that he imposed the sanctions solely on the advice of some parts – not all – of the vast American intelligence apparatus. We can’t forget that these are the same agencies responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, having convinced President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had secret caches of weapons of mass destruction which, it turned out, he did not.
Be that as it may, it is important to keep a clear focus on the hacking issue, especially since Democrats continue to try to conflate several of its possible elements. Thus, even if congressional inquiries determine with greater reliability than now exists that the Russians did indeed hack the Democrats, it does not necessarily follow that the Russians intended to influence the election’s outcome in favor of Donald Trump or that their maneuverings had any impact on the result.
How one would determine that any e-mail meddling by the Russians had an impact on voters, and even more so the outcome of the election, eludes us. Wouldn’t millions of voters need to be interviewed and give sworn statements, for starters?
There are also two other rather salient points that are not made often enough. First, even Democrats do not claim that hackers affected the functioning of voting machines and thereby threw the election to Mr. Trump. Rather, their point is that negative information about Democrats was improperly obtained and disseminated and may have soured many voters on Hillary Clinton.
But the Democrats have not challenged the veracity of the information disseminated by WikiLeaks – only that the release was unfair since Republican material was not similarly made public. The logic is stunning. Apart from the issue of the propriety of the hacking itself, can the Democrats really be complaining about the airing of truthful information that may have swayed voters against Hillary Clinton?
Of course, for those on the Left, the focus on the hacking is of a piece with other efforts to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump – like the absurd popular vote recounts in several states and the incessant pressure on members of the Electoral College – designed to feed the anger and frustration of the anti-Trump forces.
But the election is over. As in times past, we should be uniting behind the winner, at least for a while. To regurgitate an old cliché, if he succeeds, we all do.
