Down the rabbit hole with the Dems?
In theory, you can get further left than The Nation magazine is — but surely not easily.
The venerable journal boasts a long, long legacy of pointing out the horrors of America and the predations of free enterprise.
Recent samplings of its polemical fare include ruminations on how Trump has started a “cultural war;” on how Trump gets his “stupid” ideas from Fox News; on how Andrew Jackson left the nation a bequest of repression; on the urgency of seeking out alternatives to capitalism, and so on and so forth.
If there’s a malady of some kind — political, social, economic — by the Nation’s lights you can wager there’s a rightwing conspirator lurking at the bottom of it. And, additionally, likely a white, heterosexual male.
To The Nation, there’s always a patriarchal, capitalistic, sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, climate-denialist, Islamophobic, Caucasian lurking in the wood pile.
And yet, here The Nation is now a lonely voice on the Left warning that the anti-Trump, Russian collusion hysteria is just that. It is a crock of, um, hooey.
Whoa! Pause and try to take that in.
Nation contributor Stephen F. Cohen, Princeton/NYU specialist on Russian affairs, points out the dearth of facts and logic behind the Democratic Party’s moon howling over the supposed Trump-Putin collusion that deprived Hillary Clinton of the presidential throne to which she was entitled as if by monarchical divine rights.
Ranking Democrats along with their media chorus go right on howling at the moon, however. (Hence the term “lunacy,” meaning “moonstruck,” derived from “luna,” Latin for moon.)
Now from the pages of The Nation comes additional, problematical dissent. Which spells potential difficulties ahead for the Democratic moon-howlers. As well as for the anti-Trump, GOP catamites of flag-less, transnational corporatism who are joining them.
An Aug. 9 article by The Nation’s Patrick Lawrence raised — in its own headline’s terms — “big questions” about the supposed Russian hacking of embarrassing Democratic National Committee files advantageous to Trump’s campaign. The hacked information, the narrative goes, was then passed on to WikiLeaks.
But The Nation’s story suggests — gasp! — that rather than the work of diabolical Rooskies, the hack was the work of a DNC insider.
Such revelation treads on the sensitive toes of political orthodoxy. And dissent in leftist circles has never been renowned for its civility, as for example Leon Trotsky learned upon having a mountaineering ax buried in his skull.
The chances are good that Lawrence will find himself answering for suspected heresy in star chamber proceedings convoked by the humorless church fathers of progressivism.
Meanwhile, pending such proceedings, let us ponder his potentially heretical dissent.
His is a technological case. It is based on digital forensic analysis. And the witnesses he calls forth to make his case would seem to be people who might well know whereof they speak.
They are retired pros associated with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. They include William Binney, a former tech director at the National Security Agency (NSA); Kirk Wieke, a former signals intelligence analyst for NSA; Edward Loomis, another NSA tech director; and Ray McGovern, former chief of the CIA’s foreign policy branch.
In a nutshell, Lawrence’s article in The Nation says the narrative of Russians having hacked DNC files crashes on the shoals of two contradictory facts:
1. The DNC hack entailed the downloading of 1,976 megabytes from the DNC server in 87 seconds — a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.
2. “No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at that speed.” says Lawrence.
Tests of download speed attained a rate of up to 15.6 megabytes, way short of 22.7. And a transoceanic transfer to WikiLeaks would have slowed the transmission even more, according to The Nation’s piece.
All of which points to “an inside job” — “a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device,” adds Lawrence’s article.
Aside from Lawrence’s story, there continues to hover over the supposed Trump-Putin conspiracy the reported observation that a Fearless Fosdick FBI never examined the DNC’s computer itself. This, comments Lawrence, “is an omission beyond preposterous.” (If true, hard to quibble with his characterization.)
It has been widely reported — and not refuted — that the FBI relied on a DNC cybersecurity firm for information regarding the DNC’s computer system. And that firm, CrowdStrike, was cofounded by anti-Russia activist Dmitri Alperovitch, says Lawrence.
If The Nation is onto something, it looks like the Democratic Party is headed down the rabbit hole with Alice.
If it’s not onto something, there should be some highly entertaining ideological purging on the Left, relieving us at last, perhaps, of the tiresome daily anti-Trump hysteria.
Right now there are rumbling noises of the sort discontented extras outfitted with torches and pitchforks made in the old Frankenstein movies.
There are angry calls in leftward-leaning circles for The Nation to renounce its article and own up to its false consciousness and other shortcomings, as the ideological errant were required to do in the days of Stalin and Mao.
Do stay tuned to see if The Nation buckles.