The real ‘collusion’ story
Remember when Jim Carville came up with the motto, “It’s the economy, stupid!”? He wanted Bill Clinton’s campaign team to keep its eye on the ball.
Well, Republicans should rip a page out of Carville’s playbook. Substitute the word “uranium” for “economy.”
“It’s the uranium, stupid!” Repeat it at every opportunity.
That would be an effective way to shut up Democrats who persist in yammering on and on about Trump’s “collusion” with Russia.
Ask ‘em: “Hey, did you say ‘collusion’? What about the uranium?” Make the question a mantra.
Every time a Democrat utters the word “collusion,” go ahead, ask: “What about the uranium? Huh? Huh? What about the uranium?”
The Russia “collusion” treasure hunt for an impeachable case against Trump turns on the supposed Kremlin hacking of Democratic National Committee emails. It’s by no means a certainty Russia did the hacking, much less that Trump was involved. But assume Russia did do it. So what? So some embarrassing emails showed the DNC screwed Bernie Sanders every chance it got. Big freaking deal.
If the Russians did indeed hack the DNC, maybe the DNC should be more careful about having embarrassing stuff in its computer files. But let’s get back to the $64,000 collusion question: What about the uranium?
It’s a question the Democratic Party and its major news media catamites prefer not to address. But the word “collusion” should automatically trigger the question: “What about the uranium” — i.e., the American uranium that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton handed over to Vladimir Putin? Huh? Huh? What about it? Barry? Hillary?”
If Russia’s a villainous, diabolical foe — as Democrats are now suddenly insisting — how did Putin end up owning a significant chunk of America’s limited uranium mining assets? Let’s review how.
In 2013, Russia’s nuclear agency, Rosatom — a massive Kremlin entity with 360 subsidiary enterprises — moved to take a controlling ownership stake in UraniumOne, a Canadian firm with mining operations in U.S western states. The Russian deal required the approval of a multi-agency U.S. panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, headed by the State Department, then under Hillary Clinton. The panel’s approval was required because the federal government lists uranium as a critical, scarce national security asset.
The committee, chaired by a Clinton aide, signed off on the deal, even though the approval gave Russia ownership of 20 percent of America’s limited uranium resources, according to the online energy news site, OilPrice. com. And Barry Obama let the deal go through.
Democratic bigwigs and their media go-fers now tend to respond to this turn of events with a dismissive “Pfffttttt.” But was the deal indeed a matter of minor consequence? If so, how so? And why, then, was the panel’s extraordinary approval required?
Consider: The United States gets nearly a quarter of its energy from nuclear power, and — according to the U.S. government — utilities have at most three years of uranium reserves on hand. Plus, uranium is, of course, essential to nuclear weapons.
To meet its needs, the United States has to import most of its uranium — including from such exporters as Russia.
The United States possesses very little of the world’s known uranium deposits — a measly 1.8 percent. Russia possesses more than 11 times that share — 20.4 percent. (Figures from European Atomic Energy Agency.)
Russia itself greeted the Obama/Clinton giveaway of a scarce, critical resource as a Kremlin master stroke. The Russian newspaper Pravda heralded the deal with the gleefully triumphant headline: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.” In the United States, the Obama-slavering news media gave the sale hardly any notice at all.
The Russian uranium deal seems all the more peculiar in light of today’s McCarthyite paranoia convulsing the Democratic Party. Preferring Russian dressing on your salad may get you denounced for treason by Wolf Blitzer and Don Lemon nowadays. You dare not get caught reading a Tolstoy novel or listening to a Tchaikovsky symphony nowadays lest you be keelhauled by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on suspicions of betraying your country. Unless you now favor all-out confrontation with the Slav Bogeyman, you’re in danger of being denounced as a turncoat by the DNC’s emissaries to Morning Joe and Mika.
But Democrats were humming an entirely different tune back in the halcyon days of the Obama presidency. Then there was talk of a “Reset” of relations with Russia. Remember? Ivan the Terrible was not really so terrible. While the uranium deal was fermenting, the Obama administration sought to suck up to Putin by withdrawing U.S. plans for an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe and to drop sanctions against a Russian exporting agency that supplied arms to the theocratic crazies of Iran.
Putin hailed the Obama administration for its accommodating posture. “Collusion! Collusion!” was not yet a favorite parrot squawk in the DNC’s limited vocabulary.
This factual outline of the Obama-Clinton-Putin uranium collusion comes, by the way, not via Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or other exponents of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. It comes, actually, from The New York Times — daily devotional favorite of the Democratic Party faithful. One Times story observed that the deal “brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.”
What’s more, the uranium saga comes with a smelly backstory. A 2015 New York Times headline put that backstory in these words: “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.”
As tracked by the Times (as well as by Peter Schweizer’s book, “Clinton Cash”), millions of dollars in ostensible charitable contributions flowed to the Clinton Foundation from donors with a financial stake in the approval of the Rosatom deal. A minor tributary of this pecuniary torrent included a $500,000 “speech fee” for Bill Clinton, from Putinlinked Renaissance Capital, a Moscow-based investment bank involved in the promotion of Rosatom stock.
The Democratic Party’s media cheerleaders are eager to point out that, technically speaking, there’s no legally provable quid pro quo in these outsized, suspiciously timed cash flows. And maybe there’s not. But can you assert that the donation backstory doesn’t give off an overpowering foul stench all the same?
However, let’s not get distracted by the sleaze backstory. Whether the millions of dollars that flowed to the Clinton foundation were bribes or legitimate charitable donations, the point is that the highly dubious uranium deal did in fact take place, in either event.
How do you explain it? “What about the uranium, stupid?”
Surely some sophisticated Democrat can step forward and explain to us simpletons why it wasn’t really such a bad idea after all to sell 20 percent of our limited, critical uranium assets to the evil Vladimir Putin’s diabolical Kremlin.
Nancy? Chuckie? Barry?
~davidneese@verizon.net