<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Thursday, March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

Ambrose: Hacking no cause to upend election

By Jay Ambrose
Published: December 18, 2016, 6:01am

The presidential election has come and gone except in the hearts of a forlorn, desperate, leftist crew intent on tearing our democracy apart and instigating a maelstrom of division unseen in modern times.

Their greatest hope is to deny Donald Trump access to the White House, but, short of that, to delegitimize the election, to say it was a fraud, a travesty, that uneducated, morally challenged moron voters did this thing but actually lost.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, the dismayed repeatedly affirm, as if they do not quite get how the Constitution rightly works and forgetting that Trump captured most of the heartland. What’s the goal — to squeeze the East and West coasts together, essentially disenfranchising those who reside in between?

What really defeated Clinton, they say, was racism, homophobia, Islamaphobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, rigged voting procedures, FBI Director James Comey, fake news, Fox News, voting machines gone awry, and Russians. Our intelligence agencies have said Russians hacked emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee with the intent of electing Trump.

In that case, some reply, the Electoral College should deny him the presidency when it votes on Dec. 19. Clinton is party to this. John Podesta, her campaign chairman, has said the intelligence agencies should give the electors an evidential briefing.

Just a pronouncement

Most onlookers say such an unprecedented turnaround would never happen. It does not require a minute’s worth of alertness to see as well that the result could be a fiery combustion keeping the country in self-destructive turmoil for heaven knows how long. The Russians would be tickled to death, of course, and the question isn’t just whether it might happen, but why any half-sane patriot would want it to happen.

First off, we do not yet have the evidence, just a pronouncement. There’s no need for congressional hearings as now contemplated. Just give the data to us, taking care, of course, not to divulge any investigative secrets of our own. For the Electoral College to make a decision on information not shared with everyone else would instigate suspicions.

The Russians almost surely did it, but understand that our intelligence agencies have been mistaken before and that it is no more disrespectful of our government to await the facts and interpretations than it is for the left to have at the FBI for its handling of the Clinton email scandal. It might not hurt at the same time to note that Russia and China have been hacking away at us for years without the Obama administration doing enough to stop it.

The effort now should be a principled one to forge a good future and deter the Russians, Chinese and others from digital skullduggery.


Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for McClatchy-Tribune. Readers may send him email at speaktojay@aol.com.

Loading...