Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Goddammit Democrats keep this up and I will vote for Trump OUT OF SPITE.

As Democrats continue to flail around wildly trying to prove that they didn't lose the election it was stolen guys honest (behaving exactly the way they pre-emptively chided Trump for during the campaign) the latest excuse is the most ridiculous by far: if it wasn't the Electoral College or Putin stealing the election, it was lack of typing skills.

I'm going to warn you: the person who gave this story to the press is A LIAR.  He is lying. He is lying, and the press believes him. He is lying, and Hillary! & Co. and the press are supporting him because it makes it NOT THEIR FAULT GUYS that Hillary! lost.

Remember: the man who claims this excuse in the following story is lying:

One of the worst and most public email hacks in political history began with a typo, a report in The New York Times revealed on Tuesday.
An aide to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, saw a warning email in his inbox back in March, claiming to be from Google. Podesta needed to change his Gmail password immediately, the email said.

The story points out what we all know:

Most adult internet users know by now never to click a link in emails like this ― phishing is fairly common. Even unsophisticated tech types are hip to the scam. 

"We all" not including people working for Hillary!

So, before responding, Podesta’s aide showed the email to another staffer, a computer technician.


That's where the lying starts.

From the Times (bolding is HuffPost’s):
“This is a legitimate email,” Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, repliedto another of Mr. Podesta’s aides, who had noticed the alert. “John needs to change his password immediately.”
With another click, a decade of emails that Mr. Podesta maintained in his Gmail account — a total of about 60,000 — were unlocked for the Russian hackers. Mr. Delavan, in an interview, said that his bad advice was a result of a typo: He knew this was a phishing attack, as the campaign was getting dozens of them. He said he had meant to type that it was an “illegitimate” email, an error that he said has plagued him ever since.
I was not the only one who immediately realized that the "computer tech" staffer was lying: I (and hopefully you) immediately noticed that the article was wrong: the staffer wrote "a legitimate" rather than "an legitimate." If he'd meant to write "illegitimate" he likely would've put "an" in there, so there are two typos. In addition, telling someone they have an "illegitimate" email is usually not followed by "so change your password."

Further, a computer tech would have known that you don't click in the email if you're at all in doubt: you go to the site yourself, to try to avoid being fished.

In addition, if you Google the phrase "How can I know if a change password request from Google is legitimate" you'll get as a top result a link to this page, which tells you when and how Google will ask you to change your password. 

The Times report that actually discusses this notes that prior to TYPOGATE, the Democratic National Committee was already aware of potential hacking problems, but that (allegedly) nobody had alerted the higher-ups about it.

The Times story then goes on to reveal that the typo did not contribute to the hack at all.  Billy Rinehart, "a former D.N.C. field director" got the email at 4 a.m., clicked on the link, and changed his password. (The Times notes he was "half asleep," because making important decisions about presidential campaigns is okay if you do it "half asleep.")(Evidence of the press coddling Hillary! & Co is shown by the press giving Rinehart that "half asleep" pass as well as HuffPo's cutely noting that the hack wasn't all bad because we got Podesta's risotto recipe. Ha ha politicians: They're just like us!)

The actual "typo" (remember they are lying) was sent by a different computer tech to a different aide who had checked it out when he logged into John Podesta's email; the Times notes that "several" aides had access to Podesta's personal email.

"Several."

So the Times story notes that the Democratic National Committee had at least one fairly high-level person working with the FBI on a potential hack, but that person never alerted higher-ups. The DNC also had such lax cybersecurity that "several" people had access to the personal emails of John Podesta, campaign chairman for Hillary! It notes that at least one higher up, while "half asleep" clicked a spam email that set off alarms in at least one other staffer.

And reporters sum that up as "haha a silly typo screwed up the election." Those reporters did not, in repeating this fake news story, mention that the "typo" had nothing to do with the security compromise, but they do describe people like me (and like reporter/writer Tom Scocca) who see the lies about the typo as yet more BS from the Dems, as 'conspiracy theorists.'

The media, of course, generally tend to be sympathetic to Hillary! & Co. The media also do not want to admit that mainstream media sources are as culpable as 'fake news' sites and Facebook for the lack of real information provided to the public. The Dems want desperately to paint the election as "stolen" because otherwise they would have to admit that their candidate was only an ersatz Democrat in the first place, selling warmed-over policies with no real agenda, one they ran simply because it was her time, rather than because she was a good candidate.

For the last freaking time: Democrats lost the election because they did not vote. Russia, the Electoral College, Jill Stein, typos, email hacks, Wikileaks, whatever hobgoblins the Democrats want to throw out there did not lose the election. Democrats lost the election because they did not vote.

3 comments:

Andrew Leon said...

While I agree with your "dems didn't vote" assessment, I think there are a lot of reasons dems didn't vote.
Republicans made it very difficult for minorities to actually vote in some areas, for one thing.
But, also, I do think that the fake news bombardment and the Russian hacking played a part in suppressing Democrats voting. Which is not an excuse for the people who didn't vote, just part of the process that happened. I think people who didn't vote are just one notch higher on the rungs than people who voted for Trump.
And they certainly don't get to complain about it now. They lost that right when they didn't vote.

Briane said...

Sure, but consider this.

First, I've no idea how many minorities didn't vote because of Voter ID laws. I'll get into that some other day.

Second, if 'fake news' kept Democrats from voting for Hillary!, why was that? Or the Russian email hack? If the emails released by Russia convinced people that it wasn't worth voting for Hillary, then while Russia meddled in our affairs, they did it by showing us that a candidate wasn't someone we should support. Put another way: releasing emails from a candidate can only remove support for that candidate if the emails are damaging. (And Hillary! put herself in that position by having a private server and through the horrible cybersecurity procedures she put in place.)

But 'fake news' can't keep people from voting for Hillary! I can't imagine that there are liberals or moderates who didn't vote for Hillary! because of "Pizzagate," (the only fake news story that's come to light).

So the problem remains that Democrats didn't vote, and aside from voter suppression, Democrats didn't vote because they didn't find their candidate to be someone worth voting for. Think about all the negative things that came out about Trump in the campaign -- and yet his supporters got out there and voted. Democrats cared less about Hillary! than Republicans did about Trump, which is a systemic problem in the Democratic party and not the fault of outsiders. But Democrats are determined to ignore that lesson (just as they ignored the lessons of the repeated failures to oust Walker here in Wisconsin), so we suffer for it. I'm sick of it. Maybe if things get bad enough -- maybe if health care really does disappear and the top 1% own 99% of everything and minimum wage laws get gutted and terrorist attacks on American soil restart, maybe THEN people will start caring and maybe THEN the Democrats will bother to put together a coherent system of economic packaging that doesn't kowtow to Wall Street and isn't identical in all respects to the GOP, and maybe then the Democrats will stop simply nominating the person whose turn it is. When they nominated Kerry and Hillary!, they lost. When they bucked the trend and nominated Obama and Bill Clinton, they won. There's lessons there, lessons that are harder to take than simply 'people click Facebook links', but the Democrats don't want to learn them.

Andrew Leon said...

Well, again, it's not that I don't agree with you...
but...
I don't really know what my "but" is. It has to do with looking at the data, though. And the data shows things like
9 out of 10 fake news stories during the campaign favored Trump (by being something fake in favor of him (like the thing with the Pope endorsing him) or being something negative about Clinton)
Trump supporters were much more likely to click through on and share fake news stories than liberals
Russia. Just so much about Russia I don't even know where to start.

We're the puppets!