As sure as night follows day, self-beclowning follows any defense of Donald Trump.

As background, some 20,000 DNC emails were released by Wikileaks. These emails, astonishingly (okay, not astonishingly) revealed a corrupt, bigoted organization slavishly devoted to securing the Democrat presidential nomination for Hillary Clinton. Since this past weekend the DNC has tried to change the narrative on the emails from one of endemic corruption and self-dealing to one of Russian interference in the US election. The reason they want to change the narrative is because of Donald Trump’s close relationship with the various oligarchs who form Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. The implication being that the Russians desperately want Trump to be the next president and will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.

The sad addition today is conservative talker and icon Rush Limbaugh. Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh tried to knock that story down.

TRANSCRIPT

Now people are trying to figure out what is really going on here and how did this happen and who did it. And the Democrats are really focusing on the “who did it”. The Democrats have yet to deny anything in these documents is authentic. Because they can’t. They were hacked and what’s on their server is obviously what was on their server. It’s real. They’ve been snookered. They’ve been hacked. So they can’t run out and claim it is a bunch of lies. They can’t claim… they can’t… well, they could, actually. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What they’re doing is trying to discredit what is authentic by criticizing the motivations of those who did the hack. And that, everybody is being led to believe, is the Russians. And the Democrats and the media have trotted out one cyber expert after another claiming they have studied this, they’ve done their forensic analysis, and they’ve found… I’ve read three or four different super elite cyber blogs on the thing, they all say that there were two different Russian hacker units, cyber units, intel, that neither knew the other were there, meaning inside the DNC server. Two separate efforts leaving telltale signs. They tried to cover their existence but because they don’t speak English and because one of them screwed up and used a Cyrillic keyboard instead of an English language keyboard. Things like this, that it has become very apparent that the Russians did this. Which has then led to the following questions.

Well, why, why would the Russians do this? Why would the Russians want to destroy Hillary Clinton? Because, folks, let me give you another thing that’s pretty safe bet : a) this is by no means the end of it. There is going to be a whole lot more if they hacked the DNC servers then they’ve got everything and who knows what else is on the… Who knows what else is on that… What if there’s email evidence on that server that they were colluding with Hillary? That Debbie Blabbermouth was colluding with Hillary? You know Hillary’s out there denying it right now but she’s got to be sweating bullets over this. But it’s not just that. If they were able to hack the DNC server, then they no doubt hacked her Chappaqua server. And so the thinking goes like this: if the Russians know everything that was on Hillary’s private server and if they have everything on the DNC server, why destroy her at all? Why not see to it she’s elected and then blackmail her every day and get what you want out of her? Because if this is all true, the theory goes, they could have a puppet as president of the United States. Why would they don’t use this stuff to take her out even if Trump thinks that he’s a good buddy with Putin? Why in the world with the Russians rather have Trump as president, who is a wild card, who they haven’t hacked, because there’s nothing to hack, because he doesn’t use email, when you can own the American president? Especially when everybody else owns the American president because they’ve paid her, But the Russians don’t have to pay her because they’ve got blackmail-able evidence, that they can get out of her whatever they want or else they destroy her.

So people are trying to figure out why would the Russians do this? And why now? And what’s next? And when are we going to learn what was on her private server? Or will they hold that back and use that to blackmail her if she wins the election? And then there’s something even beyond this. Some of the cyber specialists are really, really worried, and I think this is a bit of naiveté, but they are really… remember who these people are. These are young millennial tech wizards, some of them older than millennial, but they’re still, they’re still of this naive young leftist generation, New Age touchy-feely, and they are writing about ‘this is unacceptable to allow, to not do anything about, to have a foreign government actually intercede in a US political election and take action that will affect the outcome. Why this is unacceptable and the US has got to retaliate. We’ve got to do something because we can’t allow this.’ I got a clue for you, the same thing happened on 9/11. They cancelled some elections in New York City on that day, but this is by no means the first time anything like this has happened. I mean that ChiComs and the Russians are hacking things left and right now in terms of affecting the outcome of an election this is maybe the most brazen public effort to affect the outcome but it’s by no means the first. It’s just the first one we know about…

To me, the hack seems too sloppy to be a direct effort by Russian security services to hack the DNC. FBI Director James Comey said, in regards to Hillary’s server, that there was no evidence that it had been hacked but if it had been hacked by a foreign intelligence service he wouldn’t expect to find evidence. The leak of the emails can easily be explained as the product of effort by Russian hacker groups that are not affiliated with the government but who have been influenced both by the Kremlin’s anger at Clinton’s comments on the honesty of Russian elections and the hot bromance between Trump and Putin.

Where Rush goes off the rails and into the swamp is in his reasoning. Even though it is true that Trump doesn’t use email… in fact, we really don’t even know if he can write… there is a great deal of evidence that the Russians own Trump in a way they could never hope to own Hillary Clinton. Since his wave of serial bankruptcies beginning in the 1980s, he has been kept afloat by cash from Russian investors. These investors can’t be making those investments without the knowledge of Putin and this gives them leverage over Trump in a very real sense. If they pull his financing, virtually overnight he becomes a homeless wino yelling at tourists in Times Square. From a motivation point of view, wouldn’t Putin rather have an ideological ally in the White House… that would be Trump who loathes NATO and American power as much as Putin… than someone he had to blackmail for cooperation?

This is not to say that Putin does not have blackmail material that would embarrass and damage Clinton. Obviously her email server was copied by the Russians and any other intelligence service with sufficient ambition to pull its pants on in the morning. The same goes for the festering pustule of pay-to-play corruption that is the Clinton Foundation. Do we really think that there are no videos of self-confessed “sex addict” Bill Clinton cavorting with pre-or-barely-pubescent hors d’oeuvres provided by his pal, convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein? Or imagery of Hillary Clinton engaging in monkey-sex with her paramours? All of this is damaging but it is different from the hold the Russians have over Trump. They have leverage that goes directly to Trump’s self-image. Where Hillary could do a Richard Nixon-style Checkers speech and admit a grievous lapse in judgment and weather a storm of revelations — her husband, Bill Clinton, is the textbook case in how that is done — Trump would be broke.

The fact is that both assertions are equally true and just because Hillary Clinton has made herself vulnerable to blackmail by virtually every nation on the planet does not in anyway take away from the fact that Donald Trump is undoubtedly Putin’s favored candidate and Vladimir Putin will suffer from the embarrassment of riches that is having both candidates for president of the United States willing to do his bidding.