Paul Craig Roberts on the prsidential nominations

American Horror Story: How the Democrats Found a Boogeyman in Hillary's Emails

Paul Craig Roberts

Strategic Culture Foundation,

10 August, 2016

Bernie Sanders won the presidential nomination, but he was cheated out of it by the Democratic National Committee which is the operating body for the Democratic Party. They helped Hillary win the nomination by combining vote miscounts and appointing super delegates whom no one elected to vote for Hillary. So, she won this nomination illegitimately. All of Bernie Sanders’ supporters know that. They have turned against Hillary, and it is unlikely that many of them will vote for Clinton. The Democratic National Committee said: “Who do they dislike more than Hillary? The Russians”, as they’ve been demonizing the Russians for the last 3-4 years. So, the Americans are told to dislike the Russians. That’s why they blame Putin for WikiLeaks’ release of the emails that showed how the Democrats were cheating with votes. Hillary is a crook in many ways. But she has escaped prosecution because she is too useful for the oligarchs. So they shift all the blame onto Putin, saying that this is all a Russian plot to get Donald Trump elected. Is that what this is? I don’t think this will fool many people. It will be played with in the media because the media is not honest, not independent. It’s like the old Soviet media – it has to answer to the master and can’t say much independently. It’s not going to fool the American people that all this email thing was done by Putin.

The Democrats are looking for a boogeyman, for somebody to shift the blame onto away from them. They don’t even realize that in doing so they are making Russia look like a cyber superpower. Well, it may be a cyber superpower, but we all know that Clinton’s emails did not reach WikiLeaks via Russia. It’s just something they made up. The media simply went along with it. I don’t think that many people will believe this. It just makes the Democratic National Committee look even more ridiculous. It steals an election from the candidate that people wanted and tries to blame Putin for doing that.

Bernie Sanders, when he supported Clinton, discredited himself and demoralized all his supporters. Therefore, they turned away from him too. That eliminates him as a leader. He ruined it for himself. If he had gone to the convention and said: “You stole the elections from me! I’m the one who won”, he would be the most popular American today. He could run as an independent candidate and win. But he didn’t have the courage to do that. He gave up, surrendered. The oligarchs are accustomed to people surrendering to them. They think that Putin will surrender to them too.

Bernie Sanders does not have the support of the oligarchs. The military security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby are not behind him. He is not their agent. His support came from Democratic voters themselves. So he doesn’t have the power to prevail, unless he really takes the fight to Hillary. But he wasn’t really risky to do that. Bernie Sanders is considered an outsider to the oligarchs. They did not found his campaign. But now he has been broken as a political leader and it is the end for him.

The media will all support Clinton and attack Trump. But this eventually loses its credibility. Fewer people depend on the media because it has lied about so much and for so long. Much more important is how Trump handles himself. If he continues to say that he doesn’t want a conflict with Russia, that NATO is a problem and other issues, then he will win regardless of the oligarchs and the media. He needs to stick to the point that he is against offshoring Americans’ jobs. The fact that corporations have moved middle-class jobs overseas really hurts Americans and the American economy. He is against having tensions with Russia. He realizes that there is no real need for NATO. So, people are supporting him for these reasons. If he sticks to these issues, he will win. But the question is what could he do even if he gets into office. It may turn out that he can do nothing, but he’s the only hope we have.

But at this moment, there is the chance that the Democrats will try to sabotage the elections. Voting in the US is largely handled by electronic machines. It has no paper trail. So, whoever programs those machines can determine the voting outcome. And nobody will ever know. Unless Trump has some kind of experts who can ensure that the voting machines are programmed correctly, I suspect that the machines will be programmed to vote for Hillary, especially because so many in the Republican political establishment are opposed to Trump. If he relies on them, they will cooperate with Hillary’s people and program the machines so that Hillary wins. There is no paper balance to recount it. This is the way a lot of elections have been stolen in recent years. This may happen again.