Hypocrisy on Election Interference

In his press conference last month, President Barack Obama sternlyvoiced concern about “potential foreign influence in our election process.”The goal may be a valid one, but it cloaks hypocrisy of staggering proportions. The United States has been assiduously intervening in foreign elections for decades —perhaps even for centuries.The central issue in the 2016 election was with some hacked emails, published by Wikileaks, indicating that some top members of the Democratic National Committee were rooting for Hillary Clinton to win their party ’s nomination for president. This seems to have been the extent of the “interference,” and there has been a concerted effort to suggest that Russian hackers were the source of the information, a contention Wikileaks has strongly and repeatedlydenied.The revelations can scarcely have come as much of a surprise to anybody following the campaign, and it seems highly unlikely that they swung many votes —my guess, erring on the high side, would be perhaps six or seven.The American record in election interference (always, of course, with the best of intentions) is much more extensive.           Exhibit number one is surely the Italian election of 1948 inwhich the CIA furnished a million dollars to congenial parties and may have published forged letters designed to discredit leaders of the Communist Party. Meanwhile, there was a concertedeffort to get Italian-Americans to write home urging relatives and friends to vote the...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs