Obama: America should have cared more about Russian meddling than the substance of the Democrats' hacked emails

Well, one Republican did. Coincidentally, it was the Republican Senate candidate whom Obama attacked more viciously on the stump than any other. From mid-October:

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Sen. Marco Rubio tells ABC News that Republicans are making a mistake by jumping on allegedly hacked emails released by WikiLeaks to criticize Hillary Clinton. In fact, he says he won’t talk about the hacked emails at all.

“As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process, and I will not indulge it,” Rubio tells ABC News. “Further, I want to warn my fellow Republicans who may want to capitalize politically on these leaks: Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us.”

O went all-in in Florida on trying to defeat Rubio and failed miserably, as tends to happen with Obama political projects that don’t involve Obama himself being on the ballot. Skip ahead to 4:55 of the clip below for his thoughts on voters supposedly caring more about what was in the hacked DNC and John Podesta emails than the fact that an enemy power was obviously trying to influence the election by releasing them. How he knows that voters cared more about one than about the other, I don’t know; if I had to bet, I’d bet big that Comey’s letter had more to do with late deciders getting cold feet about Hillary than anything in the hacked emails. If the shoe were on the other foot, though, with the GOP hacked and the contents clearly revealing matters of public interest, how many Democrats in Washington and the media would have averted their eyes out of patriotic duty? Peter Spiliakos wonders:

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I obviously oppose hacking by any foreign intelligence into any American’s e-mail, but imagine that . . . I dunno . . . the Chinese had hacked into Mitt Romney’s e-mail and revealed that he admitted that his plans involved raising taxes on the poor. I think our journalists would be able to do a better job of striking a balance between condemning the foreign hacking and thinking through the implications of the revelations. Certainly, those who would potentially be impacted by those tax increases would have good reason to take the new information into account.

This gets to the heart of what the hacking revealed that was damaging to Clinton. It wasn’t Clinton cussing to her friends. It wasn’t Clinton venting about her family or friends or coworkers. The damaging revelations were about matters that were — for all but the most hardcore Clinton partisans — indisputably matters of public concern.

What hurt were the revelations that Clintonite stooges tried to rig the Democratic nominating contest in her favor. What hurt was her comment in favor of “a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.”

If China had hacked Trump’s accountant and posted Trump’s tax returns somewhere, would the media have covered it? Should they have? If those returns revealed significant business dealings with Russian interests, is that newsworthy? I sympathize with Rubio’s (and Obama’s) impulse not to reward America’s enemies for hacking, especially when they’re doing it to influence an election, but it’s like admonishing a jury to disregard a sensational bit of testimony they just heard. The human mind doesn’t work that way. The bell can’t be unrung. An ethic of scrupulously shunning hacked material is a good idea in a world where everyone and everything is online but you’re not going to inculcate that ethic in a few months during a presidential campaign. Failing that, I’d like to know what O thinks should have happened as a result of the hacks. Should voters have punished Trump for Russia’s apparent favoritism towards him, even though (a) the FBI found no links between Trump and Putin’s regime and (b) even now, some U.S. intelligence agencies aren’t sure that Russia’s goal was to tilt the election towards Trump? Should there be a new ethic that any time a foreign power tries to influence a U.S. election in a manner that seems to benefit one candidate over the other, undecideds should all vote for the other candidate purely out of spite? That’s a bad plan for many reasons, starting with the fact that it’d be exceptionally easy for those same foreign powers to game it.

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At bottom, I think this is just Obama’s version of “Where’s the outrage?” Where’s the outrage that the guy who once stood up onstage and encouraged Russia to “find” Hillary Clinton’s emails and publish them was ultimately rewarded with the presidency? I guess, when voters were forced to choose between a candidate who’s likely to favor Russia and another candidate who’s likely to favor the highest foreign bidders in contributing to her Foundation, they went with the one who at least seemed to care about jobs.

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