U.S.: Time to stop meddling

The hypocrisy of today’s politicians is staggering! When will former President Obama report how his State Department financed an organization in Israel to unseat Netanyahu? Or former President Clinton confess to the $10 million he spent to secure success for the underdog Russian presidential candidate Yeltsin in his run for president of Russia? Then there is former President Johnson’s meddling in Ghana’s elections. And, on and on…

Dov Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University, identified 62 American interventions in foreign elections between 1946 and 1989.

The Atlantic’s July 22, 2018, article entitled “The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling” details many of these episodes all deemed necessary to ensure that democracy is secured. The article also quotes from Lindsey O’Rourke’s book, “Covert Regime Change: Americas Secret Cold War,” that the author in discussing meddling … “cannot think of a case in which America’s democracy concerns superseded its national-security concerns.” More hypocrisy.

No doubt Russia meddled in our recent presidential election. However, the assertion that Trump colluded with Russia in the meddling, has not been substantiated. Instead, the most likely explanation for what happened (using Occam’s Razor) is that the extreme Trump haters knowingly helped the Russians in their meddling by providing untruths aimed at sinking Trump’s presidential bid. Thankfully, neither the Russians nor the high-ranking “United States Government” officials were successful.

If all that is true, who actually did fuel Russia’s desire to undermine our election process? And, maybe we should stop our meddling if we want the same from foreign governments.

DICK SHELDON

Coeur d’Alene