The Fall of the Shah - One of America's Worst Foreign Policy Blunder

I have always believed that one of America's worst foreign policy blunders was its failure to support the Shah of Iran and defeat Islamic extremists back in 1979 - obviously the Vietnam War and the Iraq War may take the prize for the worse blunders, The Iraq War proving that nothing had been learned from the Vietnam fiasco.  Now a new book, "The Fall of Heaven,” by Andrew Scott Cooper, looks at the Shah and argues that much about the Shah was misinterpreted and that the United States and many in the media were duped and played for fools by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his fellow Islamic extremist revolutionaries.  From the fall of the Shah forward in time the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran have helped spread Islamic terror across the Middle East.  Ironically, Iran's regional arch rival, Saudi Arabia, has funded the same spread of terrorism.   I just received the book today, but a review in the Washington Post looks at the book and some of its disturbing findings. Here are excerpts:

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, known as the shah, has always been portrayed as both ruthless and craven — the last emperor of Iran who fled on the eve of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Nearly four decades after his death, a new book offers a more sympathetic, nuanced portrait of him and the dynasty he was born into. In “The Fall of Heaven,” Andrew Scott Cooper uses newly declassified U.S. documents from the Carter administration, interviews with the shah’s aides and revolutionary leaders as well as his own research in Iran to make the case that the shah has been misinterpreted, reduced to “a bloodless enigma.” Cooper, a Middle East specialist and the author of “Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East,” offers a convincing narrative about who the man was and the dynamics that led to his downfall. The shah came to power in 1941 after the British and the Soviets forced his father, Reza Pahlavi, to abdicate in his favor. He survived two major political upheavals, and by the early 1960s, oil wealth enabled him to modernize Iran. Religious leaders, however, accused him of Westernizing the country. Communist and nationalist activists criticized him, saying he distributed wealth and power among the ruling elite. His secret police grew more repressive, seeking to end opposition but instead alienating students and intellectuals.

The seeds of the shah’s downfall began in 1977, Cooper argues, after Saudi Arabia flooded markets with cheap oil. The shortfall in Iran’s oil revenue, combined with a drought, forced dissatisfied laborers to flock to larger cities, looking for work. The shah introduced political and social liberalization to ease the mood, unaware, Cooper notes, that his policies provided religious extremists with a context to mobilize the masses against him. According to Cooper, by the time he left the country in January 1979 the shah had, by his reforms, reduced his role to that of a constitutional figure­head. A series of missteps, economic disruptions and miscalculations by Western powers, as well as a well-funded opposition, crippled the shah’s efforts to save himself.
 Most shocking perhaps were the deceptive tactics the opposition used to demonize him. Cooper claims, for example, that Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, a nationalist-left activist who deposed the shah with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and later served as the first president, told him how they manipulated the Western media’s coverage of Iran. The revolutionaries “studied western journalists’ reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement’s facts and figures,” Cooper argues, citing Bani-Sadr. This led to the publication of grossly inflated numbers of activists jailed and executed by the shah’s secret police. The figures, Cooper says, helped provoke anti-shah sentiments and were not corrected, even after Red Cross inspectors investigated and rejected the claims. Revolutionaries themselves, the book notes, have since refuted the numbers. To bolster the impression that the shah was bent on murdering his people, the opposition initiated violence and blamed it on the shah. In the year before the victory of the revolution, the Islamists burned hundreds of private businesses, including cinemas, Cooper writes. The most brutal attack came in August 1978, when 430 men, women and children were burned to death at Rex Cinema in the southern city of Abadan — the worst arson since World War II. The inferno was intended “to destabilize and panic Iranian society,” Cooper argues. It also successfully fanned the flames of hostility toward the shah across the country.  The culprit, . . . was Hossein Takbalizadeh, an Islamist linked to a local Khomeini underground cell who was eventually tried and convicted of murder by an Iranian court after the revolution.
 The arrival of William Sullivan, U.S. ambassador to Tehran, in the summer of 1977 was not good news for the shah, Cooper contends. “He showed little or any sensitivity to the unique pressures that the shah faced at home by supporting U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East . . . . Sullivan continued to dismiss worries by moderate religious leaders — including opponents of the shah — over the consequences of the shah’s departure, arguing that their fears “were not very coherent or well reasoned.” It was only in the shah’s final days in Iran, Cooper concludes, that “Ambassador Sullivan received crucial intelligence suggesting that he might have backed the wrong horse after all.”
 Until the end, “nationalism was like a religion” for the shah, Cooper argues. Over nearly four decades, the shah transformed a backward, poverty-stricken country into a powerful one with the most educated workforce in the Middle East. This sober narrative will resonate with many Iranians — including myself — who lived under the grim conditions Khomeini introduced after the revolution. As other countries in the Middle East are going through similar transformations and vying for political reform, Cooper reminds us of the ability of power-hungry leaders, capable of manipulating people’s desire for change, to build even more brutal and unaccountable systems.

I have always seen parallels between the fall of the Russian imperial dynasty to the Bolsheviks and the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty to  Khomeini and his thugs.  In each case the revolutionaries who claimed to represent the people once in power unleashed a blood bath of repression and set back the respective nations by decades.  And like Lenin, Khomeini had been exiled instead of executed as, in my view, he deserved.  The Bolsheviks referred to Nicholas II as "bloody Nicholas," yet then went on to murder millions - tens of millions if one counts Stalin's famines in the early 1930's to wipe out wealthy peasants.  Khomeini depicted the Shah as a wanton murder, yet it was his own regime that oversaw a vast bloodbath using, of course, religion as a justification.

The Shah's real sin in the eyes of Khomeini and his faction was that he was modernizing and westernizing Iran and in the process weakening the power of the "holy men" and the hatred and ignorance they represent.  America should have fully supported the Shah and assisted in stamping out Khomeini and his fellow Islamic extremist.  Had that been done, much of the horrors since 1979 might have been avoided. 

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, in 1954

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

North Carolina GOP Continues to Suppress Minority Voting

Despite a federal court ruling that struck down North Carolina's 2013 election law that was carefully crafted to either disenfranchise minority voters or at a minimum suppress the minority vote, the North Carolina GOP is actively working to do precisely what the court ruling forbade.  While North Carolina is perhaps and extreme example, the actions of the North Carolina GOP are in keeping with GOP efforts to disenfranchise minority voters in order to increase the power of the GOP's shrinking white base.  Rather than recognize that more and more people are repelled by their racists and religious extremist agenda and reverse Robin Hood policies, the GOP instead attacks the voting rights of those who oppose them.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the insidious efforts underway in North Carolina.  Here are excerpts:

When a federal appeals court overturned much of North Carolina’s sweeping 2013 election law last month, saying it had been deliberately intended to discourage African-Americans from voting, something else was tossed out as well: the ground rules for this year’s elections in a critical swing state. In each of the state’s 100 counties, local elections boards scheduled new hearings and last week filed the last of their new election rules with the state.

Now, critics are accusing some of the boards, all of which are controlled by Republicans, of staging an end run around a court ruling they are supposed to carry out. Like the law that was struck down, say voting rights advocacy groups and some Democrats who are contesting the rewritten election plans, many election plans have been intentionally written to suppress the black vote.

“It is equal to voter suppression in its worst way,” said Courtney Patterson, the sole Democrat on the Lenoir County elections board.

He was referring to a proposal by the board’s two Republicans to allow 106.5 hours of early voting before the Nov. 8 election — less than a quarter of the time allowed in the 2012 presidential election — and to limit early balloting to a single polling place in the county seat of a largely rural eastern North Carolina county that sprawls over 403 square miles.

In a county where Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than two to one, and four in 10 voters are black, the election plan limits voting to a single weekend day, and on weekdays demands that residents, including those who are poor and do not own cars, make long trips to cast a ballot.

Actually, the roots of North Carolina’s latest conflict over voting seem apparent. Republicans and Democrats here are in hand-to-hand combat this election year as seldom before. Contests for president and United States senator are neck and neck, and the Republican governor, Pat McCrory, is in a tough bid for re-election. Two congressional races are unfolding in districts whose boundaries were ordered redrawn this year after a federal court ruled that they had been gerrymandered to dilute black voters’ influence.

While Republicans scoff at the notion that they have sought to suppress an overwhelmingly Democratic black vote, they make no apologies for pursuing every legal opportunity that exists to win elections.

[I]n a letter to The Raleigh News & Observer, which stirred a small sensation this month after it acquired an email that Mr. Woodhouse had sent to Republican election-board members and other party stalwarts after the court ruling that invalidated the 2013 law.

In it, he stated that Republican election officials “can and should make party-line changes” to the rules governing early voting periods, and urged them to oppose other measures — like Sunday hours for early voting sites, and polling places on college campuses — that are commonly said to aid Democratic turnout.

The federal appeals court ruling against the 2013 election law broadly said that given North Carolina’s history of racial discrimination in voting, Republicans could not roll back voting rules that benefited African-Americans without compelling reasons.

But when the appeals court ordered counties to restore the early voting period to 17 days, it left decisions about the number of polling places and their operating hours up to local election boards. The result is that some of the newly proposed election plans explicitly cut voting hours below previous levels, and outlaw Sunday voting altogether.

Democrats and voting-rights advocates call the cuts a conspiracy to depress black turnout. 

I increasingly find myself embarrassed to ever have been a Republican.  Like the Christofasacists, many in today's GOP are NOT nice or decent people.   

Gavin Grimm: I Just Wanted to Use the Bathroom

Baptist pastor involved in LGBT persecution

The Washington Post has a lengthy article on the legal battle being waged by and on behalf of Gavin Grimm, a 17 year old from Gloucester County, Virginia against the local school board and ultimately against the Christofascists who oppose any rights being granted to LGBT citizens.  I will admit that it is difficult for me to not get passionate on the issue since the husband and I know Grimm and his mother, who have been to our home.  While the piece doesn't fully identify the forces of "Christian" hate behind the agenda against Grimm, it does name one "godly" opponent, Ralph VanNess, a pastor at Calvary Baptist Church and a security guard at Gloucester High School. As regular readers know, in my view, religion, especially fundamentalist religion, is one of the greatest toxic evils in the world and is responsible for so many death and ruined lives over the centuries and today as well.  Here are article highlights:

There was nothing remarkable about Gavin Grimm’s first trip to the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High School. It was a little more than a month into his sophomore year, when the transgender teenager had begun quietly reintroducing himself to the student body as a boy.

Grimm had used men’s restrooms at restaurants, stores and the local amusement park, and using the boys’ bathroom at his school felt like “the natural progression of things,” he said. Just like cutting his hair short, just like wearing baggy pants and graphic T-shirts, just like beginning testosterone shots. He started using the boys’ bathroom shortly after he got word from Principal Nate Collins that it would be okay.

But that decision to use the boys’ bathroom one fall day in 2014 clashed with this town’s sensibilities and led to an acrimonious public debate. Now, Grimm’s case has made this quiet, out-of-the-way community in Virginia’s Tidewater region the unlikely center of the national debate over how public schools should accommodate transgender students. And the case has made Grimm, an introspective teen who once was painfully shy, the standard-bearer in the fight for transgender student rights. He approaches the role with a mixture of pride and apprehension.

“I’m afraid to function as myself in my community sometimes,” Grimm said.

Grimm’s parents said it seems that many people forget there’s a kid involved.  “These people have no idea how they’ve hurt my child and how they continue to hurt my child,” said Deirdre Grimm, a nurse.

“We didn’t set out to do anything,” said David Grimm, a trades supervisor at a local shipyard. “Only thing we’ve done is try to protect our child. And that is what it means, and that takes whatever form it takes.”

[T]o some here, Grimm’s being transgender violates their basic sensibilities, some of which they say they draw from the Bible. They believe changing one’s gender is an affront to nature and to God.

“In my opinion, as a pastor, looking at this situation, I do not believe that God makes mistakes,” said Ralph VanNess, a security guard at the high school who is also the pastor at Calvary Baptist Church. “God puts us on this Earth as who we are.”

VanNess, who leads a school Bible club, spoke at a school board meeting in favor of banning Grimm from the boys’ bathroom in 2014. “It was a responsibility I had before God,” he said.

Parents soon caught wind of what was happening; some phoned the school, demanding to know whether a transgender student was using the boys’ bathroom. Their concerns quickly gained steam publicly — they raised the specter of bathroom sex and rape and expressed fears that their sons would be uncomfortable in the bathrooms.

The school board took up the issue, and Grimm pleaded with them at an open meeting.
“I am just a human. I am just a boy,” he said. “Please consider my rights when you make your decision.”

The board voted to require students to use bathrooms that aligned with their “biological gender.”

Many Gloucester High School students start the day with a prayer group, and some once vocally criticized a lesson on evolution as contrary to biblical teaching. Many students object on religious grounds to Grimm’s use of the boys’ bathroom; they still see him as a girl.

VanNess and those like him embody the Christofascist embrace of ignorance and a desire to force their ignorant beliefs on all citizens.  The motivation?  To then feel good about themselves and to harm others to please what blogger friend Bob Felton would describe as their "imaginary invisible friend in the sky."  Religion has no place in public schools or public policy - the bible club is one of the first things that needs to go to bring Gloucester County into the 21st century.  It's a backwater and people like VanNess will keep it that way. 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

Colin Kaepernick and the Ugly Aspects of the Star-Spangled Banner

I never ceased to be amazed at the ignorance of seemingly the majority of Americans when it comes to knowing the true history of America.  If one bothers to really research the nation's history, its territorial expansion was fueled by genocide against the Native American population, Texas was acquired as a result of American emigres who settled in what was a part of Mexico and then revolted and overthrew Mexican rule, and Hawaii became a territory after American business interests engineered the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.  Somehow, the "patriots" ignore all of this and adopt an attitude akin to right wingers from the Vietnam War days: "America, love it or leave it" and "America right or wrong."

By his refusal to stand for the national anthem, Colin Kaepernick has earned the wrath of these very same Neanderthals who simply cannot countenance anything that challenges their fairy tale version of America and their idolatry of the American flag. Loving one's country doesn't mean one ignores it flaws and past heinous acts and treats pieces of cloth as if it was Christ returned.  That mindset only allows a repeat of past mistakes and horrors.  Had we remembered the real truth about the Vietnam War, it's possible the Iraq War would never have occurred. But back to the Star-Spangled Banner.  A piece in the New York Daily News  among others looks at the full truth about the national anthem (only since 1931) and its very unpleasant, racist author. These excerpts from The Intercept set the stage:

Before a preseason game on Friday, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When he explained why, he only spoke about the present: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. … There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Twitter then went predictably nuts, with at least one 49ers fan burning Kaepernick’s jersey.

Almost no one seems to be aware that even if the U.S. were a perfect country today, it would be bizarre to expect African-American players to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Why? Because it literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans.

Few people know this because we only ever sing the first verse. But read the end of the third verse and you’ll see why “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not just a musical atrocity, it’s an intellectual and moral one, too:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

[O]ne of the key tactics behind the British military’s success was its active recruitment of American slaves. . . . Whole families found their way to the ships of the British, who accepted everyone and pledged no one would be given back to their “owners.” Adult men were trained to create a regiment called the Colonial Marines, who participated in many of the most important battles, including the August 1814 raid on Washington.

So when Key penned “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,” he was taking great satisfaction in the death of slaves who’d freed themselves. His perspective may have been affected by the fact he owned several slaves himself.

Don't believe me?  Here's a link to the Smithsonian webpage that provides all of the words.    Oh, and check out the fourth verse and its reference to "freemen."  In 1814, that term did not include enslaved blacks.  Here are excerpts from the Daily News piece:

While it has always been known that the song was written during American slavery and that when those words about this nation being the "land of the free" didn't apply to the millions who had been held in bondage, few of us had any idea that the song itself was rooted in the celebration of slavery and the murder of Africans in America, who were being hired by the British military to give them strength not only in the War of 1812, but in the Battle of Fort McHenry of 1814. These black men were called the Corps of Colonial Marines and they served valiantly for the British military. Key despised them. He was glad to see them experience terror and death in war — to the point that he wrote a poem about it. That poem is now our national anthem.

While I fundamentally reject the notion that anyone who owned other human beings was either good, moral, or decent, Francis Scott Key left absolutely no doubt that he was a stone cold bigot. He came from generations of plantation owning bigots. They got wealthy off of it. Key, as District Attorney of Washington, fought for slavery and against abolitionists every chance he got. Even when Africans in D.C. were injured or murdered, he stood strong against justice for them. He openly spoke racist words against Africans in America. Key said that they were "a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community."
 While San Francisco 49ers quarter back Colin Kaepernick has refused to stand for the national anthem because of the overflowing abundance of modern day injustice in America, he has helped bring to light the fact that this song and its author are deeply rooted in violent white supremacy.

I don't think I will be singing the song again.  

Quote of the Day: Sexual Repression Costs Lives

Having grown up Catholic and remained a member of the Catholic Church until a few years before I came out, I am all too aware of the Church hierarchy's total obsession with all things sexual and the manner in which anything other than procreative sex is evil.  Of course, homosexuality and/or same sex physical relations was about the fastest ticket to Hell outside of possibly murder, although their were some clergy who seeming equated the two as the same in heinousness.  Meanwhile, as well all know, priests, bishops and other clergy were sexually molesting children and youth with abandon, knowing that the hierarchy would cover up the crimes and rarely, if ever, report the criminal conduct to police authorities. Yet there remain Catholics who blindly parrot the Church's official condemnation of sexuality while ignoring the fact that from many Popes on down, a vile, worldwide criminal conspiracy was going on.  Candidly, I cannot understand this mindset other than to assume that such right wing Catholics cannot let go of the Church teachings that in many cases made their lives miserable.  To admit they were wrong apparently would be too painful of an admission.  A letter to the editor in the Bucks County Courier-Times has a wonderful come back to such bitter right wing Catholics.  Here are some excerpts:

Older people jaded by their loss of youth and turning that dissatisfaction outward on the world is nothing new. But I don't think I've ever seen it put on display so outlandishly that it makes "All in the Family" look like a documentary.

In a column last month, J.D. Mullane conjured up a whirlwind of excuses to not only defend the Catholic Church from accusations of being "sex-obsessed," but to turn around and blame, well, everyone and everything he possibly could, it seems. To him, our evolution into a much more sex-positive nation is a disaster, and if the once pure holy beacon of Catholic theology on sex is now tarnished, it's because of this rising tide of naughtiness.

Most offensively, he lists Disney's attempt at transgender inclusiveness as an example of what he perceives as the moral degradation of society that's truly to blame for making the Catholic Church seem out of touch. Never mind the shockingly high suicide rate of transgendered people who feel they lack an identity -- 41 percent have attempted it!

It's likely as high as the suicide rate of those who, as children, were sexually assaulted, though that statistic is harder to come by. And while it's generally estimated that child sex abuse rates among Catholic priests are actually comparable to that of the general population, the depravity of it comes from the years -- decades even! -- that it was kept secret, allowing it to happen over and over again to more and more children.

Perhaps if we as a society had been more open to and accepting of the spectrum of human sexuality, instead of hushed by an invisible Victorian code of sexual conduct, these crimes could have been caught years earlier, and thousands of lives could have been saved.

[L]ook to the parts of Africa where the Catholic Church dominates. Its insistence that the use of condoms is wrong is causing preventable deaths from HIV/AIDS to continue to flourish, year after year. From the relative safety of America and western Europe, they preach abstinence instead, implying that they'd rather see whole swaths of the impoverished die from AIDS than compromise on a rule that, as far as I can tell, Jesus wasn't concerned with.

In short, sex positivity is hardly a moral ill; rather, it is sexual repression that costs lives, even if it makes suburban columnists nostalgic for the good old days. The truth is, these good old days were a time before the HIV/AIDS crisis, when LGBT people were free to be beaten and exiled from their communities, when mothers living in poverty were forced to give birth, and when children were being raped by priests by the thousands but were too ashamed to say anything about it.

 As I have said before, the moral bankruptcy of the Catholic hierarchy - including Pope Francis - is complete. These bitter old men in dresses should be the last people anyone should consult or defer to in matters of sexuality or anything else. 

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

A Putin-Sponsored October Surprise?

The previous post looked at fears that Russian hackers might try to either steal the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump or at least try to seriously disrupt voting returns - Arizona is one state that they apparently have targeted.  The perhaps more serious concern is that bogus or re-written documents could be released - particularly with the help of pro-Putin Wikileaks - that would seek to damage Hillary Clinton and Democrats.  Russia has a track record of such activities in other countries, but never before in America.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the unsettling possibility that malicious efforts could strike American - and how the increasingly irresponsible media which seems to care only about sensationalism, could play right into Russia and Putin's hands. Here are column highlights:

The Russians have just given us an August glimpse of a potential October surprise.

We learned earlier this summer that cyber-hackers widely believed to be tied to the Kremlin have broken into the email of the Democratic National Committee and others. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported Monday night that Russian hackers have also been targeting state voter-registration systems. And, in an apparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, they’re leaking what they believe to be the most damaging documents at strategic points in the campaign.

Last week, we learned something else: The Russians aren’t just hackers — they’re also hacks. Turns out that before leaking their stolen information, they are in some cases doctoring the documents, making edits that add false information and then passing the documents off as the originals.

Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll reported last week that the hackers goofed: They posted both the original versions of at least three documents and their edited versions. These documents, stolen from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, were altered by the hackers to create the false impression that Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was funded by Soros. A pro-Russian hacking group, CyberBerkut, had inserted Navalny’s name, bogus dollar amounts and fabricated wording.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Are Vladimir Putin’s operatives planning to dump edited DNC documents on the eve of the presidential election?

Russian “dezinformatsiya” campaigns such as this go back to the Cold War; the Soviet portrayal of AIDS as a CIA plot was a classic case. But this type of cyberwar — email hacking and, now, the altering and release of the stolen documents — is a novel escalation. It’s tempting to wonder how differently the Cold War might have gone had there been cyber-hackers back then. 

But it’s clear that Russia’s disinformation wars are as active as ever. On Sunday, Neil MacFarquhar wrote in the New York Times about Russian attempts to undermine a Swedish military partnership with NATO. The campaign is spreading false information that there’s a secret nuclear weapons stockpile in Sweden and alleging that NATO soldiers could rape Swedish women with impunity. This Russian use of “weaponized information” helped cause confusion in Ukraine in 2014, when conspiracy theories spread by the Russians about the downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet helped Russians justify their invasion of Crimea.

So does this point to a Putin-sponsored October surprise?

Putin has meddled in domestic politics in France, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere, helping extreme political parties to destabilize those countries. He appears to be doing much the same now in the United States, where, in addition to the DNC and state voter system hacks, there have also been reports this summer about Russia hiring Internet trolls to pose on Twitter and elsewhere in social media as pro-Trump Americans.

The hyper-competitive American media environment is vulnerable to the sort of technique the Russian hackers used in the Soros case — stealing documents, altering them, then releasing them as the original. If Putin’s hackers were to release such a doctored document smearing Clinton in, say, late October, it’s likely that competition would lead outlets to report on the hacked documents before they had a chance to see whether and how they were altered.

We don’t know what, if anything, Putin’s hackers have planned for this fall. But the doctored Soros documents could be a clue.

Could The Election Itself Be Hacked?

Given that Russian hackers have successfully attacked the DNC computers and purportedly those of the Clinton campaign as well, and that Putin loving Wikileaks has threatened to release hacked documents harmful to Hillary Clinton prior to election day, it may not be too far fetched to have worries about efforts to hack election results themselves.  Indeed, the FBI has warned two states to take action to protect their voting systems after apparent foreign efforts to hack the same.  Then, of course, there is the growing desire on the part of the GOP to win election costs through voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandered districts and other means.  Hacking would in some ways be the next logical progression for the GOP and its shrinking base of angry, often uneducated, white voters.  A column in Talking Points Memo looks at the fears of a hacked election.  Here are excerpts:

A few weeks back, when I was writing about possible Russian efforts to influence the US election, a number of security experts pointed me to concerns about hacking or tampering with the actual US voting apparatus. Now the FBI has reached out to local election officials after hacks were detected in two states. Whether something has Russian fingerprints on it is obviously hugely inflammatory and polarization. I think the emphasis here is something that someone may be trying to do this - at least on first blush, precisely who it is is less important to taking precautions to prevent problems.

For years, I've generally poo-poo'd claims about how elections had been or could be hacked. Mainly this is simply an evidence based criticism. Back in the aughts "Diebold" became the Dems equivalent of GOP "vote fraud" claims, an amorphous and generally evidenceless explanation for why your party is losing elections you wanted to win.

People get confused sometimes and believe that arguments that something can happen is proof that something has happened. Logic is hard.

There is one huge and incredibly important difference: none of the black box voting folks ever proposed solutions targeted at making it harder for one class or race of people to vote, which is what the GOP's 'vote fraud' nonsense is entirely about. So I'm not equating the two. The proposed remedies for combatting electronic or cyber-attack based election tampering may not be as necessary as some claim. But they don't do any harm. We should make these things as secure as possible.

If a political party or people working on its behalf want to hack an election that is not only an inherently difficult thing to do. More importantly, it's hard to do without leaving evidence. It also involves a lot of little explored complexities: to know what's going to be a 'reasonable' shift in the totals, you need some real time idea of what the actual results are. It's a complicated proposition that would likely involve a number of people working in concert and thus difficult to keep secret.

But here's the thing. If foreign hackers of any source or domestic hackers for that matter want to disrupt an election, that's much simpler. Perhaps you've hacked into the servers in advance and then you simply erase the data late in the day? Or shift it to all Clinton or all Trump. If it's being done from somewhere in Senegal or Bangkok you're never going to track down and apprehend the culprits. And the changes to the numbers don't need to be credible to severely disrupt the election. Complete hypothetical: what if 10 critical precinct tallies in Florida and Ohio are simply erased or tampered with so that the numbers bear no confidence? What do you do then? We're not in a high trust climate in our politics where something like that could be easily resolved. Precisely because we are already in such a low trust political era, even a tiny number of demonstrated cases of cyber-tampering would cast a penumbra of doubt over the whole process, especially for the losing party.

The point is that disruption doesn't really require hiding your tracks. It's enough to disrupt, delete, alter. It can also be done by people who don't have any particular concern with the actual election outcome, have no need to make the results credible and have none of the legal or reputational vulnerabilities that might deter people within the political system itself from trying to tamper with election results.

The country has enough things to freak out about as a country. I'm not saying we should start wigging out about this. But it's definitely worth being concerned about and hopefully one that federal law enforcement authorities are focusing on and proactively working with local authorities to prevent. And it's something qualitatively easier to pull off for bad actors whose aim is disruption rather than winning.