by Robert M. Traxler

A new mantra we keep hearing from the media and the Democrats is that all 16 American Intelligence agencies agree the that Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) email. Hard for a reasonable and prudent person to believe they all agree on anything, but let’s look at that number, 16.

Half of them fall under the Department of Defense; each uniformed services intelligence agency is counted as an independent agency, even though they all report to the Department of Defense and cannot collect the type of domestic intelligence involved in this case. So now the 16 is down to 8; two of the agencies are double counted as they both fall under the Department of Justice or Homeland Security. So the number falls even further.

The number 16 sounds good but it is spin, a polite word for lying. We need to ask, where are the defenders of truth, justice and the American way: the media? Where are the people charged by the Bill of Rights to stand up to the government? To hold the powerful to account?

The “Raw Data” file in the intelligence dossier on President Donald Trump, a file that contains rumor, innuendo and unproven data, was “leaked” to a welcoming press, and some media, of course, reported it as a stone-cold fact. CNN, proven by the WikiLeaks DNC e-mails to be an arm of the liberal party, being the most watched.

If it appears leaks are more prevalent today than in the past, we need to look at a possible reason. President Barack Obama has grown government, but he has also grown unaccountable partisan government by some 30%. Senior Executive Service jobs, appointed politically connected people, not subject to Civil Service controls, went from 6,000 to 9,000 in the last eight years. As these people are partisan appointees who will lose their jobs in the Trump administration, why not violate ethical standards and the law by leaking fictitious rumors as facts?

Many of the “serve at the pleasure of the president” jobs grew in the intelligence agencies, rendering them currently an arm of the DNC. The problem with the overreach and expansion of government under President Obama is that as it worked in his favor in the last eight years, it will now work in President Trump’s favor for the next eight.

Senator Harry Reid, while Senate Majority Leader, changed the Senates rules to make it easy to confirm appointees for President Obama; now that change works in President Trump’s favor. The Democrats will never learn that government can be a two-edged sword that cuts left and right.

Our Democrat friends are like the traveler who is dying of thirst in the desert. He finds a pump with a bottle of water to prime the pump, and pump out all the water he will ever need, but instead drinks the water in the bottle and later dies of thirst; not exactly long term planning.

Mark my words the press will discover the expansion of unaccountable government by 30% now that we have a Republican government, and raise almighty hell about it after eight years of being deaf and mute on the subject.

The establishment news folks see themselves as the American Pravda (Truth). We think of Pravda as a stand-alone Russian Socialist news source, but indeed there were 72 major publications in the former Socialist Republic and nearly all self-censored to extol the virtues of Socialist government. The first casualty of a radically bias media will be our democracy. President Trump will be the excuse for the press to charge even further left.