HOPELESS AND HELPLESS RANT

      Let’s start with a timeline.

      September, 2015: The FBI first contacts the Democratic National Committee with the bad news. The DNC’s computers have already been penetrated and the threat is ongoing.

      July 10, 2016: Seth Rich is murdered on his way home from a DC bar at four in the morning. At the time, Rich is employed as a DNC staffer, his job to help voters find their polling places. No arrests have been made as of this writing, and no suspects developed. However, because Rich’s hands were bruised and he had cuts to his face, police believe Rich was killed by an armed robber when he refused to submit.

      August 8, 2016: Roger Stone, longtime Trump adviser, tweets that Rich was on the way to meet with the FBI (at four o’clock in the morning) when he was murdered. The motive? He was about to offer testimony against the Clintons. “Four More Bodies In The Clintons Wake,” Stone writes. “Coincidence. I think not.”

     August 9, 2016: WikiLeaks offers a $20,000 reward for info leading to an arrest.

     August 9, 2016: WND (worldnetdaily) publishes the story. “Three people (including Rich) with tangential connections to Bill and Hillary Clinton have died in unusual circumstances over the past few weeks, sparking a renewed interest in the so-called `body count’ of people who allegedly got in the way of the Clinton machine.”

      August 10: TheBlaze publishes a story claiming that Julian Assange is “suggesting” that Rich might have ties to WikiLeaks.

      May 15, 2017: Ten months after the murder, Rod Wheeler, a D.C. homicide cop turned private eye who regularly appears on Fox News, declares that a source within the FBI has told him that Seth Rich, not Russian hackers, supplied the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks. As a staffer, Rich was able to copy the emails to a compact disc, then easily smuggle the disc out of DNC headquarters. The FBI, still investigating according to Wheeler, has taken possession of Rich’s laptop and is now examining the contents.

     May 16, 2017: Malia Zimmerman publishes a story on the Fox News website claiming that an anonymous investigator inside the FBI has confirmed Wheeler’s story.

     May 19, 2017: Kim Dotcom, a New Zealand-based hustler facing extradition to the United States for computer-related crimes, proclaims that he can prove Seth Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks. Dotcom promises to release this proof in the near future.

      It should be noted that no reputable news outlet runs a story based on a single anonymous source. Information supplied by anonymous sources must be confirmed by an independent source before publication. Both Wheeler’s declaration and the Zimmerman story were single-sourced.

      The political right in our country, of course, generally avoids the verification issue, fake news being fake news. Thus, the usual suspects promote the various claims, including the one about the Clintons pulling off multiple assassinations: TheBlaze, worldnetdaily, Townhall, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, ZeroHedge and many others. More insidious are the contributions by Fox News and local Fox outlets because they give a blatant lie the aura of legitimacy. If the most popular news outlet in the country is running a story, there must be some truth to it. I mean, they couldn’t just make it up? Wouldn’t somebody sue them?

     Consider this from Melanie Alnwick on DC’s Fox 5: “This is really jaw dropping developments here. Now, Seth Rich worked as the voter-expansuion data director here at DNC headquarters. And there are a number of let’s call them intriguing things about his murder a month ago. Now you add this interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that had really thrown gasoline on all these internet theories.”

      Consider this from Steve Doocy, co-host on Fox and Friends: “Now WikiLeaks is offering a $20,000 reward and some on the internet are suggesting, wait a minute, was Rich the source of the leaks?”

      The worst comes from Sean Hannity. He repeats the various assertions, especially Dotcom’s. Hannity also interviews Assange, who refuses, naturally, to name his source, yet insists that the leaked emails might have come from a DNC staffer. This seems perfectly credible to Hannity although he’s previously accused Assange of “waging war against the United States”. Then, on May 17, one day after Wheeler’s claim, Hannity repeats Wheeler’s story without developing a source of his own. He follows up twice more with the most egregious charges. Did a close friend of the Clintons have Seth Rich killed?

      The story quickly falls apart when Wheeler backs off his claim, Fox News takes down Malia Zimmerman’s story, Zimmerman makes herself unavailable for comment and Dotcom withdraws his accusations. Still, Hannity refuses to quit. And when the Rich family, mother, father and brother, asks him to cease, his response is swift. “I am not backing off asking questions,” he tells his audience of approximately one million on May 19, “even though there’s an effort that nobody talk about Seth Rich.”

      As his ratings surge, Hannity becomes more defiant. Congress must investigate. Democrats are “panicking”. Even after Fox News retracts the Zimmerman story, admitting that it didn’t meet the network’s minimal standards, Hannity persists. “I am not Fox.com or FoxNews.com. I retracted nothing.” No, Hannity doesn’t shut up until Media Matters publishes a list of his advertisers. Only then does he decide that sparing the Rich family further pain outweighs the public’s right to know.

     One more thing, The New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post and many other mainstream outlets publish stories debunking the Seth Rich rumors. Their efforts, at least in my opinion, only reinforce the story. If the liberally-biased-media is paying attention, the must be fire somewhere beyond all the smoke.

      Try a small experiment. Do a Google search for “Clinton Body-Count”, then pass a few moments browsing… oh, but you probably don’t want any cookies planted on your computer by the ultra-right websites you uncover. Fortunately, I’m using a VPN, so I’m not worried about being tracked. I can report that there are dozens of sites, including Ann Coulter’s LifeZette, supporting the conviction, held by millions, that Bill and Hillary have been murdering people since 1977. As a typical example, here are three claims made by whatreallyhappened.com. The site lists more than one hundred “murders”.

      1977, Suzanne Coleman, Age 26: “Had affair with Clinton when he was Attorney General of Arkansas. Died of suicide with gunshot wound to the back of her head. Was seven months pregnant at the time of her death. Had told friends it was Bill Clinton’s child.”

      2016, Dr. Sandeep Sherleker, Age 54: Anesthesiologist who “participated in a surgery on June 30 to relieve a blood clot on Hillary Clinton’s brain”. Died: 9/30/2016, Suicide by overdose.

       2016, Former United Nations General Assembly President John Ashe: Scheduled to testify about Hilary’s links to Ng Lap Seng , who’d been accused of funneling illegal Chinese donations to Bill Clinton’s reelection fund. Ashe died from a crushed larynx.

      As I said, there are at least 100 names on whatreallyhappened.com’s list. Available to anybody who cares to look. Free for the asking. And just in case some of you out there have been suckered into the equivalency trap – the Dems are just as bad – I spend several hours trying to run down a progressive website riddled with crackpot theories that cross the border into delusional. I couldn’t find one.

      I titled this rant HOPELESS AND HELPLESS because there’s no way to reach conspiracy theorists who blind themselves to any truth. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Tens of millions of Republican voters believe the entire universe – not just the Earth – is 6,500 years old. Just as many millions believe Trump will return prosperity to West Virginia by reviving the coal industry. Denial is a slippery slope. Slide too far down and you’ll never find your way back. No, you’ll find yourself sharing a space with John Hinckley who believed that if he managed to kill Ronald Reagan, Jodie Foster would fall in love with him.

      You’ll find yourself in TrumpWorld.