Writing this post is in some ways a self-indulgent waste of my time. Let me say right off the bat:
ALL MEMES ARE BY VERY DEFINITION THOUGHTLESS.
Why? Because they’re the equivalent of a pie in the face. Show me a thoughtful meme and I’ll . . . well, I don’t have to say that I’ll do because no one will be able to find such a thing. I’m reminded of the old joke about college lectures:
College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.
True of many college lectures; totally true of all memes—they go straight from one Facebook page to another, with no intervening critical thought processes involved. Here’s the online definition of a meme:
A humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.
I’m still sorry that I deleted the meme that showed up on my FB page the day after the election showing this fratboy-looking guy yelling, “Say it! Say it! Trump Won!!!!” I should have kept it, with the added caption: “This is what we have to look forward to for the next four years.” (I can’t find it now. Anyone have it?)
Okay. What about this meme? I’m glad there are only six questions, so I won’t be taking up too much time and space to deal with it. First of all, let me be clear: my motivation is not to whitewash the Obama administration or Hillary Clinton. Instead, I would like to point out, for about the 500th time, that when we as conservatives try to engage with the culture and change hearts and minds, we have to start from a factual basis. Instead, we do dumb things such as accusing Hillary Clinton of ordering the murder of Vince Foster and running a pedophile ring from the basement of a pizza parlor. (What? You mean she DIDN’T??) As I always say, there’s plenty of real stuff to criticize. Why waste your time dealing in falsehoods? (Well, I guess we know the answer to that one. Always more work to dig up the facts!)
Let’s start with question #1: “Which President secreted cash to Iran in the middle of the night?”
This question refers to a payment made to Iran in January 2016 by the US government which was indeed in the amount of $400 million and was indeed paid in cash. Whether or not it was “in the middle of the night,” I don’t know. There’s no explanation given in this meme as to what this payment was for; other sources have accused the Obama administration of paying a ransom for four hostages that were being held in Iran at the time and, indeed, those four were released at the time of the payment.
So what’s the deal? According to the sources I’ve checked, and there are many, this was money that the US had owed to Iran since 1979, when the then-Shah ordered some fighter jets and made a down payment. The Iranian revolution intervened and the jets were never delivered, but the money was never returned. Iran had sued the US in a tribunal of the Hague’s World Court and the case had been dragging on for over 35 years. As the time for resolution was finally drawing near, the US feared that the settlement was going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion, much less than the $10 billion that Iran was requesting, but still a great big chunk o’ money. So the US government entered into private negotiations and came out with a total of $1.7 billion, with $400 million as the first payment. The Obama administration was adamant that the money was not a ransom for four hostages that Iran was holding at the time but that the US had to have confirmation of their release before the money was paid, so the release was a condition of payment but not a ransom. If you want to call that hair-splitting, so be it. In some sources there is mention of the release of several Iranian prisoners in the US at the same time, so there may have been an exchange of sorts. As Fortune magazine says in its article, “America’s motives were probably justifiable, though the optics are anything but good.”
As for the “pallets of cash,” well, the US doesn’t have banking relationships with Iran, so cash was the only way for the payment to be made. And it had to be made in currencies other than US dollars, so it was paid in a mix of other ones, including Swiss francs.
Also, may I point out that the wording “secreted to” typically refers to the output of glands?
On to #2: “Which administration made sure that Russia got 20% of our Uranium?”
Sigh. This is such an oldie-but-goodie that I can’t believe people are still posting about it, but I got this meme from a FB page dated this month—that is, July 2018. Some things never die. It’s wearying to contemplate going through this whole thing again (but no one put a gun to my head to do this, did they?), so I’ll (try to) be brief.
First of all, the actual accusation that’s always made is that Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was the one who “gave away 20% of our uranium to Russia.” In reality, Russia has never had an export license for uranium from the US, and there is no evidence that any uranium even went there. Russia did buy a controlling interest in an international uranium company, a purchase that had to be approved by a nine-member committee called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. One of those members is the Secretary of State, and the deal was approved during Hillary’s term in that office. It’s not at all clear that she even sat in on the decision-making process, and the further accusation that the Clinton Foundation got a big donation from people involved in the deal is sort of true, but the dates don’t match up very well. This whole story was publicized in the rather sleazy book Clinton Cash by a Breitbart contributor, Peter Schweizer.
I’m going to advise that you go to Snopes.com if you’d like to read a very thorough discussion of this accusation.There are so many ins and outs that there’s no point in my re-writing the whole thing. While some questions still remain about the Russian actors involved, the overwhelming evidence indicates that none of this was a direct quid pro quo between Hillary Clinton and the Russians.
#3: “Which 2016 candidate’s spouse received $500,000 for a very short speech in Russia?”
This refers of course to Bill Clinton, who did indeed receive this very high fee for a speech (I don’t know how long it was) to a Russian investment group, Renaissance Capital, which has had a number of prominent figures as speakers, including Tony Blair. Since this fee has been tied to the same uranium deal as the one mentioned above, let me quote from the Snopes article:
The timing of . . . Bill Clinton’s Renaissance Capital speaking fee might be questionable if there was reason to believe that Hillary Clinton was instrumental in the approval of the deal with Russia, but all the evidence points to the contrary — that Clinton did not play a pivotal role, and, in fact, may not have played any role at all. Moreover, neither Clinton nor her department possessed sole power of approval over said transaction.
#4: “Which US President told a Russian official, ‘This is my last election. After my election I’ll have more flexibility’?”
Barack Obama, no question. He was caught on an open mic saying this to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at a conference before the 2012 election. Medvedev responded with “I will transmit this information to Valdimir,” referring to Putin, who was ready to take the Russian presidency back over. Who knows what all this meant? But a fair question to be asked is, If Obama was so all-fired “flexible” with Russia, why did the Russians want Trump and not Hillary Clinton, Obama’s soulmate, to win the 2016 election? (Remember, folks—Putin said at the Helsinki Sellout that he had, indeed, wanted Trump to win.)
#5: “Which administration directed the 17 intelligence agencies to go after the duly-elected opposing party’s candidate?”
This is one of those rather vaporous accusations that’s pretty much impossible to prove or disprove. With all of the weird stuff going on with the Trump campaign and Russia, there were certainly questions raised by a number of intelligence officers under the Obama administration. In the end, these investigations were not made public out of a fear that doing so would look as though Obama was putting his thumb on the scales of the election. Of course, everyone expected Hillary to win, so the hope was that it wouldn’t matter. I think this question is derived at least partly from Trump’s “wiretapping” tweet. (News today broke that Carter Page was indeed wiretapped by the FBI, by the way.)
#6: “Which President presided over Intelligence agencies that helped their candidate’s campaign with laundering $400,000 [later corrected to $400 million] through Russia?”
It’s hard to know exactly what this question is even talking about, but it seems to me that the accusation comes from Vladimir Putin himself, that fount of truth and integrity. It’s part of a smear campaign against Bill Browder, the man who has campaigned for and gotten passage of the Magnitsky Act in the US and now Canada, an action that has fried Vladimir Putin’s shorts. Browder is one of the people Putin said he’d like to interrogate in his laughable offer to Trump at the Helsinki Sellout.
Well, this post is now over 1,500 words, so I’m going to quit. Let me encourage all of you who read this and have a tendency to re-post memes: spend five minutes googling the relevant terms and check things out. Please. No one is being served by the spread of misinformation—except for our enemies.
But I can’t resist leaving you with one thought, a repetition of what I said above: Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. He said so publicly just this past Monday in Helsinki. All of our intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian agents interfered in the election in order to help Trump. So even if every item above were completely and totally true, that fact would still not explain why Putin supported Trump. He should have wanted Hillary to win.
But he didn’t. Why not?