DEM DUMP

Recommended reading when you have trouble
falling asleep.

There was a big hubbub a few days ago when up-and-coming hacker Guccifer 2.0 broke into the DNC's computer system and stole, among other things, the party's "oppo research" regarding Donald Trump.

You can tell that the people who  wrote this thesis took it really seriously, going so far as to mark each page CONFIDENTIAL. A quick glance at the table of contents shows you just how top secret it really is. Trump Is Loyal Only To Himself. Trump Is A Liar. Trump Proposed Banning All Muslims.

This is confidential? Anyone with cable can watch the 7:00-7:20 block of Morning Joe and get the same information. I've been doing oppo research without even knowing it -- and in my underwear!

But then there's Trump's history -- Family and Upbringing. Childhood. Education. Draft Deferments -- surely, it takes a village of gumshoes to raise that kind of information, right? Nah, just someone who's ever heard of Wikipedia. You wonder where those after-school jobs are for teenagers? At the DNC, only they're paying Harvard grads to do the same thing at twice the price. 

"Who, me?"

The meat of the research provides no more insight than you've been getting from the first time you've ever heard Trump bellowing about himself: One thing is clear about Donald Trump, there is only person he has ever looked out for and that's himself. [...] Trump has switched his policy positions and political party affiliations multiple times over the course of the last few decades [...] Trump falsely claimed that President Obama was not born in the United States [...] 

You don't say? Do tell! Next thing you know, they'll spill the beans on his hair. However, one passage -- Trump has openly discussed his view that fidelity is the right thing to do unless a marriage is going poorly, and described his relationship with women as a game -- shouldn't be the centerpiece of a party featuring any guy named Kennedy or Clinton.

Notice how only two guys receive a "Mr." before their names. What's
a donor got to do to get some respect around here?

One wonders what the DNC's high-roller donors think of their dough going to a bunch of wannabe cloak-and-dagger researchers (and I use the word "researcher" advisedly). Maybe Steven Spielberg and Jeffery Katzenberg (total donations: $4,100,000) can make a movie about the DNC hack. 

Such a complex movie would need narration. As you read this CONFIDENTIAL passage, listen to it in your head as spoken by million-dollar donor Morgan Freeman:

Despite Trump's continual boasting about his business success, he has repeatedly run into serious financial crises in his career and his record raises serious questions about whether he is qualified to manage the fiscal challenges facing this country.

Damn, Freeman makes anything worth listening to.

"Why didn't somebody tell me that I wasn't
the only one who used computers?"

A big disappointment from the DNC hack, though, is Hillary Clinton's "secret" documents from her Secretary of State days regarding foreign policy, which appear to be nothing but a bunch of talking points, e.g.: On his first day as President, Barack Obama would give the military a new mission: ending the Iraq war. Uh, wasn't he yapping about that during his 2008 campaign?

However, in the next bullet point, Hillary seems to be confusing her role with that of Obama's: As Commander-In-Chief, I will have no greater priority than taking out these terrorists who threaten America, and finishing the job against the Taliban. Always thinking ahead, eh, Hillary? (Gee, remember those innocent, pre-ISIS days when all we had to worry about was the Taliban? Kind of makes me feel all wistful!)

Guccifer 2.0 gave Wikileaks 99% of the documents, so maybe the good stuff will turn up over there. Otherwise, this is the biggest disappointment since season two of True Detective. Maybe Mr. 2.0 can bust into the RNC files and discover classified information such as: Hillary Clinton has been linked to several scandals over the decades, and was a self-described "Goldwater Girl" in 1964 before switching parties. Should make for some fascinating CONFIDENTIAL reading.

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