Barack Brings a Knife to A Gunfight

The New York Times asks and answers the question,

"Why did it take the Obama administration more than 16 months to develop a response?
The short answer, suggested by the report the agencies released on Friday, is that the United States government is still responding at an analog pace to a low-grade, though escalating, digital conflict."

In other words, Barack brought a knife to a gun fight.

Like Donald Trump says, it gets tiresome being right all the time.  Five minutes into the first Barack speech I ever heard I knew that, if we were going to elect him, we would be electing a 19th century man for a 21st century job, and that it could not possibly end well.  Of course, I had in mind social and economic policies.  This was a guy, I thought, whose mental landscape is uncluttered by the monumental events of the 20th century.  He is still a socialist, despite everything.

What I did not appreciate at the time, though I should have, is that his 19th century mentality would ramify outside of social and economic policies and into Cyberia.  The first major instance of this was the sad case of the Obamacare website, which you must remember had a very difficult birth.

Yes of course, complicated websites are difficult to produce, so you have to meditate on this for a bit to fully appreciate the enormity of that experience.  We are not talking about some cash-strapped start-up, we are talking about the United States of America.  The USA is home to a deep bench of the best digital talent on the planet, and most of that talent is highly sympathetic to Barack.  Furthermore, major private companies have long experience in health insurance and in developing and maintaining online services.

With an essentially unlimited pot of money and a deep well of sympathy, Barack could have easily organized an enthusiastic working group of the best talent on earth to develop the Obamacare website.  It would have been a model of how to get things done.

Barack Obama did none of that, and you have to wonder why.  The only answer that comes to me is that Barack simply did not know better.  He is a 19th century man in a 21st century job.  Too bad for us.

If you suppose that Barack, and the people who surround him, simply do not know better, that they are 19th century people living, rather uncomfortably, in the 21st century, then the recent hackings, of the DNC computer and of Hillary's personal server, must come as no surprise.  These are the people who, when confronted with a phishing link, "Send Me Your Password," click on it.

Why did the DNC's technical support not respond to multiple warnings by the FBI?  Only because they did not know better.  What other answer could there possibly be???

And none of this is new.  The U.S., both government agencies and private companies, have been under intense cybernetic assault for years.  This is not about a slow response over 16 months, as the NYT suggests.

In other words, we have the answer to a question that the NY Times failed to ask.  This abject failure of Barack Obama to protect the most fundamental interest of the United States, the integrity of the electoral system:  was it malice or incompetence?  People like me tend to suspect the worst, i.e., I suspected malice.  It is now obvious that I was wrong.  That the DNC, itself, actually had no digital defenses clearly reveals that these people are incompetent.

I had violated "Hanlon's Razor":  Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.