Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Today's NY Times headline speaks volumes: Mystery of the Midterm Elections: Where Are the Russians?



The National Security Agency, which failed to respond when Russian hackers were first seen inside the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems in the summer of 2015, has now taken to sending messages directly to Russian hackers, reminding them that they are being watched.

...“The Russians are too smart to run the same play a second time,” said Dmitri Alperovich, one of the founders of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, who was central to identifying the Russian military inside the D.N.C., touching off chaos in the Democratic Party. “If they were going to do anything in today’s environment, they certainly wouldn’t want to act until the very last moment.”

Ah, yes. Those sneaky Ruskies are just waiting to attack at the last second.

Maybe they are waiting to reach out from under our beds.

It was only weeks ago that Russia was about to pounce on us.



. USA Today (10/9/18) warned, “As Russia and perhaps other foreign governments seek to undermine democratic elections, Congress and states need to get serious about defenses.” The PBS NewsHour (10/11/18) quoted one official who noted, “Given our experiences of 2016 and what we saw the Russians attempt to do across the nation’s election equipment, the election infrastructure, we certainly have a degree of concern of what their capability is.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post (9/26/18) writes, “While Russia is clearly trying to influence the 2018 elections, this time the United States is prepared and taking action to counter it.”

They are going to attack any minute now, for realzies.

Or maybe we've seen this story before.

Let me take you back 15 years ago.



British officials are circulating a story that Saddam Hussein may have been hoodwinked into believing that Iraq really did possess weapons of mass destruction. The theory, which is doing the rounds in the upper reaches of Whitehall, is the result of an attempt to find what one official source called a "logical reason" why no chemical and biological weapons had been found in Iraq.

Yes, it was Saddam that was fooled!

That makes perfect sense.

And who do you think did all that fooling? Why Russia, of course.



John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, “almost certainly” removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad. “The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units,” Mr. Shaw said. “Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units.” Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.

"Reliable information". That sounds believable to me.

It couldn't possibly be that Russia has been used by our intelligence agencies as a boogyman.

Either way, the Pentagon is ready to attack.



The US has prepared to launch a cyberattack on Russia if the country directly interferes with the midterm elections next week, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity.

For some odd reason, the Dems aren't mentioning Russiagate in their political ads. It seems odd that this dog isn't barking.