— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) July 15, 2021But the real issue here is not who released this information and why (still a valid question for intelligence assessment, but in this context, maybe not so much):
The real issue is: what does this story say about the American system, and especially the American people?Narrator: In fact, people are pretty broadly raising cautions about it, just like they raised cautions about the Hunter Biden laptop that Mr. G chased like a six-year old chasing the ice cream truck. pic.twitter.com/y05Cg9JQZl
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 15, 2021
Because the underlying premise of this story is still that Putin was a brilliant puppet master (answering, in part, the cui bono question, eh?) and the American people were dupes and pawns. Now, I'd hardly say the American masses are, en masse, clear-eyed and clear-thinking and paragons of wisdom. Democracy works here pretty much on the "blind hog finds an acorn" principle, and only Churchill's supposed observation that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms of government. But I don't think the election of 2016 was a shining example of a mass turn toward Donald Trump thanks to the manipulations of Russian hackers on Facebook. The clearer explanation is far more muddied, and has to do as much with the baggage Hillary Clinton was burdened with (or made herself) which lead to low turnout and the fluke of the electoral college going for the guy with the fewest popular votes. Putin has taken some pretty hard hits to his national reputation: covid is running wild in Russia, it has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world, once again the world press is recognizing Russia is really just an oil company with a military (and all of that pretty shaky), reports of U.S. sanctions hurting Russia are not making Putin look stronger....
...so he drops this bombshell to create the narrative he is holding all the strings of American democracy and playing it like a Stradivarius. Among other obvious questions: if Putin was that good, and that invested in Trump, why did Trump lose so massively last November? Who stole Putin's mojo? Yeah, there's more than a little reason, just on the face of it, to be skeptical.
Still, one more swipe at the Former Guy from the Russian bear is not a swipe I'm going to try too hard to deflect. I still wanna see him deny it.
All I have to see is Glenn Greenwald and I'm not going to touch it.
ReplyDeleteI honestly think the only thing keeping Greenwald alive is Marcy Wheeler re-tweeting his tweets and dissing them. I don't think even Rupar cares anymore what Greenwald has to say.
Delete