This nightmare isn’t going to end well.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I read the WaPo article and a few other blogs in regards to the Russian hand in the election. What I expect is a mild pushback from Team Trump that says allegations are just unfounded sour grapes, move on, let’s make America Great Again…end of story.
To be honest, if there was a solid piece of evidence, a video of Trump scalping babies and shooting dogs and stealing money from an orphanage it still wouldn’t matter. He is bulletproof. He has wrestled support from the tightest of tight-assed Conservatives and will continue to have support from voters as he scraps Medicare, Social Security, and health care. They want to burn it down. And he’s the one to make it happen.
This is just phase I. Putin would never be satisfied with just getting Trump elected. The real game will start Jan 21 when Putin begins his WikiLeaks of the RNC, Trump’s campaign and Trump’s businesses. He’ll go public and he’ll go private with his information and he’ll pull every string he wants to on his puppet.
Putin is going to play Trump like a fine violin. There will be tears in our eyes by the finale.
Yes. When will the Russians hack the donald’s twitter or better yet just buy twitter and take full control…before or after the inauguration?
By “not ending well”, I would agree if you are referring to it not ending well for McCain and Graham. Or any other Republican who dares to even dabble with this question. They will be crushed like cockroaches, under the heavy heel of Trump and his acolytes.
Going forward, it is not going to matter. Trump will likely have enough support from Republicans to quash any potential investigation of anything. The media, even if somehow it wants to start doing their job, has been effectively neutered as far as their ability to affect or influence the Washington power structure. Once Trump takes the oath of office things are going to quickly be consolidated into a maximized authoritarian structure, which is going to be difficult to crack. And we will truly be living in an Orwellian world in this country, where reality is whatever emits from the President’s Twitter account. Once the power of the surveillance state is in the hands of Donald Trump, it might well be considered the crossing of the Rubicon for out little American experiment. This really is going to be the nightmare scenario for many of us who voiced serious opposition to the extension of Bush’s assault on civil liberties which, in many ways, was embraced and continued by the Obama administration. Assuming that we would always have an administration in power who would handle these powers with a measured hand turns out to have been a fools bet. Who could have imagined, right?
Maybe I’m letting my cynicism get out of hand here. But I think, for at least the foreseeable future, we are majorly and truly fucked as a country. The majority of Americans did not vote for Donald Trump. But if a significant percentage of those people stand on the sidelines and do nothing to push back against the assault that is coming, then we are all going to be swept out to sea when the Trump tsunami hits our shores. The Republicans are a hair’s breadth away from holding enough state legislatures to be able to pass Constitutional amendments. Imagine that scenario coming to pass during a Donald Trump administration.
I don’t think it is arguable to say that we are teetering on the edge of something none of us wants to see. Some hard choices are going to need to be made by those who, in their hearts, do not embrace the principles of the Trump followers. Courage is going to be tested. It is going to be a very ugly time.
I work in DC mainly with the foreign affairs apparatus (State, USAID). They are pretty much all deeply traumatized by the election of Trump. I can assure all of you there will be a lot of resistance to the Trumpistas by the bureaucracy. More to the point, if Trump’s foreign policy is what we expect it to be, whoever is SoS will be villified by every other foreign minister except Russia’s. Expect a real mess unless Priebus installs grownups as Asst. SoS. Even then….
I upgraded your comment here, but I don’t agree that the outcome is a fait accompli. We can fight and win.
I agree with you that we can fight and we can win. We have no choice, do we, if we really care about the future of the country? What I’m not sure of is that it has dawned on most people yet just how bloody this fight is going to be.
The current comments threads here at the Frog Pond provide evidence in support for your concern here that it has not yet dawned on enough people deeply enough.
Lauren Duca is fully woke:
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/donald-trump-is-gaslighting-america?mbid=social_twitter
“…Trump won the Presidency by gas light. His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception. Civil rights are now on trial, though before we can fight to reassert the march toward equality, we must regain control of the truth. If that seems melodramatic, I would encourage you to dump a bucket of ice over your head while listening to “Duel of the Fates.” Donald Trump is our President now; it’s time to wake up….”.
jelani cobb Retweeted
matt blaze @mattblaze Dec 10
matt blaze Retweeted Teen Vogue
If you told me last year that @TeenVogue would be at the cutting edge of political journalism in 2016, I would have politely laughed.
overly pessimistic.
I can’t.
What we have in Trump is an easily manipulated dupe. That was evident just listening to Trump speak about Putin. (“He says nice things about me…”) Putin, schooled in the black arts of psychological manipulation, has already played Trump like a fiddle. And there had been speculation that, in addition, Trump may have been compromised by the Russians. Throw in the appointment of people like Flynn to intelligence posts, and foreign adversaries are about to have a field day over the next several years. At least.
Why wouldn’t Putin want Trump as President?
Recall a little over a year ago when the pro Russian PM of Ukraine and his political allies were ousted by Ukrainians, supported by the US. Russia pushed back, arming pro Russian rebels and sending in Russian special forces to help them. The GOP made a big show of blaming Obama for not being more bellicose per Putin, and not doing more to help Ukraine by directly arming them and providing more material and tactical support. The original GOP 2016 platform called for this. Trump had it removed:
“‘The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington,’ reported Josh Rogin in the Washington Post.”
Putin is already realizing dividends.
When the CIA made the presentation to the senate, McConnell threatened to attack the White House if it took this to the logical conclusion, by attacking them of being partisan. This is a horrible case of projection, because what this really says is the GOP is not beyond exposing the US to manipulation and hostile actions by foreign actors even, if it means political gain for them.
The democrats need to be bold, and call this for what it is. Its very dangerous when you have a president not only under the sway of a foreign leader, but to the extent that he is publicly casting doubt on the institution whose role it is to counteract this, our own intelligence services. Very dangerous stuff. Maybe if the democrats saying this publicly is “shocking” enough to move an entertainment obsessed news media to report on it as something “entertaining,” but at least gets it out there. People need to understand what’s happening here.
Until I see some evidence of Russian involvement in transmitting the data to Wikileaks, I’m going to assume (without evidence) that the Trump campaign itself was capable of stealing the files and anonymously or pseudonymously transmitting them to Wikileaks. We know after many incidents that US political information systems and government servers have crappy security protection and that this is a major failing of the NSA, which has been more interested in total information awareness of everyone 99%-er on the planet.
Obama seems to be calling for the intelligence community to get its act together enough to provide evidence to the public one way or the other. The fight is between Brennan and Comey–pretty obvious at the moment.
To the extent that Clintonistas get involved in the controversy (with or without reason), they delegitimize the charges. Hopefully, there is unanimity in understanding that political fact.
Unless there is something major in nine days, on January 20 at 1 PM, Donald J. Trump will shut down all inquiries into Russian actions during the 2016 election. And Mitch McConnell will ensure that they stay dead.
Should the intelligence community persists, one might see the intelligence community held out to dry in a way it hasn’t been public since the 1970s. Or there will be a major Trump-driven shake-up of personnel.
The lobbyists in DC have so compromised US national interests in so many competing directions that this issue is unlikely to gain the long-term traction that it needs.
“Until I see some evidence . . .” Absolutely. The Fix references another story in the same paper, which apparently “cites officials” who “say” they have “identified individuals” connected to the Russian govt., and so on, without a shred of real evidence anywhere. To have all these vague references summed up as “the consensus view” is perfect. It sounds so much like Muhammad Atta meeting Al Qaeda reps in Prague or the centrifuge-bound aluminum tubes that it’s hard to believe people running with this story just because the shoe’s on the other foot.
of the actually relevant experts had already become that the Atta meeting in Prague almost certainly never happened, and that the “aluminum centrifuge tubes” were in fact rocket bodies, just as Saddam had declared them to be (and this had been publicly reported in the media, along with “Curveball”‘s discrediting in the “consensus view”) before the War Crime of invading Iraq was launched (on March 19[here]-20[Iraq], 2003; *e.g.), yet it was launched anyway.
The consensus view was quashed to enable proceeding with the War Crime. Which is what makes it a War Crime (though still, also criminally, an unindicted, unprosecuted one).
This critical sequence in time must never be allowed to be flushed down the Memory Hole, despite the best efforts of evildoers or their enablers to do exactly that.
*
See also (note: Updated October 9, 2002)
And.
Not sure why Obama continues to fiddle if there’s substance to these stories (except that he’s always wasted time fiddling when he should have been making timely, and effective, decisions). His last game of eleventy-dimensional chess no doubt, always so entertaining to watch, but the clock’s going to run out long before the end of this match.
There’s just no actual evidence that the Russians (whether Putin is a mastermind, or just another puppet on someone else’s strings) won the election for Trump; it’s fairly clear that Clinton lost fair and square all on her own by being a dreadfully bad candidate (as advertised far-and-wide in advance by me in addition to millions of others; not Booman of course, so yes, stick a fork in him he’s dead). I was so wrong about all of her great qualities, as so many here, patiently, repeatedly, and ineluctably pointed out, and how she would win because I was incoherent, impetuous, not to mention white and male. Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. She should never have been in the race (and on 9/11 when she fainted in the streets of New York she surely knew it herself).