UPDATED BELOW
Let there be no doubts. I have no love for Mr. Trump who I believe to be a uniquely unqualified mediocre businessman blowhard psychotic old man with small penis syndrome. But let’s be honest: This whole Russian thing is a big joke on Americans. The Russians did nothing and are nobodies.
The real scandal should be that the tiny brained Democrats need a tiny brained reason for Americans to hate Trump that does not bring to light the fact that Democrats have nothing to offer the American people and are in bed with the same Wall Street and corporate interests as Trump & Co. Then you have the dumb-ass Republicans who wrongly think the Russians did them a favor and somehow want to both show Russia their gratitude and hide that fact at the same time. Furthermore, Mr. Trump’s ego is so vulnerable to manipulation, that the mere hint that a foreign power favors him over Obama turns him into putty in their hands.
But the fact of the matter is that the hacked emails revealed absolutely no wrong-doing on the part of Hillary. Of course, Americans are too tribalistic and persuadable to have realized that it was all about nothing. All they knew was that there was supposed to be something bad about her private email server (but they don’t know what) and that there were hacked emails. Add those two together with 30 years of brainwashing that Hillary is evil, and ergo email scandal proves she’s Crooked Hillary.
Even though the investigations were never about corruption and those emails revealed no wrong-doing, I believe they were ultimately in the public interest, just as the leaked “grab’em by the pu$$y” recording of Trump was. Does it matter who disclosed them? Americans, Russians or others? The information was true and newsworthy. Had the Russians hacked voting booths, this would be a very different story.
Objectively the Trump recording should have been more damaging to Trump than the Hillary emails were to her, but it wasn’t. Evangelicals still voted for a disgusting con artist pig with no moral or business scruples while far too many Democrats stayed home on Election Day. Personally, I think the FBI decision to pretend to reopen the investigation was decisive but not the email hack.
Now we have Mr. Sessions (and other Trump appointees) lying about having spoken to Russian officials. In the case of Sessions, it makes absolutely no sense that he lied under oath. He had plenty of valid justifications as a Senator for having met with the Russian ambassador. So why does the person who is now Attorney General, the highest ranking US official in charge of enforcing the laws of the nation, commit perjury? Surely if he really is one of the top lawyers in the country, he understood the question and knew that his answer was false. Either he’s an idiot and unqualified or he is a felon. But in America, if you are a person of color or an average white dude, our judicial system is unforgiving. When you are an immigrant, you get deported. When you are part of the ruling elite, you keep your job and pay absolutely no personal or professional price for your actions. So much for Personal Responsibility in America. It reminds me of this silly kids song – Johnny Johnny Yes Papa – my 20 month old loves. I have my own version:
Father: Jeffrey Jeffrey
Little Jeffrey: Yes, Papa
F: Speaking to Russians?
LJ: No Papa
F: Telling Lies?
LJ: No Papa
F: Open your mouth
LJ: Ha ha ha
Mr. Sessions lies like a little boy because he can get away with it. Ha ha ha.
But overall, the tragedy of going retro with the Russian paranoia is that both Democrats and Republicans have colluded here, arguably unintentionally for their own selfish reasons, to rehabilitate Russia as a global powerbroker and force to be reckoned with. Everyone should be ashamed of themselves. It’s just really dumb geopolitics.
UPDATE 5 March 2017:
Now that it is clear that various Trump advisors and appointees, including his son-in-law, had meetings with Russian officials during the campaign and prior to entering office, Trump has decided to go with “but Obama was illegally wiretapping me”. Here are some quick observations:
- Again, who cares about the Russian meetings? Does anyone doubt that Bibi – who openly hated Obama – had conversations with Trump & Co.? I don’t think there is anything wrong per se with Trump speaking to Russians. I think he did engage with them because he has a pathetic need for attention, as said above. What doesn’t look good, though, is for the Trump team to try to cover up the meetings. While I am not concerned about those meetings (at least based on the evidence we have to date about Russia’s involvement in the election), I am concerned by (i) Trump’s need to cover it up with lie, (ii) having a president who is so easy for foreign governments to bait, and (iii) Trump’s decision to scapegoat a former president with wild, unfounded allegations.
- Even if the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump, that would not absolve Trump if he or his team had acted illegally or excuse their instinct to lie about the meetings.
- Explain this to me: Trump first asked that someone hack Hillary’s emails, congratulated the Russians for the hack, but then whines incessantly about leaks against his administration. Either leaks are bad or they are not.
- The Republican mantra about domestic surveillance post Snowden has been “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about”. I guess that doesn’t apply to Trump.
- Trump loves to keep a scandal alive. Instead of moving on, he goes off on twitter and tries to blame someone else, this time Obama. One would think this is just bad political strategy. If Trump were a master strategist, he might be doing this on purpose to distract Americans from, say, quietly pushing Bannon’s dark policies. But, Trump is both a nihilist who couldn’t care about policy and too dumb to think that far ahead.
- After the election, Democrats criticized Obama for not having intervened on the Trump/Russian relationship. As the argument went, if Trump was in bed with the Russians, the intelligence communities would have informed Obama and he could have done something about it. But Obama remained silent. My guess is that Obama was smart enough to know that you don’t want to give Putin the free publicity. Had O Obama really wanted to get Trump, he would have had ample opportunity.
- One of my biggest criticisms of Obama was his Look Forward Not Backward policy relating to the egregious law breaking of the Bush Administration because it meant that future presidents could commit the same crimes with the same impunity. In part that is how people like Trump could campaign on reinstating torture or reviving Guantanamo. But my purely political criticism was that no Republican president would ever respect Obama’s gesture of not investigating him. Clearly Trump never got that memo. As with everything else, he just doesn’t give a fuck.
- No president in American history has ever played the victim as much as Trump. He won the election but still can’t come to terms with it. Everyone is unfair to him. Poor boy.
- Welcome to Great Again!
Note: this post is derived in parts from comments I made on this subject on Facebook this week.
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