Russiagate Part 2: When it's Easier Than Helping Voters

I find it very hard to get angry at Russia, a country rationally pursuing its own interests in the world, for testing to see just how corrupt its main rival's political elites are and discovering that they are so corrupt that America barely qualifies as a sovereign power anymore

— David Klion🌹🔥 (@DavidKlion) July 20, 2018

In Part 1 I made the point that the Mueller indictments were being conflated to essentially cloud the possibility that Hillary Clinton lost the election as legitimately as is possible in our broken electoral system. I also make the point that whether or not the hacking was representative of typical cyber-intrusions between nations the information released showed the actual Machiavellian efforts of the party to ensure that Hillary was the nominee. Although Nancy Pelosi and others have made a point of saying the Democrats are more focused on winning the mid-terms than on Russia that seems counter to what the majority of party figures are talking about. The DNC has even pointlessly sued the Trump campaign, Wikileaks, and Putin, essentially everyone they consider responsible for "disrupting" the election. All of it seems to be aimed towards the implication that the whole thing could lead to impeachment, ignoring that he has already committed impeachable offenses, and even if we somehow shamed the Republicans into impeaching we'd be left with a theocrat who's somewhat more competent as an executive. When it comes down to it, everything from the Democrats around Russia seems performative; it has an air of the magicians sleight of hand about it. Looking at their actions closely, it's clear they don't take it as seriously as their performance would seem to demand. They don't seem to be focused on securing our elections and protecting us, for closing the window, they seem focused on shaming the thieves.

Nah, I'm kinda saying that if I leave my windows and doors open while worrying about other people's houses and someone walks in and takes my shit, I should think about what I'm doing in the world.

— Little Jon Quijote (@brotherbeat) July 29, 2018

The one commonality between the David Klion quote beginning this post and the Katie Halper quote opening Part 1 is the cognizance that the current response is a reaction that requires to some degree being ignorant or apathetic to our interference in other nations' elections. One response to me casually pointing out our history of interference was essentially a paean to our exceptionalism, 'yes, but this time it's about us.' However, putting aside our history of assassinations to secure governments we prefer, the death and destruction left in the wake of our machinations in Russia were exponential to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. This is not to say that the interference is justified, but it should certainly be expected. After all of the breathless screaming about Russia, the repeated accusations of Russian sympathizer that anyone questioning our rush to call the "attacks" infamous has received, looking at the Manafort case makes it clear that it's all bullshit. Any money invested by anyone in Russia towards any intent in our elections is a pittance next to the money actively gathered from other foreign governments. If Democrats are serious about this unwelcome flow of money influencing our laws obviously you can imagine the strength of their outcry if a nation to whom we'd given billions used that money to lobby our government for both more money and to create a law that contravenes our First Amendment to jail US citizens for protesting that country. Me neither.


I shared the recent Gallup polling on most important problems on the wrong thread in a conversation on Russiagate. I removed it because it seemed somewhat tangential to the topic at hand. In retrospect, it was central and essential. The friend was talking about the hack more or less without context, in the binary of did it happen or not. He felt that polling was irrelevant. I didn't argue the point at the time but I would now. While public opinion should not determine your perspective for you, it does speak directly to the concerns that are most relevant to people and offers a possible framework for connecting them to what you consider important. In a sense, if Democrats were serious about Russiagate and the fear that Trump is a double agent their actions would be focused on stopping him and their message would be focused on drawing a line between Russia and the problems confronting citizens. The fact that the Russians have nothing to do with our most pressing issues makes that difficult. Instead Democrats seem to be using Russia to distract from their unwillingness to move beyond the strategies that culminated in the ascendance of a senile white supremacist to the white house while empowering him to be the existential threat they warned about.

It's almost as if they'd prefer another 4 years of Trump to abandoning their failing neoliberalism.