Category: Empire

Troll farming

“Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Laura Ingraham asked former CIA Director James Woolsey this weekend.

With a grin, Woolsey replied, “Oh, probably.”

“We don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”

“Well,” Woolsey said with a smile, “only for a very good cause.”

(Pat Buchanan, who, for the record, I’m aware has gotten “pretty far out there”)

[I]f Putin’s mischief-making constituted an act of war against the United States, then the U.S. has committed acts of war against an astonishingly long list of countries since the end of World War II. One study estimates that we interfered with no fewer than 81 elections in 45 nations from 1946 to 2000. Such efforts have been so brazen and uncontroversial that former CIA Director James Woolsey recently felt comfortable laughing about them with Laura Ingraham on Fox News.

This doesn’t mean that we should respond to Putin’s program of manipulation with indifference. Far from it. But it does mean that a response of self-righteous indignation is risible. To treat such meddling as an act of war on the part of Russia is either to invoke a blatant double standard that permits the U.S. to do things we stridently denounce in others — or it’s to admit that our own actions have been far more pernicious than we like to think. We definitely need to protect the integrity of our elections, but we should do so without placing ourselves unconvincingly on the moral high ground.

(Damon Linker)

If our meddling in other nations’ elections comes as a surprise to you, you really need to get out more.

The indignation and exaggeration about Russian election meddling disgusts me for reasons too numerous to list (well, some of them are at the sub-articulate level, too), but hypocrisy tops the list. Damon Linker is exactly right that we need to respond, but we make ourselves absurd by feigning clean hands. STFU and do what must be done.

Much as I detest 45, trying to portray him as a Manchurian Candidate is absurd. He serves no master save his own massive ego. Even mammon and mistresses are just means to stoke that fire.

UPDATE:

The astonishing thing about Donald Trump’s response to Robert Mueller’s recent indictments is his inability to recognize that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election is about something bigger than him. Look closely at Trump’s tweets.

February 16: “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong – no collusion!”

February 17: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

February 18: “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said “it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.” The Russian “hoax” was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia – it never did!”

Each tweet makes basically the same point: “Sure, Russia may have tried to undermine American democracy. But what really matters is that I never colluded with Putin and won the presidency fair and square.” Even if you believe that Trump is right—that his campaign never assisted Russia’s efforts to swing the election in his favor and that Russia’s efforts had no material effect on its outcome—the narcissism is breathtaking.

(Peter Beinart, The Atlantic, who then goes off the rails by implying that what Russia did was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor or 9/11)

Also, don’t forget the Time magazine story alluded to here.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Trump, Russia, Poland and The West

I’ve figured all along that Team Trump was guilty of something in this regard. You don’t get so cozy with a Russian made man like Paul Manafort, not if you have the ethics of Donald Trump, and not get your hands dirty in some way. The problem so far is that much of the Trump-Russia speculation in the media has gotten out ahead of the known facts. That problem is rapidly going away, and may have just done so.

Here’s the thing that dogs me, and that’s a measure of my own cynicism about Trump: I’m struggling to care about this story at this point. Me, I’ve priced this corruption into my estimation of the man. He is morally unfit to be president. By the time his presidency is over, he will have made Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding, previously thought to be considered the two most corrupt American presidents, look like Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans (sorry, Millennials; you have to be of a certain age to get the reference).

I guess it’s Trump fatigue. He has so lowered the bar on presidential behavior that this latest revelation comes across as just one more damn thing.

(Rod Dreher) I can’t say I’m with Rod on this one. I have not assumed “that Team Trump was guilty of something” with regard to Russia, nor do I think that the meeting of Manafort, Junior and Natasha Fatale is a smoking gun.

Analogy: 30+ years ago, we suffered a very disappointing loss in a Federal civil jury trial. As was then routine, the Judge ordered parties and counsel not to contact jurors. We didn’t. But a friend of our client, who had sat through the trial and was not subject to the Order, did somehow make contact, not at our instigation, and brought us information we couldn’t ignore. We filed a motion, were smacked down for trying to impeach the jury’s verdict, and even were rebuked by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals for having made the contact ourselves — a falsehood unsupported by any evidence — in violation of the trial court Order.

If I had it to do over again, I could not do it otherwise, even if I knew I’d be falsely accused and “convicted” by a judicial rebuke.

So I’m sympathetic, in bare-knuckled context of politics, with willingness to listen to any source that bodes to help. If Team Hillary had been approached by the same lawyer, promising to dish dirt on The Donald, I suspect they’d have sent Leon Panetta to Natasha with flowers and chocolates.

I have changed my views on another political-ish topic within the last week, though.

I had assumed that we’re still demonizing Russia through a failure of imagination, particularly on the part of Republicans (who were more hawkish during the cold war) — that we, or the GOP at least, needed someone to demonize, and that Russian would fit the bill admirably.

I’m now inclined — after Trump’s Warsaw speech, the reactions it provoked, and my idiosyncratic processing of that all — to think that we’re still demonizing Russia for the more specific reason that it represents the major more-or-less Western, more-or-less modern, power center that doesn’t buy our “universalist” dream that love of liberal democracy burns intensely, if secretly, in every human breast. Cynically or not, Putin “is positioning himself as the world’s leading defender of traditional values,” and notwithstanding domestic political prattle from what passes for The Right in America, genuinely traditional values are antithetical to our vaunted capitalist economic dynamism.

For that reason at least, demonizing Russia is a bipartisan consensus. Call that a “measure of my own cynicism” if you like.

We could talk at length about how both Republicans and Democrats in Washington have over the last 20 years or so supported policies that have benefited Wall Street interests at the expense of the common good. I’m not sure if you can still watch it on the PBS website, but in 2009, Frontline aired an episode called “The Warning”, about how a relatively minor government regulator, back during the late 1990s, warned Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, Clinton economic adviser Larry Summers, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that the derivatives market threatened to crash the entire economy. They all shut her down. Didn’t want to hear it. Wall Street was making too much money (and note well, the GOP Congressional leadership was fully on board with Team Clinton in this respect). We all remember what eventually happened in 2007-08. How many bankers went to jail over it, or paid any kind of professional price? How many Washington politicians?

I don’t think many, if any, laws were broken. But that doesn’t mean the corruption did not go deep.

(Dreher, whose whole column is worth reading. Don’t miss his comments about Obama’s personal rectitude combined with his willingness to impose damnable lies as destructive public policy).

As long as we’re on Trump, more or less, let’s go back to Warsaw and the reactions.

Not all reactions were shrill. John Mark N. Reynolds was generally admiring of the speech, and caught gentle heck from two Christian friends on roughly opposite political poles.

Reynolds opened with Mr. Trump goes to Poland, the very title of which offended a historian friend:

And it irks me because it exhibits the exact inversion of power dynamics that I’m going to describe in this response, as well as those which convinced otherwise good-hearted people to vote for a predatory man who proposed policies of oppression, scapegoating, and physical violence. Mr. Smith went to Washington to serve his constituents and build a camp for underprivileged boys he mentored. Mr. Trump called for the illegal execution of five wrongly accused boys as the first act of his political career. The comparison, even in mere syntax, feeds the narrative Trump tries to spin of his own victimization.

…

It seems to me that you are encouraged by this speech because (1) it elevates Poland and (2) it affirms our commitment to defending “western values.” These are both, perhaps, good things. But both the text of the speech and the character of the administration that produced it immediately require a much more critical eye than your piece gives it.

The core problem is context. The president stood in the square where thousands were murdered by Nazis, thousands who expected Allied aid that never came, and he did so as the first US president to play footsie with NATO’s Article 5. He praised a Poland of the past that overwhelmingly stood between tyrants and their victims, a nation in which the highest proportion of individuals chose to sacrifice themselves in order to personally hide Jewish people from Nazi death squads, and he called Poland’s current refusal to accept today’s refugees a continuation of that spirit instead of what it is: its betrayal.

The trick of white nationalism is to pretend the power dynamic is inverted. The conquerors, therefore, only conquer out of fear of conquest. The oppressor only oppresses to prevent greater oppression. Throughout our history as a nation, the United States has perfected this inversion and presented it for generations as fact ….

Next day, I was expecting Reynolds’ response to this friend, but, no, he’d caught heck from another friend, a pro-life Democrat who voted for Trump over Hillary:

The Left is the Boy who called Wolf. To accuse President Trump of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia for a speech that was manifestly anti-racist, pro-Semitic, and xenophilic is to destroy what little remains of their credibility.

The critics’ argument is premised on the idea that any reference to “Western” civilization or “Western” values, or to any threat from the “East” or “South” is inherently racist and pro-Christian. This is, of course, nonsense. The idea of an opposition between East and West dates back to the war of the ancient Greeks against Xerxes’ invasion. It was also prominent at the time of the battle of Actium, when Octavius defeated Egyptian and Syrian troops commanded by Mark Antony. The idea of Western civilization predates Christianity by several centuries, and the invention of racism by Darwinian anthropologists by several millennia. Western civilization is essentially Roman civilization. Cicero and Virgil define its essential shape and tone, involving a way of life in which we find the rule of law, a sharp distinction of private and public, individual rights and private property, intermediate institutions, including schools and corporations, anthropomorphic gods, freedom of debate and philosophical inquiry, and a literature extolling civic virtue and romantic love.

…

My own problem with the speech is that Trump failed to recognize the distinction between the Communist Soviet Union and the authoritarian and nationalist Russia of today. The latter represents many orders of magnitude less danger to the world than did the former. We need to revive Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s useful distinction between authoritarian regimes and totalitarian ones. The world’s only totalitarian regimes are North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, with Iran lying near the borderline. China and Russia have evolved into merely authoritarian regimes (as has Vietnam and former Soviet republics like Moldova and Uzbekistan) …

Let me close by addressing the larger question, the supposed “Bannonism” of the Trump administration. Ethnic, ethnicity, ethnos—these are not curse-words, some litany of Satanism. The creation and recognition of the status of nations (ethnos is simply Greek for nation) is one of the fruits of Christian civilization. I recommend the work of Roger Scruton, especially The West and the Rest, and T. S. Eliot’s classic Notes toward the Definition of Culture.

No nation is reducible to a set of ideas or a propositional creed. That includes the United States. Trump critics pose a false dichotomy: either abstract universalism or fascistic racism ….

Finally, Reynolds replies to both. I found his response on “Bannonism” especially notable:

I define Bannonism as being both an idea and an approach to politics. Let’s begin with the approach. Bannon has advocated a “by any means” conservatism, beating the left at her own game. Politics is not a Sunday School picnic and we can hit hard, but not use any means. We cannot (as Christians) hate, torture, or slander.

Christians are not too genteel to do those things, but too meek like Moses or Jesus.  Of course, you do not take issue with this, I assume you are not in favor of “by any means,” but that is central to my rejection of Bannonism. Christians are willing to be martyred rather than “win” in the short term!

You defend the nationalism of Bannon and here too we disagree. I think strong patriotism is compatible with Christianity, but not nationalism. I am an American and I love my nation, but I cannot think her special or unique. We are not “chosen” as Israel was chosen, though like any people group we have a work to do.

If you haven’t reached personal bedrock in your views of the Warsaw speech, or if you just want to see some civil and irenic comment among friends (well, Reynolds is the hub of the wheel; his two friends don’t interact directly), it’s worth 20 minutes or so to read the series.

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There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Friday 12/2/16

  1. Dag Hammarskjöld and Post-Truth
  2. Rooting for the other side in Culture War 2.0
  3. The Big Rebuke
  4. Submerged Schism
  5. Trump is indecent, not Politically Incorrect
  6. Meaningless Statistics

Continue reading “Friday 12/2/16” →

The Trump Doctrine?

I’ve been pretty cool toward Patrick J. Buchanan lately as he was way too hot for Donald Trump. But now he focuses on one of the few Trump “policies” that was articulated fairly consistently and which, standing alone, I found appealing:

The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States.

What should Trump say?

As our Cold War presidents from Truman to Reagan avoided World War III, I intend to avert Cold War II. We do not regard Russia or the Russian people as enemies of the United States, and we will work with President Putin to ease the tensions that have arisen between us.

For our part, NATO expansion is over, and U.S. forces will not be deployed in any former republic of the Soviet Union.

While Article 5 of NATO imposes an obligation to regard an attack upon any one of 28 nations as an attack on us all, in our Constitution, Congress, not some treaty dating back to before most Americans were even born, decides whether we go to war.

The compulsive interventionism of recent decades is history. How nations govern themselves is their own business. While, as JFK said, we prefer democracies and republics to autocrats and dictators, we will base our attitude toward other nations upon their attitude toward us.

No other nation’s internal affairs are a vital interest of ours.

Europeans have to be awakened to reality. We are not going to be forever committed to fighting their wars. They are going to have to defend themselves, and that transition begins now.

In Syria and Iraq, our enemies are al-Qaida and ISIS. We have no intention of bringing down the Assad regime, as that would open the door to Islamic terrorists. We have learned from Iraq and Libya.

Then Trump should move expeditiously to lay out and fix the broad outlines of his foreign policy, which entails rebuilding our military while beginning the cancellation of war guarantees that have no connection to U.S. vital interests. We cannot continue to bankrupt ourselves to fight other countries’ wars or pay other countries’ bills.

The ideal time for such a declaration, a Trump Doctrine, is when the president-elect presents his secretaries of state and defense.

I cannot imagine a “Secretary of State John Bolton” (shudder!) executing such a “Doctrine,” and only his lack of foreign policy credentials lets me imagine pugilistic Rudy Giuliani doing so.

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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.