NP - Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did. (less bluster, more evidence)

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thank you. I very much enjoyed this take:

"It’s possible that the Democratic National Committee 
leaks were caused by Russian hackers—but given that the 
hack took place thanks to John Podesta clicking on a link 
in a phishing email, displaying all the technological 
savvy of someone’s aunt extremely excited by the new 
iPhone she thinks she’s won, it could have been anyone. 
The “leaked” CIA concerns over Russian meddling were quite 
clearly leaked deliberately by the CIA itself, an 
organization not exactly famed for its commitment to the 
truth; they’re the conclusions of an investigation that 
hasn’t even happened yet and on which there’s no consensus 
even among the gang of petty Caligulas that calls itself 
the intelligence community. Still, it’s possible. 
Countries sometimes try to exert influence in each other’s 
internal affairs; it’s part of great-power politics, and 
it’s been happening for a very long time. When Americans 
meddled in Russia’s elections, it was by securing victory 
for Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s very own Donald Trump, a man 
who had sent in tanks to shell his own parliament. Leaked 
cables suggest that Hillary Clinton’s own State Department 
interfered with the political process in Haiti by 
suppressing a rise in the minimum wage. And American 
involvement in the politics of Chile, Guatemala, 
Indonesia, and Iran was mostly through military coups, 
sponsored by none other than the CIA. There was no 
question of these countries repeating their elections; 
anyone the generals didn’t like was tortured to death. 
Next to the mountain of corpses produced by America’s 
history of fixing foreign elections, a few hacked emails 
are entirely insignificant.

(...)

What the Russia obsession represents is a massive ethical 
failure on the part of American liberals. People really 
will suffer under President Trump—women, queer people, 
Muslims, poor people of every stripe. But so many in the 
centrist establishment don’t seem to care. They’re far too 
busy weaving themselves into intricate geopolitical power 
plays that don’t really exist, searching for a narrative 
that exonerates them from having let this happen, to do 
anything like real political work. They won’t accept that 
Trumpism is America, in all its blood-splattered 
horror—that the dry civics lesson of a democracy they love 
so much is capable of creating a monster. Decades of 
neoliberal policy disenfranchised people to the extent 
that Donald Trump could look like a savior; far better to 
just hide your bad conscience somewhere far away in 
Eastern Europe. It wasn’t us, it wasn’t our country, we 
were all duped by Putin."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/what_the_hell_is_wrong_with_america_s_establishment_liberals.html
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l