I have, I confess, been somewhat puzzled by Lindsey’s reactions
to my comments on the ongoing Mueller investigation, and, perhaps not
surprisingly, I have found myself in agreement with Ed Barreras, LFC, and S .
Wallerstein. But all of this, as I said,
amounts to no more than speculation on our part. I really care about only one thing: the danger that the expressions of skepticism
by Lindsey and others of the same persuasion will weaken the commitment of
anti-Trump folks to fight for the defeat of Republicans in the upcoming
elections. So long as Lindsey is
prepared to join me with in that fight, I am content.
Did Russian interference have an effect on the outcome of
the 2016 election? Well, considering how
close things were in a handful of key states, I would say the answer is almost
certainly yes. So did the weather, so
perhaps did a competing football game, so also, as far as we know, did a vagrant
strain of stomach flu. I think we can be
confident that voter suppression efforts by Republicans had an effect, perhaps
so large as to swamp all these other possibles.
Will we ever know? Of course not.
All of us who are not personally acquainted with Donald Trump
and the members of his administration are compelled to rely on third person
sources of information. [Lindsey, are
you quite sure that Trump is in fact President?
Could that not be a complex lie told by Clinton forces to conceal the
fact that she was actually elected and inaugurated and is even now doing the
bidding of her corporate masters? Is that
the real reason for the rapid rise in the stock market, assuming that really
happened? Absurd, you say. But are you certain Obama was really born in
Hawaii?]
Well, you see the problem.
I am quite certain that the sun rises in roughly the same place every
morning because I see it, but I only have it on the testimony of others that
that direction is the East. I am under
the impression that I live in North Carolina but could this actually be a
little bit of Texas? How do I really know?
How do I really know?
ReplyDeleteDr. Wolff,
I thought the same thing when they ran that political commercial about the apple. There was an apple on a surface and someone said: "nothin' will change the fact that this is an apple." I thought, how can you 100% positively know it is an apple? You can't. There must be some philosophy out there based on Utilitarianism with a twist. If the majority believe it to be an apple then it must be an apple. The majority of everyone on earth is devoted to this sort of philosophy concerning basic ideas. Of course, there are always exceptions. But if you don't believe it is a verified apple, you are peer pressured into believing it by being called foolish or dumb etc.
Did the Russian trolling have an impact on the 2016 election? Perhaps one or two votes here and there; basically negligible. The trolling farm spent about 100k on the US election (not the 1.2 million as Rachel breathlessly claimed, which was the world wide budget). The paucity of the posts (which were incredibly lame) amounted to 1 post to every 23,000 posts on FB. And many were post election posts. Was the Kremlin behind it? No proof yet. Proof of hacking? Nope. Politicians claiming all of this was an "attack" on the US: too many to list. Politicians wanting to dig into the domestic subversion of the electoral process (such as cross-check), zero.
ReplyDeleteSo what is this about? It's about maintaining establishment politics, suppression of turnout, and maintaining the narrow range of our political debate. It's Cold War II. The Mueller indictments of Russians was a political act intended to marginalize those who like the attacking Russians who "sow discord": BLM, Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, anyone on the left or anyone fed up with the American oligarchy, neoliberalism, and the student movement builders. Let's not forget: the CIA/security state has a long history of trying, with disinformation, to start a war with Russia (recall that they did by providing false info to JFK re Bay of Bigs believing he would bomb Cuba and pressing feverishly, if not madly, for JFK to attack Cuba when missiles were discovered there. Let us not forget the sub headlines in many of the newspapers following JFK's assassination: "Pro-communist is suspected shooter."
I don't see Russiagate rallying the Democrats come Nov. Quite the contrary. I see Russiagate pushing out of the news the long list of actions taken by Trump that harm both his base and the common good and turning off the precariat that is utterly fed up with American electoral politics. How many voters know, for example, that Trump rescinded the regulation that had made it more difficult for the mentally ill to buy guns? This should have been headline no. 1 for days; instead, we were treated to the outrage of both party leaders that Russia, armed heavily with nuclear weapons attacked America and that the "attack" was akin to Pear Harbor and 9/11.
The CIA, the NSA, and the FBI are not our friends.
At the risk of becoming as obsessed with the Russiagate story as Russiagaters themselves, I urge everyone to
ReplyDeleteread this brilliant, zany, funny response to the greatest misdirection of our time:
Me, Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow
by JOHN ESKOW
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/26/me-bill-moyers-and-rachel-maddow/
Could Lindsey be a Russian operative?
ReplyDelete