Re: Donald Jr. meeting with the Russkie chick.
Err, what was the transaction taking place here? As I understand it, Jr was going to come away with evidence that Hillary was a crook and the Russians were going to get kicked in the groin with lower oil prices. One side got a product that was a glut on the market to the point of being valueless and the other side was going to get punished.
That's not exactly high stakes, is it? Watching the press and pundits go ape over this is like seeing ESPN hosts lose their minds over a trade between the class-A Fort Wayne Tin Caps and the Great Lakes Loons involving utility infielders.
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| "Nate Easley for Cristian Santana is a total steal for Fort Wayne!" "Are you out of your mind? Easley's upside is crazy high!" |
I can see your point that the Russians probably have very little to gain from having Trump in as president, and that about the worst thing that anybody has been able to pin on the Trumps about it is that they are *acting* like they are guilty of *something*. Still, I think that there are a bunch of possible reasons why the Russians may have actually at least attempted to collude with Trump:
ReplyDelete1. Maybe the Russians don't actually care who is President, but they thought it would be useful/fun to mess with us just on general principles. And they figured that helping out Trump would cause more chaos than their other options.
2. Perhaps Putin doesn't consider the Russian oil oligarchs to be his friends (he has already purged a bunch of them over the years), and thinks that reducing oil prices actually increases his personal power, by reducing theirs.
3. Possibly the Russians made a mistake. Maybe they thought that Trump would be more helpful to them than he turned out to be, and they're now just trying to make the best of what they've got.
4. Conceivably, the Russian government is every bit as incompetent as our own, with the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. This may be all just a general cock-up of epic proportions, with nobody actually ending up with what they want.
Tim, if any or all of these are true, it still doesn't make this any bigger than a trade between AA teams. What's the big deal?
ReplyDeleteThe thing running through my mind lately is this: What would you find if you performed this level of scrutiny on anything? We're down to Jr meeting with some chick. If we looked into, say Diane Feinstein and staff's dealings with people in the UK or Mitch McConnell's dealings with Japan, wouldn't we find at least this much?
If you use an electron microscope on anything in DC or among our mega-elites, wouldn't you expect to find some rodents? This just seems teeny weeny when you strip away the names.
"What would you find if you performed this level of scrutiny on anything?"
ReplyDeleteWe might find something like this
KT: The big deal is that it is doing wonders for the ratings of the "news" channels.. There is a long history of whipping up a frenzy over some "nothing much" that the president has done, in the name of ratings, and this is just the latest. And I can't really say that the Trumps are doing much to tamp it down. If anything, they are complicit in making it look like a big deal, and it looks to me a lot like one of those fake rivalries with the news channels that were so well developed by professional wrestling.
ReplyDeleteThe news channels are getting their ratings, and the Trumps are getting the publicity that they so clearly crave, over something that will ultimately turn out not to be illegal (and maybe give them an excuse for not actually carrying through on the things they promised to do during the campaign). What's not to like, from their point of view?
If we don't like it, the only solution is to stop watching the "news" channels. If they don't get the ratings, they'll drop it and move on to something more constructive.