a quick poll about Russia and Donald Trump

I think it's something, just not the Manchurain Candidate LARP people want it to be.

I think it's something, just not the Manchurain Candidate LARP people want it to be.

there's a bunch of something but it may never become clear during this presidency

Wow what an annoying bug

oh and what DJP said it's far more old-fashioned corruption and back-scratching than a masterplan to destroy the US

Wow what an annoying bug

sorry

There is something, probably more than just 'something', but the smoking gun stuff is tiring. I think there's a lot of pieces that need to be puzzled together. NV otm though that's is not some masterminded thing but mostly stupidity and surrounding himself with stupid fraudster where Trump's concerned.

i have it on good authority that after just a few hundred more tweets about trump and russia, bernie will finally be president

i have it on good authority that after just a few hundred more tweets about trump and russia, bernie will finally be president

this is kinda the function of this poll - to talk about whether this stuff is mainly heroes-and-villains control-the-dialogue stuff, or whether there's actual dirt in it, and why one does or doesn't think so

From the moment the DNC leaks happened one day before the Dem convention, this was a scandal. Already back then, the information pointed to Russia. And yet there was no bi-partisan condemnation. That was already scandalous.

Also, what should be incredibly obvious, but the main reason leftists like Greenwald are trying to downplay everything is because they played a key role all along. With the DNC leaks meant to harm with the Sanders wing, and the first Podesta emails including snippets of Goldman Sachs speeches, this was always obviously the Russians trying to create harm with the left, and would never have been so harmful if they hadn't taken the bait 100%.

so, heroes and villains, you're saying

I suspect the gist of it is that Trump surrounded himself with cranks and shady business people who couldn't get a seat at the table with more mainstream Republicans. Some of them, like Flynn, are more than usually sympathetic to Russia - probably in Flynn's case because he was paid and taken seriously as a critic of the Obama government when nobody else was interested in him. Some, like Manafort and Cohen, don't have any particular political axe to grind but have found the region a useful place to make shady money.

I do t think there will be evidence of a quid-pro-quo. Partly because, if Russia did provide the emails to Wikileaks, there was enough animus there towards Clinton to have done it anyway, partly because there doesn't seem to be any change of direction in the relationship with Russia. The sanctions have been reconfirmed, the inviolability of Ukrainian sovereignty loudly proclaimed and plans for a vast US military build-up announced. I can't see any of that changing unless Europe moves first on normalising Crimea.

It isn't impossible that there was an agreement but nothing in any of the stories seems to indicate anybody has any evidence or, more broadly, any idea how to create a vaguely plausible narrative.

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/65/6553/UNT4100Z/posters/the-x-files-i-want-to-believe-print.jpg

I'm definitely sympathetic to the idea of wanting it to be true but the whole business of signal boosting hucksters like Adam Khan, HuffPo randos and a woman who thinks Putin arranged the Westminster terrorist attack should embarrass all concerned.

SV otm,

Also, what should be incredibly obvious, but the main reason leftists like Greenwald are trying to downplay everything is because they played a key role all along. With the DNC leaks meant to harm with the Sanders wing, and the first Podesta emails including snippets of Goldman Sachs speeches, this was always obviously the Russians trying to create harm with the left, and would never have been so harmful if they hadn't taken the bait 100%.

Is this supposed to be the extent of Russian 'interference' in the US election?

Is there much evidence that these leaks led to a major loss of support for HRC from people who were planning to vote for her otherwise?

i have it on good authority that after just a few hundred more tweets about trump and russia, bernie will finally be president

― sleepingbag, Saturday, March 25, 2017 5:17 PM (fifty-four minutes ago)

this is a pretty pathetic post

trump owes shitloads to the russians. he scratches their backs, they continue scratching his by helping take down hillz. he's such a corrupt dunning-kruger silver spoon he doesn't realize he and his hangers on committed treason

good read https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/why-putin-hates-clinton-and-helped-trump-win

thanks

I think it's going to be difficult to show active collusion [between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin] because people who study this say that the Russian government often works with groups that they have very arms-length relations with. It's unlikely these groups have an easily verifiable link either to the Kremlin or to the Trump team. It could also be that they really wanted to see Trump in office, so they did these things without active collusion.

otm, Russian intelligence isn't dumb enough to have actual FSB fingerprints on stuff; but the Trump camp folks are so dense who knows, I mean the Roger Stone -> Guccifer 2.0 twitter DM thing was pretty 0_o

it's nothing like Frederik's deranged fantasies

http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/03/23/man-testified-trumps-campaign-chair-just-shot-dead/

Manchurian candidate LARP is a charitable way to put it!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

trump's dramatic arc calls for an ignominious fall. if russia doesn't do it some other criminal activity will have to be unearthed. it doesn't make aesthetic sense for him to just continue to lose popularity and sort of fade away after four years.

The thing is that this is real life and not a movie. Actual results will either be wholly unsatisfactory or so batshit insane that no one will believe it's actually real.

batshit insanity seems to cling to trump like a bad aroma

Like, the most likely scenarios I see panning out here are "Trump is an incurious moron who surrounded himself with compromised ninnies because they flattered home the most" or "Trump and Putin are secretly lovers planning to conquer the entire world through military action and trade shenanigans"

imo, the explanation could be: trump is addicted to the idea of making deals that make him money. this is central to his self-image. business deals are only about one thing: making or losing money. Russia offered him deals that make him money. there is no connection in his mind between his running for president, his deals with russia, his making money, and his committing treason or felonies. they are wholly compartmentalized in different parts of his brain. and then there was the money, too.

Dan's first scenario is almost exactly what I've been assuming for some time. Dan's second scenario is the plot of a series of self-published erotic novels I have coming out later this year.

kinda just wish the fucker would choke on a ham sandwich (DJT, not DJP)

because even if there is an actual fire in this case, idk how much more of this ugly shit this country can take at this point....which isn't to say I don't think it should be pursued, but just that it's all so fatiguing

I think it's something, just not the Manchurain Candidate LARP people want it to be.

otm

more to the point, not nothing, but also not something worth wasting precious effort on

imo, the explanation could be: trump is addicted to the idea of making deals that make him money. this is central to his self-image. business deals are only about one thing: making or losing money. Russia offered him deals that make him money. there is no connection in his mind between his running for president, his deals with russia, his making money, and his committing treason or felonies. they are wholly compartmentalized in different parts of his brain. and then there was the money, too.

I think the difficulty with this, and a lot of similar theories - like him 'owing money to Russia', is what we mean by 'Russia'. Is the Russian government offering him deals? Is he doing favours for non-government investors?

I think Trump is probably sceptical of sanctions and part of that scepticism could be motivated by self-interest, along with a broader idea that they are bad for business, but that scepticism seems to have been overridden by political reality and would fall a long way short of malfeasance on its own.

The wider trend of lumping everyone from Russians to Ukrainians, Azeris, Armenians, Russian-Armericans, Jewish Lithuanians who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US aged seven, people who have business interests in Russia, people married to Russians, etc, as a suspicious monolith called 'Russia' is where it gets deep into what critics like Marsha Gessen are describing as a xenophobic conspiracy.

'putin's sphere of influence'

the saddest insult to everyday americans in a loooooong looooooooooongg time is trump and his buddies were convinced they could get away with it :/

I suspect the gist of it is that Trump surrounded himself with cranks and shady business people who couldn't get a seat at the table with more mainstream Republicans. Some of them, like Flynn, are more than usually sympathetic to Russia - probably in Flynn's case because he was paid and taken seriously as a critic of the Obama government when nobody else was interested in him. Some, like Manafort and Cohen, don't have any particular political axe to grind but have found the region a useful place to make shady money.

I do t think there will be evidence of a quid-pro-quo. Partly because, if Russia did provide the emails to Wikileaks, there was enough animus there towards Clinton to have done it anyway, partly because there doesn't seem to be any change of direction in the relationship with Russia. The sanctions have been reconfirmed, the inviolability of Ukrainian sovereignty loudly proclaimed and plans for a vast US military build-up announced. I can't see any of that changing unless Europe moves first on normalising Crimea.

otm

lol @ "something"

Russia is going to be Trump's Benghazi

maybe in terms of fallout but probably not in terms of what, like, actually happened

yeah there seems way way way more here than there was with Benghazi, and I'm not just saying that because I hate Donald Trump

his campaign advisor through the republican national convention had a $10,000,000 a year contract to advance russia's interests, from 2006 till Grover Norquist knows when. imagine the shoe on the other foot. moscowghazi hearings till the cows come home

the GOP called Obama "King Obama" for far lesser trangressions than Donald

they seem to be saying, people who believe above all in tax cuts for the rich are also epic hypocrites. it's not a good look, not that fox/koch nation gives a shit

Posted this on the main thread but worth a note:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/politics/senate-jared-kushner-russia.html?referer

also didn't Roger Stone, who most biographies describe as Trump's closest advisor, straight up admit he was in contact with Russian hackers? isn't it weird how Stone, Guiliani, and every member of the Trump family (besides Tiffany, probably) knew exactly when the Wikileaks stuff was gonna start dropping?

it's only weird if you hate business and jesus and the constitution and success

yeah there seems way way way more here than there was with Benghazi

100 times zero is still zero

kamala doesn't need to be divisive. there is a lot that the biden administration is doing that has mass appeal, including this new infrastructure bill. she needs to run on that and on the fact that they helped pull the country out of the covid catastrophe.

i think the child tax credit idea will win friends and influence people. they need more policies like this -- things that tangibly improve people's lives.

any democratic candidate will be massively divisive, though. whoever it is will become the tool of satan

believe it or not, in 2024, whoever the democratic candidate is will be seen by 40% of the country as the tool of satan

meanwhile, the republican candidate will be an impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex. but when balanced against the tool of satan, what can you do? america divided

I can think of a Kamala Harris policy that would massively improve people’s lives

joe biden did a good job not letting that stick to him though. trump tried to cast him as a villain, first, a radical, then as a fool, but it didn't work. he simply represented a "boring' return to normalcy for most voters. (a great feat as he is becoming more scattered in his speech). kamala should just do the same thing and she could do it even better because she really can convey competence. the less she puts herself at the center of her campaign, the better she will do. (this goes for all democratic candidates).

xp

hillary let herself become a foil to trump. biden didn't, it just didn't work.

the way the guardian piece drops in the italicized scary russian words is extremely funny imo

what's the russian word for signature reduction?

kamala doesn't need to be divisive. there is a lot that the biden administration is doing that has mass appeal, including this new infrastructure bill. she needs to run on that and on the fact that they helped pull the country out of the covid catastrophe.

I feel like I shouldn't have to point this out, but in modern America a woman of color running for president is going to be extremely divisive.

сокращение подписи

Aka 'sokrashcheniye podpisi'.

You're welcome. xp

people who are so racist that they wouldn't vote for a black person, or so sexist that they wouldn't vote for a woman, are voting for the republican candidate anyway. you don't need to worry about those voters. the important thing is driving turnout with a message that has broad appeal. i personally think that the key part here is not getting drawn into trump's distractions (if in fact trump is the candidate in 2024).

it's not kamala vs. trump, it's sane government that is responsive to the needs of the public vs. a lunatic authoritarian who, last time he was in charge, drove the nation into chaos.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-russia-kremlin-vladislav-surkov-grey-cardinal-moscow-a8773661.html

sorry thought this was the other thread. anyway, that link is about the propaganda strategy of the kremlin under putin, which is based in maximizing incoherence and confusion. i think it's possible this is a fake leak designed to get "russiagate" back in the news and sow more chaos in america.

especially the fact that the "kompromat" thing is coming up again. like, enough is enough. five years of this.

Harris isn’t going to be President this decade unless Biden dies. The track record for VPs immediately becoming President in modern history is… HW Bush.

i was just naming anyone, and she's next in line and will probably try for it at some point. i'm just saying, whoever it is will be satan to 40% of the country, divisiveness is baked into our country now

treeship, I'm not talking about winning the votes. my point was that Russia wants to sow as much division and discontent in the US as possible, given our inherently racist society I'm guessing they want Kamala to run so they can use that to continue pushing that division with the tools they've honed over the last two elections. it wasn't intended as a referendum on who will vote for whom.

maybe russia wants to do that. i think we let russia live in our heads too much, rent-free. like, by their own admission, there isn't much rhyme or reason to their strategy beyond "sowing division" and "chaos."

meanwhile, the republican candidate will be an impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex. but when balanced against the tool of satan, what can you do? america divided

jesus. i was just responding to KM's question about wondering who russia would like to see run, but go off and lecture me some more treeship.

maybe russia wants to do that. i think we let russia live in our heads too much, rent-free. like, by their own admission, there isn't much rhyme or reason to their strategy beyond "sowing division" and "chaos."

Treeship - I see and second your suspicion about this leak; however, this is interesting.. from two days ago: The REvil Ransomware Hackers Have Gone Offline

If it was Russia that forced them offline for whatever reason, maybe they already had these docs and were just waiting for the moment to drop them?

xp boring, MD

trump. i guess i'm making the assumption the republican candidate will be trump. if not him, i guess it would tucker carlson. white america loves a motherfucker

I don't think Pence has a chance

xp i was confused about what you were talking about jon, apologies. i didn't know the conversation started with speculation about the kremlin.

the kremlin re. 2024

people who are so racist that they wouldn't vote for a black person, or so sexist that they wouldn't vote for a woman, are voting for the republican candidate anyway.

I don't believe this for a minute. There are more than enough 2020 Biden voters who are plenty racist or sexist enough to sit out voting for Harris in 2024 and swing the results - and as he likes to point out, Trump got more votes in 2020 than any Republican in history.

i don't know. that could be offset by people who are inspired to vote for a woman, though -- she could get more women turnout. it's really hard to say how it will shake out.

i just think she doesn't need to become a lightning rod. no more than obama was anyway. he was a target of the right but still built a strong coalition of liberals and moderates.

if I were in charge of fucking up US electoral politics I would do everything I could to back Harris for sure, for a lot of reasons

re the guardian piece, something to keep in mind if you're unfamiliar the (very different) norms of UK journalism to keep in mind: when the article doesn't hedge, it might be wrong. when the article hedges, it's probably wrong.

This piece uses a version of the word “appear” seven times, “suggest” five times, and has one big “assessed to be.” pic.twitter.com/b7Su4NeYvK

— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) July 15, 2021

that could be offset by people who are inspired to vote for a woman, though -- she could get more women turnout

I believe this, or rather want to believe this, while also hearing a voice on my other shoulder saying "yeah right, let's ask President Hillary Clinton about that."

different situations with different baggage of course

yeah, i mean, these questions are hard to answer. but i will say that i remember 2008 and the fact that obama was a black man didn't seem to hurt him. in fact, it helped make him a transformative and inspiring figure for many voters, including me.

so, yeah, women candidates face unique challenges and in 2016 misogyny played a big role in the animus we saw toward hillary. but this same dynamic might not manifest itself in the same way again. new election, new situation, new opportunity.

For many reasons “first Black” President or Governor or X does not seem to map onto other demographics or identities.

i don't know. first woman president seems inspiring to me.

Yeah, excitement over the first woman President is probably better predicted by whether or not you have a college degree than whether you’re a man or woman or any other information about you.

that might be true. either way, it is hard to say how strong of a candidate harris will be if she runs in 2024. it depends on what the biden administration accomplishes.

i know i'll be inspired when nikki haley becomes president

Boebert/Greene ftw

obviously it's no one's top criteria. i supported sanders in the primaries. i just think it's too simple to say she will be a lightning rod like hillary just because she is a woman and a POC.

xp boring, MD

trump. i guess i'm making the assumption the republican candidate will be trump. if not him, i guess it would tucker carlson. white america loves a motherfucker

They may even run an actual banana.

The only thing that would actually surprise me is if they nominated a competent and relatively sane human being. Anyone/thing outside of that is definitely on the table.

my feeling about Harris is that, as someone who pays more attention to politics than is healthy, I have no sense of what her priorities are and what, if anything, she genuinely believes in. She also doesn't have an immediately recognizable persona in the way that Biden does. Makes me think Republicans would have a very easy time defining her on their terms and villainizing her.

the Russia thing feels a little too good to be true - my guess would be that Russia's involvement in the election is a bunch of scattered directives to underlings, a few minutes in meetings here and there as the primaries progress, etc, rather than some novelistic meeting in which the fiendish plan is devised.