The most astonishing aspect of the discourse on Russia is how little attention is paid to the risks of fueling a new Cold War.
The New Yorker is aggressively touting its 13,000-word cover story on Russia and Trump that was bylined by three writers, including the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick. Beginning with its cover image menacingly featuring Putin, Trump, and the magazine’s title in Cyrillic letters, along with its lead cartoon dystopically depicting a UFO-like Red Square hovering over and phallically invading the White House, the article is largely devoted to what has now become standard — and very profitable — fare among East Coast newsmagazines: feeding Democrats the often xenophobic, hysterical Russophobia for which they have a seemingly insatiable craving. Democratic media outlets have thus predictably cheered this opus for exposing “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence on the presidential election.”
But featured within the article are several interesting, uncomfortable, and often-overlooked facts about Putin, Trump, and Democrats. Given that these points are made here by a liberal media organ that is vehemently anti-Trump, within an article dispensing what has become the conventional Democratic wisdom on Russia, it is well worth highlighting them:
A major irony in the Democrats’ current obsession with depicting Putin as the world’s Grave Threat — and equating efforts to forge better relations with Moscow as some type of treason — is that it was Barack Obama who spent eight years accommodating the Russian leader and scorning the idea that Russia should be confronted and challenged. Indeed, Obama — after Russia annexed Crimea — rejected bipartisan demands to arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine and actively sought a partnership with Putin to bomb Syria. And, of course, in 2012 — years after Russia invaded Georgia and numerous domestic dissidents and journalists were imprisoned or killed — the Obama-led Democrats mercilessly mocked Mitt Romney as an obsolete, ignorant Cold War relic for his arguments about the threat posed by the Kremlin.
Hillary Clinton, however, had a much different view of all this. She was often critical of Obama’s refusal to pursue aggression and belligerence in his foreign policy, particularly in Syria, where she and her closest allies wanted to impose a no-fly zone, be more active in facilitating regime change, and risk confrontation with Russia there. The New Yorker article describes the plight of Evelyn Farkas, the Obama Pentagon’s senior Russia adviser who became extremely frustrated by Obama’s refusal to stand up to Putin over Ukraine but was so relieved to learn that Clinton, as president, would do so:
The Russian experts heralded by the article also feared that Clinton — in contrast to Obama — was so eager for escalated U.S. military action in Syria to remove Assad that a military conflict with Russia was a real possibility:
It’s impossible to overstate how serious of a risk this was. Recall that one of Clinton’s most vocal surrogates, former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, explicitly said — in a Dr. Strangelove-level creepy video — that he wanted to kill not only Iranians and Syrians but also Russians in Syria:
There’s a reason that those who were so eager for U.S. military intervention in both Syria and Ukraine were so passionately supportive of Clinton. They knew there was a high likelihood that she would do what Obama refused to do: risk war with Russia in pursuit of these foreign policy goals.
One can, of course, side with the Clinton wing on the ground that the U.S. has been too soft on Russia, but what should not be suppressed — and what the New Yorker article makes clear — is that the hawkish views on Russia now dominant (even obligatory) in the Democratic Party were exactly what Obama resisted up until the day he left office.
That’s why people like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, along with various neocon organs, relentlessly attacked Obama on the ground that he was too accommodating of Putin in Syria, Ukraine, and beyond. The post-election Democratic Party orthodoxy on Russia has deliberately obscured the fact that the leading accommodationist of Putin was named Barack Obama, and in that, he had a radically different approach than Clinton advocated.
The most astonishing aspect of the post-election discourse on Russia is how little attention is paid to the risks of fueling a new Cold War, let alone of military confrontation between the two nuclear-armed powers. A different New Yorker article in December, by Eric Schlosser, described how many times the two countries came quite close to nuclear annihilation in the past, and how easy it is now to trigger a nuclear exchange merely by miscommunication or misperception, let alone active belligerence:
Today, the odds of a nuclear war being started by mistake are low — and yet the risk is growing, as the United States and Russia drift toward a new cold war. … The harsh rhetoric on both sides increases the danger of miscalculations and mistakes, as do other factors. Close encounters between the military aircraft of the United States and Russia have become routine, creating the potential for an unintended conflict.
Constantly ratcheting up aggressive rhetoric and tension between Washington and Moscow is not a game. And yet it’s one that establishment Democrats — and their new allies in the war-loving wing of the GOP — are playing with reckless abandon, and with little to no apparent concern about the risks. They have re-created a climate in the U.S. where a desire for better relations with Russia triggers suspicions about one’s loyalties.
The New Yorker article is rife with warnings about how close the two countries are to returning to full-blown Cold War animosity, with all the costs and horrors the prior one entailed. This harrowing passage is typical:
Some old foreign policy hands in the Clinton circle believe the U.S. and Russia are already in a second Cold War and are angry that Trump is not doing enough to win it (and, even though they are loath to say it, they believed the same about Obama):
There are, as usual, numerous highly influential factions in Washington that would stand to benefit enormously from the resurrection of the Cold War. They’re the same groups that benefited so much the first time around: weapons manufacturers, the think tanks they fund, the public/private axis of the Pentagon and intelligence community, etc. And the people who exert the greatest influence over U.S. discourse continue to be the spokespeople for those very interests. When all of that is combined with the Democratic Party’s massive self-interest in inflating the Russia threat — it gives them a way to explain away their crushing 2016 defeat — it is completely unsurprising that the orthodoxy on Russia has become hawkish and pro-confrontation.
One can debate whose fault it is that the two nations are so close to re-starting the Cold War. A primary obligation of Good Patriotism is to insist that it’s always the other side’s fault. But for those who would like to hear the other side of this equation, as a tonic to the singular message of the U.S. Patriotic Media, here’s Noam Chomsky speaking last year to German journalist Tilo Jung:
But regardless of where one wants to pin blame for these heightened tensions, the risks of heightening them further are incredibly high — one could plausibly say: incomparably high. Yet in the name of being “tough” on Putin, those risks are virtually never discussed, and anyone who attempts to raise them in the context of advocating better relations will almost instantly be accused of being a Kremlin stooge, or worse.
U.S. media accounts often note that “Putin believes” that the U.S. government has repeatedly interfered in Russia’s political process. Given how often Putin publicly makes this claim, that’s hard to suppress. But what they almost never comment on is the rather significant question of whether Putin’s claims are true: Does the U.S., in fact, try to manipulate Russian politics the way Russia now stands accused of interfering in the U.S. election?
The New Yorker article demonstrates how steadfastly this question is ignored. Here’s a classic formulation of it:
So, the New Yorker notes, Putin claims Clinton’s State Department supported and promoted anti-Kremlin protests during Russia’s parliamentary elections, yet offers no evidence. But is that true? Did that happen? As most media outlets typically do, the New Yorker simply does not say. Here’s another classic example from this genre:
Is it true, as Putin claims, that the U.S., in fact, “has long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddle in Russian affairs”? Again, the article believes it’s significant enough to note that Putin claims this, but never bothers to tell its readers whether it is actually true, or even if evidence exists for it.
What makes this steadfast silence so bizarre is that there’s virtually no question that it is true. Some have noted the 1996 Time magazine cover boasting of how U.S. advisers helped the U.S.’ preferred candidate, Boris Yeltsin, win Russia’s presidency. And, of course, the U.S. has continually and repeatedly interfered in the domestic political processes, including democratic elections, of more countries than one can count.
But far more relevant, and more recent, are the very active efforts on the part of the U.S. government to alter Russian civic society more to its liking. Many of these efforts, needless to say, are covert, but many are not. Here’s the National Endowment for Democracy — funded by the U.S. Congress through the State Department — openly touting the dozens of Russian political groups it funds.
In response to all this, one can offer the same cliché that is invoked when it’s pointed out after a terrorist attack that the U.S. has killed countless innocent people all over the world: It doesn’t matter because two wrongs don’t make a right. That may well be true, but just as it’s difficult to actually fight terrorism if one refuses to grapple with its causes or if one objects only when one’s own side is the victim but not the perpetrator, it’s very difficult to credibly object to — let alone prevent — other countries from interfering in U.S. politics if you make no effort to object to U.S. interference in theirs.
And at the very least, U.S. journalists who discuss Putin’s claims in this regard should not just summarize those claims but report on whether they are valid. The refusal to do so is as conspicuous as it is troubling.
That Putin ordered Russian hacking of the DNC’s and John Podesta’s emails in order to help Trump win is now such consecrated orthodoxy that it’s barely acceptable in Decent Company to question it. But that obscures, by design, the rather important fact that the U.S. government, while repeatedly issuing new reports making these claims, has still never offered any actual evidence for them. Even the New Yorker article, which clearly views the theory as valid, acknowledges this fact:
Recall that even hardened Putin critics and Western journalists in Moscow were aghast at how evidence-free these government reports have been. The lack of evidence for these theories does not, of course, prove their falsity. But, given the stakes, it’s certainly worth keeping in mind.
And it further underscores the reasons why no conclusions should be reached absent a structured investigation with the evidence and findings made publicly available. Anonymous claims from agenda-driven, disinformation-dispensing intelligence community officials are about the least reliable way to form judgments about anything, let alone the nature of the threats posed by the governments they want Americans to view as their adversaries.
Denouncing the autocratic abuses of foreign adversaries such as Putin has long been the go-to tactic to distract attention from the failures and evils of U.S. actions — including the unpleasant fact that support for the world’s worst despots has long been, and continues to be, a central precept of U.S. policy. Or, as then-Secretary of State Clinton put it in 2009 about the decades-ruling Egyptian tyrant: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”
That Putin abuses the civic freedoms of Russians plainly answers none of the policy debates over Russia, given how ready and eager the U.S. is to align with the planet’s worst monsters. It’s instead designed to encourage Americans to fix their gaze on bad acts by people thousands of miles away in order to obfuscate the corruption of their own society and savagery by their own leaders. In several places, the New Yorker article warns against exploiting and inflating claims about Putin as a means of ignoring that the real causes of America’s problems reside not in Moscow but at home:
It is true that Putin is used to avoid confronting the fact that Trump is “a phenomenon of America’s own making.” It’s also true that he’s used to avoid confronting the fact that Trump is a byproduct of the extraordinary and systemic failure of the Democratic Party. As long as the Russia story enables pervasive avoidance of self-critique — one of the things humans least like to do — it will continue to resonate no matter its actual substance and value.
And this avoidance of self-examination extends to the West generally:
As Even The New Yorker Admits™, the primary reason for Trump, for Brexit, and for growing right-wing über-nationalism throughout Europe is that prevailing neoliberal policies have destroyed the economic security and future of hundreds of millions of people, rendering them highly susceptible to scapegoating and desperate, in a nothing-to-lose sort of way, for any type of radical change, no matter how risky or harmful that change might be. But all of that gets to be ignored, all of the self-reckoning is avoided, as long we get ourselves to believe that some omnipotent foreign power is behind it all.
Using Russia — yet again — to whitewash our own sins and systemic failures is bad enough. Let’s just hope it doesn’t lead the two countries back into a protracted and devastating Cold War or, worse still, direct military confrontation. With tensions rising and rhetoric becoming harsher and more manipulative, both of those outcomes are more likely than they’ve been in many years.
Top photo: Russian soldiers march along Red Square during a Victory Day parade on May 9, 2013.
There is plenty of room on both sides for cognitive dissonance. I was just discussing with my son, also a lefty, that perhaps the outrageous gullibility of so many on the right is a result of our interpretations and suggested a way of testing this.
If you and your neighbor both go on vacation for two weeks and your neighbor locks his doors and sets his alarm while you do neither, is your neighbor really at fault if your home gets burglarized while his does not?
Do you really think no hackers attempted to penetrate the RNC like the DNC? How likely is that really? Hacking attempts are to be expected. That’s why computer security people tell you to use a firewall and antivirus. The fact that the DNC was hacked is one very good reason not to put the same people in charge of government computer systems.
You seem to be confusing Obama’s reluctance to go to a hot war with Russia to Trump’s (possible) willingness to allow them to meddle in U.S. politics. (As an aside, here’s an interesting article posing that we are now indeed involved in a hot war with Russia: (read past the Trump-bashing…it’ll just set you off) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-to-make-of-donald-trumps-early-morning-wiretap-tweets
Thanks, Glenn, for the time you took to pick apart that schlocky article. My head would spin a bit just deciding where to start. Thanks.
People, many unelected, are picking and pulling at the wiring which may unleash a torrent of unpredictable change. It could be like the Iraq invasion all over again, but on a global scale.
Very well written as always, but reading the comments I think you guys overseas (I’m in EU) still don’t get Russians. Just because they are white, believe in the same God as you and (usually) don’t wear strange headgear doesn’t mean their culture is similar to yours. Start paying attention to the things you consider weird, like Putin riding half-naked on a horse, and think about them not as silly oddities, but as manifestations of a culture principally different from yours. Where the U.S. is based on individualism, Russians are natural collectivists. Where the U.S. ideology is predominantly based on rationalism, Russia is deeply spiritual – even the young people. Where you believe in the abstract qualities of freedom and equality, they believe in the very real Mother Russia – their motherland, the unending green plains. Also, what to most of Europe was just the end of Cold War – an important event and a significant change, but not anything menacing, to most Russians was an actual defeat from which they are still trying to recover (lately they’ve recovered Krym when the hands of those who mean them harm came too close to it by trying to bring Ukraine into EU+NATO – their point of view). No wonder Putin has over 80% support at home. The Russians want their safety back, and Putin tends to get the job done. And the more you threaten them, the more they’ll flock to their leader. The more you take from them, the less they’ll care about the threats. Their national pride is based on their ability to endure hardships, they see themselves as the ones who are constantly under attack. Actually attacking them (even with economic sanctions) is never a good way to get them to back down…
Your comment caught my eye.
It is one of those comments which, even if flawed in some details, is very valuable to consider.
Where do you get your description of Americans? How are they individualists rather than conformists, how are they rationalists rather than magical thinkers prone to bizarre victim-blaming and easily overcome by greed? How do they believe in freedom and equality when they not only tolerate police murders of civilians but praise them, as long as the victims are “one of them” and not “one of us” and reflexively worship the rich, no matter what they did to get their money as long as they got away with whatever that was?
What makes you think most (Anglo-) Americans consider Russians “real” whites, rather than subscribing to some diluted version of Hitler’s hierarchy, just as they did before WWII and a century before that? (BTW, did you know Lenin’s parents’ marriage at the time it took place would have been illegal in most states? This speaks volumes.)
The people who come here to comment — who even know about The Intercept — are not typical of America.
As for how Russians see themselves — they have been under an inordinate amount of attack throughout their history. Their ability to suffer hardships, and to achieve in the arts and the sciences on the same par as Westerners do in spite of it, is well known and inspires a good amount of fearful bewilderment. Their long history of lacking good leaders (for the most part, and most of the time) is tragic. I don’t know why most Americans would hope for something better, for them. No evidence that they do.
1. Obama and Clinton differed some (by the end almost not at all) on the Russian threat? So what?
2. A Cold War is dangerous? To who – the Russians folded last time and communism gave way to a kleptocracy where at least Russians can travel and discuss much more than behind the Iron Wall.
There is little doubt a new cold war added to sanctions will most likely either break or shrink Putin’s siloviki state – what dont you like about that ?
3. The media do report that many US organizations were involved in supporting democracy, anti-corruption etc in Russia as many other countries and the US State department too. Putin finds this offensive and so apparently do you – wonder why? The Russians also interfere via RT and lobbyists etc but Western democracies aren’t fussed with the spread with ‘factual’ news.
4. No one provides details of (particularly successful) intelligence breaches – you should know that. It just tells your opponent how much you know.
Wonder why an ‘investigative journalist’ has a blank on something as obvious as that.
5. Sorry – fixating on the US electoral system being hacked is less important than the lefts obsessions with occupy anything and the crisis in transgender toilet availability ?
I’m a little sad as I came away from your writing about Snowden taking you seriously but finding you aping Russian propaganda policy of 1. you guys disagree so its all confused. 2. things could get really bad like soviet times if you respond to Russian interference 3. You are involved in Russia so why cant we hack your democracy? 4. Show us the classified details – no huh ! 5. The really important stuff is anything else but the fact we attacked your core democratic institution. Talk about that stuff instead.
Your whole spiel could have been written in the Kremlin.
Investigative my arse. Another hack running interference for unpleasant regimes.
Putin would have ya Russianou locked up or at least fired but we will listen to you white anting the liberal and democratic institutions that permit you.
Thanks for the reference to the Atlantic article. If you hate it – it must be good.
d
“Atlantic article?”
New Yorker, honey.
You didn’t even get that right.
If you believe Putin brought us Trump, then you must believe the Democrats, from President Obama on down, are the singularly most inept political party in the history of humanity. So — if you actually give credence to this claim — start there and work backwards.
As for the rest of us, we kinda think a solid investigation would be a good preamble.
Nowhere did we so much as hint that it isn’t necessary.
http://m.democracynow.org/stories/16976
http://m.democracynow.org/stories/17115
http://m.democracynow.org/stories/16978
Am not sure I’d described Obama as “accommodationist”. He was being realistic about US leverage; no US president is going to do much about what happens in Russia’s back yard. Not sending lethal armaments to Ukraine makes perfect sense.
Excellent and BALANCED reporting. Great work. Both NEEDED and refreshing.
It seems, that this article tries to support Trump on a far more intellectual and morally correct level. But it is not very objective.
For example it muddles its verdict with the perception of a destroyed “economic security”. This is exaggerated and pretty much a alt-right / Trump narrative and simply not true.
It also showcases, that Clinton’s way of rejecting Russia is dangerous but doesn’t really show the dangers of the “friendship” of Russia and the current administration. Because Obama still “installed” an embargo and diplomatic penalties for Russia. Trump is actively helping Putin.
There are few major flaws or deceptions in this article – but it is just again double down on the issue of Hillary Clinton. IMHO she would have done a far better job and would have been a president for “all” Americans (for some progressives and democrats maybe a bit too much) – compared to Trump.
If you say this article “tires to support Trump,” you haven’t read the article. Saying that Glenn Greenwald is adopting the “alt-right/Trump narrative” is another outrageous claim. You are furthering the “either you’re with us or against us” MaCarthyism narrative by making such claims.
#1: Criticize Democrats and left-of-center people in general for not being consistent in their hatred of Russia, for accepting Obama’s soft treatment of Russia and now embracing a hard-line stance against Russia, but it’s possible Obama was wrong. And furthermore, the Russian hacking of the election does change things, seeing as free and fair elections, because they are literally the thing that makes a democracy rather than an autocracy, are sacred (and now it’s personal) – ask Obama, who changed his posture on Russia in the last months of his presidency in response to the DNC hack.
#2: There’s a difference between the brinkmanship of the Cold War that made nuclear holocaust a real threat, and signaling to Russia that its (probable) interference in our politics and disrespect of international law (not to mention disregard for the lives of Syrian men, women and children) is unacceptable and will not go unpunished. We can enact sanctions against Russia and exclude them from institutions like the former-G8-now-G7 without having to worry too much about war of any kind. Vladimir Putin is no idiot; he’s not going to get his country into a war with the United States. The worst he’d do is ratchet up cyber-attacks against the U.S. government and civil society, which is dangerous, but not nuclear Holocaust (and can perhaps be prevented to some extent with better cyber-security). The idea that we shouldn’t push Russia too hard because we have to avoid another Cold War is not only unfounded because it overestimates Putin’s willingness to go to war with the U.S. (what a great way to revive NATO!), but it could lead to a foreign policy of appeasement that has disastrous consequences (think Germany 1939). Besides, relations between the U.S. and Iran can hardly be called warm, and yet we were able to achieve the Iran Nuclear Deal; even enemies can cooperate.
#3: Glenn, I’m surprised at you for insinuating the media isn’t doing its job because it’s not investigating U.S. interference in Russian politics. You and other Intercept writers have written extensively about how Donald Trump makes incredible statements without providing any evidence to support them, and have never once suggested that the media should investigate any of those claims (even though the media has investigated many of those claims – remember when that one journalist verified that planes in the 80s actually did have armrests after Trump was accused of sexual assault as a passenger?) In fact, you criticize the U.S. government for not providing enough evidence that Russia hacked the election in the very next section of the article! At least the U.S. government laid out its precise accusations against the Russian government and some modicum of evidence to support those accusations, rather than presenting the media with a vague and completely unverified statements. The very sentence that follows your underlined portion of the New Yorker article (“Vladimir Putin, who is quick…”) is “(No evidence was provided for the accusation)” that the U.S. meddles in Russian affairs. Also, remember the Russian president made his statement about U.S. interference in Russian politics in the aftermath of anti-Putin pro-democracy rallies that looked like they could threaten his power, and which were ultimately crushed.
And if the U.S. is interfering in Russian politics, it certainly isn’t working. Putin’s grip on power is as strong as ever, and even if we wanted to hack emails from Putin’s party and use them to lessen his election prospects, the Kremlin has a stranglehold on Russian media, especially television media where most Russians get their news. No significant criticism of Putin ever shows up on Russian media.
Furthermore, let’s acknowledge that there is a big difference between Putin’s Russia and Obama’s or even Trump’s America. If the U.S. government is interfering in Russian politics, it’s interfering in the affairs of an aggressive, strikingly authoritarian (dare I say neo-fascist) kleptocracy. If Putin is interfering with U.S. politics, he’s interfering with the affairs of a functional (albeit deeply, deeply flawed and unequal) liberal democracy. That doesn’t give us the right to meddle in Russia’s affairs, but if you really care about the survival of liberal democracy in this world, it should scare you.
#5: The article correctly says Trump is a phenomenon of America’s (not just Hillary Clinton’s or the Democrats’) for a reason. I’ve argued this before – yes the Democratic Party is elitist, yes it is disconnected from the plight of the average worker, yes it is too conservative, and yes it should have made more overtures to white working and middle class people. Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate, too conservative on some key issues, and didn’t reach out enough to working class voters. But a) that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about the very real possibility that an adversarial foreign power which is fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy influenced our election, and thus compromised the very bedrock of our liberal democracy (if indeed it did, after all, who’s next? The UK? Germany? France?)
And b) Hillary Clinton lost primarily because America’s civic infrastructure has deteriorated, and because most media outlets (including such varied organizations as Fox News, CNN, the New York Times and, yes, The Intercept) pushed a false equivalency narrative with regards to the two major party presidential candidates in 2016, and failed to properly communicate to voters the flaws in Donald Trump’s policies (or lack thereof), the facts of the issues the candidates discussed, the stakes of the election, etc. It’s hard to sell progressiveness to a reactionary public, let alone get people to go to the polls – especially when unions, student organizations and civil society groups have become apolitical, ceased to engage with the majority of Americans, or all but disappeared. I’ve written before, if there is an AFL-CIO or NAACP or Urban League or ACLU or Democratic Party presence in my hometown of Syracuse, I’ve never seen any signs of it. Maybe that’s why we have a Republican congressman right now. Plus, plutocrats have been telling working and middle white Americans their enemy is not their fellow rich white countrymen, but brown people, for centuries. It’s hard to compete against that narrative. Try telling a guy who lost his job to Mexico that he should be mad at Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Plus, it didn’t help that while everyone (and I do mean everyone, no matter what their political affiliation, ideological preference, age, race, gender, ethnicity, etc.) associated Hillary Clinton with the email scandal, which only exacerbated the reputation as corrupt she received from years of Republican “right-wing conspiracy-” making, the media gave tons of free coverage to Trump, hired a host of Kellyanne Conway-esque full-time Trump apologists, and didn’t interrogate his policies and lies until the very end of the campaign (and halfheartedly at that).
Great summary of the most important issues and dangers in escalation of anti-Russia hysteria , strangely reminding the all-explaining single root cause conspiracy theories of Protocols of Elders of Zion or Malleus Maleficarum. I have just learnt that Witch Hammer was best selling book, only second to Bible, for two centuries. The conspiracy theories sell well. Printed Media is the main pusher of paranoia exactly because of some implicit knowledge of that.That is why TV and web based media are more reasonable here. One of the most serious damages and scars left after this is over is losing trust to newspapers of record and the increased fragmentation of discourses into full unmanageability by participating actors.
We stopped believing anything that the Russians did since September 1, 1983. Rescue007.org.
Thank you for what you do. I don’t always agree with your view on things but I am eternally grateful for you doing the job the msm propagandists refuse to.
See, this article is a bait and switch. You get the impression that Greenwald, who clearly doesn’t like the New Yorker , is going to dish on what’s wrong with their piece. But he really just gives five reasons to think that, even if the New Yorker is pushing a line, they’re being fair by including lots of things Greenwald thinks are embarrassing to the media, elites (whoever they are), and the Democratic establishment. So I guess we should all go out and read this New Yorker piece, huh? It must be a solid piece.
Strobe Talbott is a member of the David Rockefeller founded and chaired Trilateral Commission.
This is the most recent Trilateral Commission membership list, at the Trilateral Commission’s official website:
http://trilateral.org/download/files/membership/TC_list_1_17.pdf
Strobe Talbott, President, The Brookings Institution, Washington
David Rockefeller, Founder, Honorary Chairman and Lifetime Trustee, Trilateral Commission, New York
Okay, given everything here is correct and true it is still scary that the Russians might be doing to the U.S. everything the U.S. has done to the rest of the world. It is not the U.S. only that has made Russia appear to be menacing. Putin has been perpetuating this menace as well. He wants Russia to be a major player in the world and to do that Russia has to be a superpower. All the world’s major players are also big powers (except Japan maybe, but Japan has the U.S. military behind it). Putin is dangerous even to Russians. The U.S. may have brought this on itself but it does not mean that Russia is not dangerous to the U.S. Let’s not try to compare Russia to Allende’s Chille, or Mossadegh’s Iran. Putin’s people are not nice.
And what are the “horrors” suffered under the Cold War? I know people living under Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had a bad time of it, but what “horrors” did anyone else suffer?
Glenn…. the narrative is pushed from above, from organizations, into the grassrots. Citizens are now protesting Trump on Russian conspiracy, rather than on the most pressing of issues. This, too, is dangerous. MOBs don’t think, individuals do, and individuals need the right information. Please keep us informed. Remember this….from HRC friends, the Rothschilds, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21709028-how-contain-vladimir-putins-deadly-dysfunctional-empire-threat-russia
Referred to you by Sane Progressive, well done!
please try to find another word aside from “dangerous”. it’s one of the most overused words in moralistic journalism today. don’t just say something is dangerous: point out the dangers. why is it dangerous? think it through. use a thesaurus. do something to avoid using vacuous words that people pour their own meanings into.
also, you may want to review state department briefings and some of the more intellectual commentators out there (Chomsky is passed his prime — bless his heart) regarding Syria and Ukraine. State Department briefings also provide quite a few clues, if they haven’t been completely sanitized — the questions are especially important, much more important than the very predictable answers you have memorized.
also, see Dana Rohrabacher’s questions to Victoria Nuland. the story of Ukraine is not the one you’ve been fed. (e.g., supporting neo-nazi groups, who is doing the killing in Crimea and on another note, that most ISIS members come from Chechnya.
And don’t forget to credit your sources!
That’s not how agenda journalism aka propaganda works, buddy.
Another word that ought to be trash-canned, along with “dangerous,” is that ubiquitous and annoying and completely unhelpful “scary.” An abraço virtual from nearly Búzios.
Has everyone already forgotten that Bill and Hillary Clinton had ties to Russia. Remember The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from Russia. John Podesta also had business and financial ties to Russia and Putin.
See attached:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/03/03/peter-schweizer-trump-vs-clintons-russia-ties-guess-who-always-got-free-pass.html.
Between the crybaby campus nutbars shutting down free speech on campus and these ridiculous and dangerous Russian conspiracy theories, the American Left is dead. No leaders worth following, nobody wants to listen to lectures from aloof intersectional feminist morons. Did you see how the Democrats dug up a 76 year old corn pone fossil, former governor of a 90% white red state and put him a redneck diner exclusively full of white people to give their rebuttal? That happened because not only are the Democrats extremely racist and therefore start with their identity pandering, they have no leaders under 60 who aren’t toxic and alienating to over 3/4 of the country.
The Lunatic Leftists and the Sore Loser Democrats won’t stop until they’ve destroyed the Democratic Party and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group of liars hypocrites and backstabbers. Good riddance. The Dems have already lost 1,000 seats since 2010, they’ve lost the post-millennial generation to guys like Ben Shapiro and I can’t wait to see them lose even more, can’t wait to see Progressive Hero Liz Warren lose her seat in the Senate to a retired baseball player. Good riddance.
But hey, do me a favor and don’t ever change. Double down on losers like Bernie and Keith and their reliance on nonsense gender theories from aloof Ivory Tower Eggheads like Michael Kimmel.
Please. Just keep being you.
“And at the very least, U.S. journalists who discuss Putin’s claims in this regard should not just summarize those claims but report on whether they are valid.”
That’s backward. It is up to US journalists to challenge Putin to back up his claims, which he clearly did not. It’s not a surprise that Glennwald takes this tack. He gives Putin a pass at every opportunity. Also not a surprise that he would embed a Chomsky video as Glennwald is hardly less one-sided than Chomsky.
You don’t get it – Putin often presents evidence for his statements, which is ignored by US journalists and his reasoned arguments are presented as mere unsubstantiated claims.
This site sure does a lot mutual backscratching with Russia Today. You’re all TOTALLY anti establishment rebels! What’s happening now isn’t neo-Macarthyism. For that to be true, Russia would have to be communist instead of a corrupt ethnocentric autocracy. Anyone who doubts Russia’s involvement with trump look at the Putin administration has been doing in Europe the past few years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/us/politics/russian-hackers-election.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-21/vladimir-putin-is-winning-the-french-election
http://www.politico.eu/article/europe-russia-hacking-elections/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/german-spy-chief-russian-hackers-could-disrupt-elections-bruno-kahl-cyber-attacks
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/inside-cunning-unprecedented-hack-ukraines-power-grid/
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/lithuania-accuses-russian-hackers-of-cyber-assault-after-collapse-of-over-300-websites-1.942155
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/20/the-baltic-elves-taking-on-pro-russian-trolls.html
http://www.politico.eu/article/latvia-putin-clinton-trump-russia-unitedstates/
http://www.politico.eu/article/latvia-putin-clinton-trump-russia-unitedstates/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/europe/nato-russia-cyberwarfare.html
Question: Do all your arguments mean that it’s OK that US “help” in the 1996 russian presidental elections is allowed, something natural and to be cherished and afterwards forgotten, and in other elections for example in Georgia or Ucraine… but when the Russians do the same in other countries then it’s evil? Quot licet Jovi non licet bovi?
From an outsiders view – I’m no US citizen – I doubt in any statement of both sides without a prove. There were too much lies in the last time.
A final remark: One Nobel Price for Economics was presented for game theory. The work proved that a slightly modified tit for tat brings best results and exactly that we see in the moment between the players in the US and Russia.
As always I read this knowing Glenn will put words into my mouth to fit his Narrative. Lazy Journalism but Glenn comes here from a different perspective.
This is not Journalism.
It is a case that Glenn is presenting to a jury whose intelligence he underestimates.
No, I won’t attack Glenn!
Why bother?
This little box is not proper format to take him on anyway.
Setting himself up as the “Voice” is a Deja Vu moment! It is as if Glenn has stolen the Fox News, Rush Limbaugh model. He is the only one to be trusted, funny how that works. This doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. But that is why Glenn has always shied away from serious roundtables.
I personally love his childish inference that someone is going to come forth and begin naming names as far as sources!
Really!
What a cute world you live in.
??????
Thanks for playing.
You can tolerate Russia and attempt to co-exist peacefully with them without aiding and abetting the highjacking of our election. It doesn’t have to be either/or. I don’t want nuclear war with Russia or any other country, but that doesn’t mean we should turn our head when members of our own government collude with another country’s government for personal or political gain.
Glenn seems to make a good case for turning his own words against him.
He has issues and they play out in his writing.
Get over yourself, get out of the way and do the Job that you purport Intercept is here for.
Breitbart with a bit of a twist!
This ends up being a waste of time!
The Russophobia scare mongering is reaching a level I never thought could happen in 2017. This Neo McCarthyism for political advantage played by the left is a dangerous stupid game. Most Americans see right through this. I’m sick of hearing about Russia.
Democrats are not attacking Putin or Russia. We are attacking Trump and his cronies for colluding with them, then doing everything in their power to cover up the evidence. Is your assertion that we’re risking a Nuclear exchange with Russia by simply calling for a legitimate investigation into Trump based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence?
Hillary Clinton had to endure 8 separate Benghazi investigations despite being exonerated over and over again.
Besides, one would think Trump would WANT to have a real chance to clear his name on the Russia connections. It would be a huge boost to his dismal approval rating.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the problem is that there are two separate complaints which are being conflated, and which should not be.
The first is the idea that the Russians “hacked the election”. That’s a very dramatic phrase, and totally misleading. Nobody at all claims they hacked voting machines or altered the count. The very most which is claimed is that they hacked the DNC’s mail servers and leaked the contents — and the DNC themselves admit that what was published, whether it was a leak by a DNC member (as WikiLeaks claims) or from a hacker, is real. If “hacking the election” means “telling us the truth about what the unpleasant things the party does in secret”, then frankly I would like to see much more “hacking the election”. Every single other thing which the Russians are accused of doing is not illegal or even particularly unusual, and none of the things they are accused of doing on this head are as bad as some of the things the CIA has done in the past in other countries. This assertion is pure sensationalism, presented without proof, and is as tiresome as the whole Benghazi non-issue that the Republicans were pushing for so long.
The other issue is whether the Russians have undue, possibly illegal, dealings and influence with Trump (and the members of his administration). This is actually a big deal, and the disclosures so far demonstrate that at least some of the charges are true.
The problem is that Democratic partisans want to conflate those two claims because they believe the evidence for the latter will make people believe the former, while Republican partisans want to conflate the claims because they believe the lack of evidence for (and the lack of seriousness of) the former will lead to people glossing over the latter.
If you really want Trump investigated, then drop the idiotic claims about “hacking the election”, at least until you have actual evidence for an actual crime happening, and focus on the latter. Permitting the two claims to be merged makes your case weaker.
How can someone not investigate the former though? No substantive public evidence has really been put through I’ll give you that, but a whole lot of connections lends credence. Connections between Trump and his cabinet and Russia coincides with the hacking of the DNC.
If people close to Trump have possibly lied under oath, colluded with whomever leaked the information, and had a huge steak in the outcome of such acts; then seeking after the information of both is intrinsically linked. You cannot ignore a possible crime by focusing instead on another crime that is left up to interpretation. Trying to prove lying under oath or a conspiracy is hard to do unless you focus on the acts that raised the questions.
Getting mad at a phrase so much that you’d rather dismiss the allegations is falling into rhetoric yourself.
If you want to investigate the idea that the Russians “hacked the election”, then fine. But it’s a waste of time: as I already pointed out, there’s only one thing Russia is accused of doing which is even illegal, and since — if they actually did it, which Wikileaks denies — all it ended up doing was revealing the less-than-pleasant truth about some less-than-pleasant people, you’re going to have a hard time making a case that any of the accusations deserves action. (Not after we already lowered the moral bar on hacking by using Stuxnet — if you don’t already know about that, go look it up and prepare to be disgusted.)
You won’t be able to get any other countries to go along with any punishment for Russia based on the “hacking the election” claims, even if they turn out to be true, and since the “hackers” are presumably not in U.S. jurisdiction they can’t be jailed for it. So it would simply be a waste of time — and you run the very real risk of making the electorate say “why are you so upset that we learned what the DNC was saying when they thought nobody could hear?” and getting a backlash. If you really want to waste time on something which may end up biting you in the rear, I can’t stop you, but I can tell you in advance that that’s what you’re doing.
It would be much wiser to focus on Trump and Co.’s deals with the Russians. There seems to be proof that at least some of it happened, for one thing, and unlike the DNC e-mail leak, nobody can claim any of it was good for the public. Plus, since the people being accused are in the U.S., once the accusations are proved it will be possible to take definite action, which is always a bonus.
(It’s funny how Democrats loyal to the Clinton cabal were all saying “pick your battles” a few weeks ago when talking about the confirmation hearings the Democrats refused to unite and refuse to approve, but now they’re all for wasting time on something pointless.)
If the foundation premise is that Russia hacked the elections should that be the basis for further injuries….. Rather an uproven accusation is made than everything follows its lead…..once obama did the sanctions on unproven evidence everything else has been built on a false accusation and provocation….. At least obama kept his cool until clinton influence grew
I am tired of hearing this “fake” arguments.
Only because the public didn’t received sufficient evidence, it doesn’t mean, that there is no evidence. In fact, can you recall any operations against another company (diplomatic or military) where the US proofed (directly) their action with evidence? I can’t.
Even if it comes to the Cuban missile crisis, the government “claimed” that the Russians are building missiles silos on Cuba. The supportive evidence (aerial pictures} were declassified decades after the evidence.
Evidence of a hack, would most probably uncover the sources of the intelligence community- which would be “counter-intuitive”.
Again – hacking the election doesn’t mean, that there was major voter fraud (nobody claims this) – but the hacking (and releasing of information) of one political party and not the other.
Plus – it seems, that so many people in the current administration were “in bed” with Russia, that the Trump administration rather looks like a unrealistic political movie than reality.
Trump is the man that may keep us out of WW3….. Pick a side….. Trump or War! This is a witch hunt to war….thank you Glenn for seeing so clearly on this!
Convenient to leave the facts that Russia didn’t interfere with American electoral process until 2016. Sure, Obama was dovish in his outlook but infecting a sovereign’s electoral process is an act of war. Recall those wars in Europe to decide succession to the throne. In other words, Russia crossed the line in 2016.
Secondly, Trump has lied repeatedly about himself, his businesses linked to Russia. The lies continue with his cronies staffing the white house. Appoint a special prosecutor, disclose his tax returns and come clean.
So the US didn’t cross the line in 1996? Can you please explain?
@AJ Castellitto
That is non-sense. Clinton (even if you would like to call her hawkish) is a far more considerate politician compared to Trump. There is an inherent risk, due to his thin skin and his erraticism. Yes the Democrats might risk a confrontation with Russia. But Steve Bannon together with Trump might just affront one far more dangerous opponent: China (besides of opposing “world Islam” and Mexico — latter obviously wouldn’t stand a chance against the US Forces).
Trump risks an economical war with China, which cannot be won. Further Steve Bannon (who rather runs the presidency) said openly, that he is sure, that the US will be involved in a military conflict in the South China Sea.
Further – besides of the scary outlook, that the United States turns into a fascist country, buddying with Russia has it’s own military risks. The US has it’s own interests. How long can Trump swallow Putin’s provocation, until he is bursting and will do something stupid (and given the track record of this administration, they will do it incompetently)?!
Don’t be so stupid and just listen to the Trump campaign narrative.
Glenn Greenwald is one of the few journalists whose facts I don’t have to check.
A journalist of the highest order.
Yeah, you never feel the need to check someone’s facts when they’re telling you exactly what you want to hear
The key point is that it is a red herring to detract from DNC corruption in Primaries, and Seth Rich’s murder. DNC is scared the truth will come out. DNC elite is so swollen on corporate corrupting money it can’t move.
I love how CNN puts Vladimir Pozner on-air and then try to get him to bash Putin. Do these idiots realize that Pozner is a triple citizen (US/French/Russian)? Not once do any of them acknowledge this. Of course they won’t. If they did, they couldn’t try to score points by hyping the “Putin is Hitler, evil, nasty” garbage.
Some important facts that aren’t being mentioned here in the US. Even by the Intercept.
Almost 90% of average Russians support Putin. Why?
They want a strong leader.
They’re tired of being treated as a third world country.
They don’t like foreigners telling them what to do. They must have a
US style democracy to have REAL democracy.
Russia has only been a sovereign state for 26 years. You can’t expect a
perfect country overnight.
Actual proof of Putin directly interfering in US elections will never be completely disclosed. Why? Because it’s “classified”. This gives Trump and the rest of his cronies the perfect cover. Congress will want hearings. The solution? Closed door sessions. This then means someone will leak.
Who’s going to leak? CIA? FBI? DOJ? NSA?
The govt. will never have to disclose it. But they can hype the hell out of it to promote the Perpetual War with Russia. I mean, we do have to justify the mega trillion dollar military industrial complex.
The rich and powerful will continue to manipulate and repeat the “Putin is Hitler” message. The almost 100% corporate owned media and their “news superstars” will obediently do as they’re told and continue to put this out.
Thank you, Mr. Greenwald, for being a beacon of commonsense and level-headedness in these troubled times.
This is your best article yet on this whole thing. Pretty well balanced and factual. Some of your co-workers are clearly not truthful and honest and probably working as an agent of an adversarial group!
PropOrNot?
I recall in 2008, it was Georgia that attacked South Ossetia. It seems, that Georgia was promised membership in NATO, bringing it right NATO right up to Russia’s border.
Imagine if the Russians were on the beaches of Florida in 1962, it’s like that.
NATO is military force with out an enemy, so the US must create one.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/georgia/2521987/Vladimir-Putin-vows-Russia-will-retaliate-against-Georgia.html
NATO was always a tool to limit the threat of Soviet expansion. Still is. The enemy of NATO is the Soviet state, the Warsaw pact, and now Russian attempts at expansion. Not much has changed regarding the goal of NATO.
The USSR and Warsaw Pact are gone. Russia is not only a shadow of the former USSR, it had to suffer the inflow of ethnic Russian refugees from former Soviet republics. With an economy 10X that of Russia, and 5X the population, Western Europe doesn’t need the US in NATO to counter Russia. All NATO has done for the US is provide diplomatic cover for US “Interventions” by having European countries provide token participation in adventures that should never have happened in the first place. DUMP NATO NOW.
The fact that neo-cons thinks the US “won” the Cold War is scary. If you think of that confrontation in terms of winning and losing then you know a nuclear war is possible, today. The Cold War was a massive mistake that required sane people to fight like hell so it did not become a disaster for mankind. It is clear to me that the US economic and political failure and the refusal of elites to acknowledge the failure means we are on the same path to collapse that occurred for a USSR that ignored the facts that its economic system was failing its people.
@Tim Agreed. Nail on the head.
The biggest reason, that West won the cold war was, that the West was twice as large in population and even larger in other aspects. However, the Eastern bloc was not defeated in a battle, but its elites joined the less egalitarian West.
With all these assertions coming in a steady stream everyday why you would not be wondering why independent investigations have not begun. Would you agree that if this level of speculation (not all is speculation) was aimed at a Democrat’s administration the investigations would have started the day they took the oath, if not before? Your efforts would be better spent in trying to find the truth not in throwing sand in the gears. If there’s no there there so be it. It’s not as if we haven’t spent huge amounts of taxpayers money chasing white whales before.
I’m shocked by how many of my “intelligent” friends have fallen for this
propaganda. It’s Orwellian to see them obsessed over Russia. It’s
like mass psychosis.
Cultivating mass psychosis…
Agreed
Agreed, a daily demonstration of the power of propaganda.
GREENWALD: Get the facts straight: “Indeed, Obama — after Russia annexed Crimea — rejected bipartisan demands to arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine and actively sought a partnership with Putin to bomb Syria. And, of course, in 2012 — years after Russia invaded Georgia” There was a re-run of the 1990s vote, which should have give Crimea a choice. So the Crimea rejoined the Russian Federation. Georgia attacked Russian civilian enclaves in Georgia and Russia retaliated. Fuck look it up!
False!
There’s a difference between what Obama says and what he does.
Great article, Glenn. Truth hits everybody!
“We should think about whether it is an act of war or not,” Shaheen said Thursday, referring to the election hacking. ”
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/322002-dem-senator-we-should-determine-if-russian-election-hacking-was-act-of
The more writers a story has, the more lies it contains.
There is one indirect piece of evidence that Putin is interfering in other countries’ elections: the remarkable parallells between the US and French elections. First, you have the populist ranter (Trump, Le Pen), whom everybody says can’t win, then the moderte candidate (Hillary, Fillon), who is being discredited and, finally, the dark horse (Sanders, Macron). What brought Hillary’s vote down to “rigging range” (4 – 5%) was that far too many of those who supported Sanders in the primaries didn’t vote in the general election (50% turnout). It looks likse the same scam is being prepared in France. And the common denominator is Putin.
George Soros interfered in both those elections too, but that’s OK because he’s a totalitarian globalist technocrat.
the Trump fandom, like a pestilence, has taken up residence on this site
To balance the cognitive dissonance and idiocy…
that is hilarious. I think I understand your username.
These situations are similar because all the western countries, especially those in North America and the eu, are experiencing the same globalization that’s robbing our country’s citizens of its freedom, cultures, and money.
Uh, exit polls show that more of Sanders’ supporters voted for Clinton in the general in 2016 (around 95%) than Clinton’s supporters in the 2008 primaries voted for Obama in the 2008 general (around 90%).
I know you Clinton dead-enders want to blame Sanders and his supporters for your candidate’s incredibly inept, useless campaign, but the truth is: other than people who voted for Clinton in the primaries, nobody in the country wanted Clinton as President. All the votes she got in the general who weren’t her supporters in the primary were votes against Trump, not votes for her. Independents, who are now the largest group of registered voters, hated her, and they hate anyone who embraces the same policies she de facto does (deregulation for the banks and the rich, more war, disastrously disadvantageous trade agreements, shilling for fossil fuel companies, etc. etc. etc.). The Democratic Party is only going to keep losing as long as the Clintons and their small army of think-alike corporatists are in charge.
And plenty of Dems/Independents hated Bernie, Liar Do-Nothing King, too… So, I guess we’re just screwed.
Democrats who hate Sanders are largely fools, since Sanders has been more effective at fighting for the things that Democrats say they want than most of the party. (It’s an interesting exercise to go back and look at policy positions which the Clintons, either in the White House or Hillary as Senator/Secretary of State, have championed, and which turned out to be disasters in hindsight. In a remarkably large number of cases — repeal of Glass-Steagall, “three-strikes” sentencing laws, welfare “reform”, NAFTA, the invasion of Iraq — Sanders predicted exactly what ended up happening, and stood against those positions, while the Clintons ignored him and charged onward anyway. You may not like him, but there is no question whose record is actually better.)
As for independents, I have yet to hear from any Independent who hates Sanders who didn’t vote for Trump anyway, but I kept hearing, and continue to hear, Independents who were enthusiastic about Sanders and hated Clinton enough to either not vote or to vote for Trump.
Clinton was, when all is said and done, just a really stupid candidate to choose. A slight majority of people who are tied up in the Democratic Party very strongly liked her, but outside of that group she was massively unpopular, the least-popular figure in the party of national standing. The only candidate who would have had a bigger handicap would have been Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and she ended up being hired by the Clinton campaign.
The Vicar
gives me hope for the comment section at The Intercept
Thank you.
Please, keep talking. Just . . . keep talking.
(And the fact they hated her is not a bad thing. It is instead the glimmer of hope we’ve still go.)
Le Pen’s farther participated in elections in 2002 with the same populist programme as his daughter has now (anti-EU, anti-migrants etc.), he was backed by almost one fifth of the French. Nobody even knew about Putin then, nobody remembered about Russia. Why can’t you accept that there might be some other denominators?
During Congressional confirmation hearings,…
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/graham-sessions-trump-russia-235597
That’s great isn’t it?
But still the DNC is just pissed cause they got found out; they’re fucking liars too.
Hopefully the RNC, DNC, CNN MSNBC Fox NRA NAACP, etc they all get hacked to know the truth, to learn what the private positions vs public positions are and how they differ.
You think this is great?
The United States Attorney General lies under oath to Congress?
about his connections to and communications with Russia?
The same Russia that is being investigated for interfering with US elections?
…investigated by the man who lied about his connections to same?
I don’t think you’re serious.
“Lies under oath” is your interpretation RMD. At the end of the day, what is it that Americans are so insecure about? What is the “smoking gun”? What will be the criminal activity? Interference in an election is something the US prides itself upon in its “nation building” and “regime change” policies.
“…is your interpretation”…
apologists for Trump have great difficulty admitting to lying when it occurs. Some have referred to Upton Sinclair’s observation. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
For others unencumbered by fealty to a corrupt pol, detecting a lie is fairly easy.
• Does person making a statement know it to be false? (Sessions did)
• Is there evidence as to veracity of person’s statement? (Facts conflict with Session’s testimony. He is the highest ranking attorney in the US. He knows of the importance of speaking truthfully under oath. Abundant sources confirm communications with Russia)
• Does person making statement have direct knowledge of the truth? (Sessions communicated directly with Russian agents, Ambassador)
Sessions is on TV just now explaining in what way his testimony was not a lie.
He’s blathering on with a shit-eating grin reminiscent of Slick Willy.
He mentioned he was a church man, too (honestly).
He’s the sickness that permeates our government.
“He’s the sickness that permeates our government.”
He’s the sickness that permeates our society.
Fixed that for you.
Tough talking! It’s easy when you’ve lost so much ground that you have no way to take action, and thus there is no expectation of any follow-up. When the Democrats held a majority in the Senate under Bush, I remember Pelosi telling us that impeachment was not on the table — because that would have required action, and Democrats don’t do action any more. But now? There’s no chance of this going anywhere with Republicans in majority and holding the Presidency, so she can go ahead and shoot her mouth off; it may even fool some party loyalists into thinking she actually means what she’s saying, even though she doesn’t.
“there’s no chance this is going anywhere”?
…and she’s “shooting her mouth off”?
you have the nerve to make that comment in light of the seriousness of what is under investigation and with the scale of dishonesty around illegal conduct with a foreign power we consider an enemy? who we have sanctions against?
what is wrong with you? to equivocate so?
Have you no moral compass? Is your fetid ideology all encompassing?
Listen, you lackluster excuse for a human being, in 2006 the Democrats had a ready-made case against Bush:
The Constitution says that duly signed and ratified treaties have the same “weight” as the Constitution itself. The treaties we signed at the end of World War II forbid preemptive attacks on other countries. Bush made a preemptive attack on Iraq.
Pelosi not only wouldn’t take action herself, she denied the possibility that anyone would take action. After that, the idea that the Democrats actually stand for anything worthwhile was implausible at best. The way that the Democrats then refused to pursue any significant legislation at all after they lost their 60-member majority in the Senate (but still held a majority), didn’t force the Republicans to actually carry out an actual talk-all-night filibuster even for the debt ceiling crises, signified that the party is constantly looking for any excuse whatsoever to avoid actually having to do their jobs.
So it’s highly amusing that now, when Pelosi’s ability to take action is nil, because her party no longer has the votes to do anything, she’s threatening. Obviously she can’t carry through her threats — the Democrats lack the ability. And the fact that, when she had the ability to take action, she actively refused to do so, means that this is just meaningless showboating.
Which, these days, is all the Democrats are good for. And I speak as one who has been a registered Democrat since reaching voting age (although I’m going to switch to Independent as soon as I can be bothered to go make the change — the last 20 years have just been one failure after another by the party, and enough is enough; if I’m going to lose ground anyway, I might as well keep my conscience clean and vote Green).
You seem intent on ignoring what is happening with the current administration while harping about an old establishment hag that I have not regard for nor interest in.
…and lackluster? …now that’s just mean. You take that back!
When it comes to this kind of thing, there is nothing we can do about the current administration, so why worry about it? We can oppose policies which directly impact us, but this doesn’t. Congress won’t do anything — the Republicans won’t and the Democrats wouldn’t even if they could — and the judiciary doesn’t have the authority.
And that brings us back, once again, to the failures of Democrats: it’s possible that we could do something now, if the Democrats had actually used the Obama administration to rein in the excesses of the Bush administration. But they didn’t, so we can’t.
(Oh, and finally: people like you really swallow things hook, line, and sinker. There is nothing Russia has done which countries which we have declared allies have not exceeded. Human rights abuses? Go check out Saudi Arabia. Russia has been declared an enemy not because they are evil or horrifying but because they get in the way of the powers that be and we, for the time being, are unable to buy them off. To pretend that this is more serious than, say, the many times Israel has been caught stabbing us in the back with no reprisal is disingenuous.)
I do not agree with the view, sadly much in evidence on this blog, that “there is nothing we can do about the current administration”
Earlier, you posted that Pelosi could have done something, and didn’t. I should have replied that I completely agree with you on that. It was disgusting. However, I do understand part of the rationale, when, scaled across the political spectrum, very likely could initiate political retribution as de riguer.
And the world has ample experience with this tactic. But I do agree, it was a calculated Ford-ism… to preserve the smooth operation of government.
Re: “the failures of Democrats”
there are many, and this site devotes much emphasis in tone, time and coverage to reviewing, decrying and all…
But the current situation is on the Republicans. Forgive me if I am, right now, very intent on seeing this examined properly.
Unlike many who post here, I think where there’s a fire, there’s smoke.
…and all we get out of this administration regarding their stooges and conduct, is smoke.
Time to get out the firehoses.
…I’ll happily discuss other issues on another thread.
Have a good day.
Greenwald has done a fine job in exposing the Russophobia industry’s latest effort. When I read the New Yorker piece the next-to-final sentence in the following paragraph, that Glenn doesn’t deal with, stuck out:
‘Obama’s adviser Benjamin Rhodes said that Russia’s aggressiveness had accelerated since the first demonstrations on Maidan Square, in Kiev. “When the history books are written, it will be said that a couple of weeks on the Maidan is where this went from being a Cold War-style competition to a much bigger deal,” he said. “Putin’s unwillingness to abide by any norms began at that point. It went from provocative to disrespectful of any international boundary.”’
“Putin’s unwillingness to abide by any norms…” What norms? Just imagine what “norms” are part of the New Yorker authors’, and of course the whole US imperial structure’s, core beliefs.
The US is the “exceptional” nation. The one the world cannot do without, according to Obama. The US alone can as a result violate international laws at will. It and its NATO allies usurp the right to sidestep the UN. It alone can on its own authority invade other sovereign nations, or assassinate their leaders. It can economically and politically sanction nations that don’t bend, bow and scrape. And as the whole Russophobia theatrical production exposes, the US allows itself the sole right to cyberinvade, to manipulate the news, to create disinformation.
The empire has willing allies who join it to accept crumbs from the table. Including at the moment much of the US 99%. But the crumbs are getting fewer. There are real and potential international competitors. The Balkans isn’t the only region in line to be Balkanized. Monopolists don’t like to share. Competition depletes the bottom line.
The New Yorker article reveals the mindset of liberal imperialism. Those of us who don’t accept imperialism’s “norms” share the responsibility of educating on and working to replace them.
I’m a programmer and reiterate what’s been said elsewhere. No compelling evidence it was Russia.
The evidence actually points to the UK as hacking the DNC so they could jump to the front of the queue on trade deals when Trump got elected.
You see, the security scans showed it was well known Russian hacking software found in the DNC system. If they had seen it before then so had the Brits who would then clone the software so they could hack the DNC and point the finger at Russia.
Sound ridiculous? Well that’s not because I have less evidence but because I am a joe blow commenting on the internet.
I am simply pointing to the fact that the story presented by the intelligence agencies is no better supported than mine…especially as the intelligence agencies let it slip that it was a phishing attack on Podesta that got the spies in. Anyone with a wordpress account could have done it.
Not to mention his top notch passwords that are probably among the first 10 in any brute force attack list of words.
Outside the box Jake. Alot more room to move around. GCHQ erstwhile NSA contractor earns Jon McAfees accolades https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvj0v0W6yjk
Ironic that you Mr. Greenwald are the one that sounds like a conspiracy
theorist. The facts are simple there are connections between Putin and D. Trump. Its a shame you seem more intent on defending them than doing your research and publishing the facts like i stated earlier even Snowden agrees with the facts on this issue.
http://ndb.int
Isn’t this the real threat?
Can America survive in its present form if the dollar loses its status as the global reserve currency?
If the US economy lurches toward collapse, of course there will be a war, fought against the usual suspects.
Looking at this excellent article revealing the structure of the yankee state, it looks to me that it might benefit everywhere else in the world if the yankee economic structure did in fact collapse.
I think the risks of a nuclear war are now much higher than in the days of the Soviets. For one, Russia does not have the East European buffer and unlike the old days of the Warsaw Pact is hugely outnumbered and outgunned by NATO in conventional forces. Further, and even more ominous is the shift in doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons, both strategically and tactically. Russian, unlike the Soviet, military, is not trying to achieve parity (or outdo) the West. They know their economy would collapse just as the old Brezhnev behemoth did. Therefore, they will not be sucked into a meaningless arms race with the US. The modern Russian military doctrine knows that the current nuclear arsenal they have is sufficient to destroy the US – parity means nothing, it’s a race for overkill. Also, and most importantly, Russia no longer subscribes to the MAD doctrine of “overwhelming response” to a nuclear attack. Its new strategic thinking – actually started to be developed in response to Reagan’s Star Wars obsession – centers on overwhelming first strike capability, and technologies that could punch through anything that the US could throw in the path of the incoming missiles. The Soviet strategists at a point in time, and after them those of the Russian Federation realized they cannot compete with the Americans for a credible threat of a response to a large nuclear attack. Its only (and small) chance for survival is to deal the enemy crippling blow at the outset. As a popular Russian general Alexander Lebed’ liked to say “he who shoots first laughs last”. Of course, the US military knows this, and I suspect, believes it’s a huge bluff. It looks like it is dead set to chase the “Big Red dog” in its own backyard. So, yes, we might be closer to the Unthinkable than most people imagine.
Never mind the fact that the US has enough nuclear warheads aboard submarines to do a very nice job of taking Russia further back into the stone age.
great respect for your fabulous magazine
CIAs MSM 2017 – Remember “Fake News” was a CIA Construct delivered
by the Washington Post and its MSM.
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/feb/15/memo-offers-look-cias-private-press-pool/
https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/06/19/memo-sheds-new-light-on-cia-network-of-journalists/
It sounds more like an article about supposed Hillary Clinton’s russophobia than an article about Trump, Putin and the new cold war.
Curious work that Putin would like, good relay for his propaganda. How can you say like Putin that may be Clinton gave a signal to anti Putin’s protest in 2011. Bolotnaya square repression by Putin is an awkward thing and opponents in Russia need support. Russia today is not a democracy. Look at how people can hardly demonstrate in Russia. They are arrested at once and have no financial backing from us organizations.
This is getting old. Greenwald doesn’t dare mention the numerous Russian ties to Trump and associate’s. So I will. Felix Sater, Paul Mannafort, Carter Page,Wilbur Ross, RexTillerson,and the now” infamous “General Michael Flynn.” Oh have I mentioned the Russian oligarchs? Real estate deal’s in the hundreds of millions. To Trump. Any hint of money laundering? Hmm? Back then Trump was cash strapped. Forty million dollar profit on Florida mansion.In two years! Bought by Russian oligarchs. Ever wonder why Trump publicly “blow’s kisses” to Putin? All of thisNEEDS to be blasted to the world!!
The facts would have to be nailed down a bit better than just throwing out a list of names and innuendo-laden speculation. Not that I particularly disagree, but idle knee-jerk cries of unproven allegations are hardly very helpful to the debate and suggesting sensible ways forward.
you can add Jeff Beauregard Sessions, III to the list…
In the light of the accumulation of ties, links, associations and outright pleas for Russian intervention, we now add the esteemed AG to the list… and the intelligentsia in residence at TI are silent.
curious, that.
Jeff Sessions graduated law school in 1973, the same year the Yom Kippur war raised US-USSR tensions.
I love how after decades of warning about McCarthyism,the Corporate Democrats have embraced that strategy for crass political purposes.
If we were to ask the Pythia who today is a better journalist than Glenn Greenwald, she would say “no one.”
There is one thing that has been bothering me about this election. Although I can believe that the key actors in the deep state have grave reservations about Trump and that many of these actors want to see him removed from office, I am still skeptical that his election represents a true populist surge. Someone among the elites must have either acceded to Trump, or, more likely, have definitively abandoned Clinton for some fairly important reason pertaining to the Clintons and having little or nothing to do with Trump.
I disagree with the commenters who say that some within the deep state and the 0.001% “must have” actually wanted Trump all along or he never would have been elected. That view strikes me as reflexively categorical and not empirically founded, but I am thinking there is still much about this power struggle that we do not know.
This time, I suspect we will find out more. Much more. Something has changed all right. The lid will come off.
I’ve been voting straight Democratic for 45 years, but after this despicable, dishonest, and incredibly dangerous Russia garbage, I’m done with them. Only a moron would believe this preposterous nonsense.
It’s all to make money for the war machine (the military industrial complex, and the intelligence community, think tanks, etc.). The only problem is that although it’s nonsense it could get us all killed.
Russia has the ability to burn this country to ashes from one end to the other … how can people forget that?
They are little bit like Mao Ze Dong who was convinced that nuclear war was survivable.
Many neocons are convinced of the same thing. They believe we are in a position to wage–and survive–a ‘limited’ nuclear war. Very dangerous …
please give me a break, you are not a Democrat. I’m a registered independent
and there is there, there too many connections between the two, too many
denials and excuses from the Trump admin. as for Mr. Greenwald used to respect him now he sounds just like Assange a sell out due to his own political views.
Hell even Snowden agrees with the evidence.
Please link to some evidence, not “everybody who has lied before says so this time really really.”
Did American administrations not talk to others, including Russia, off the record before? This time, however, they are mired in lies for some reason.
Nowhere has Greenwald et al at The Intercept stated they would oppose an investigation, etc. They have on the contrary called for one. Of course.
Be suspicious of those who do not call for an investigation, either because they say it is unwarranted, or because they say “the evidence” is already “obvious.”
Of course, there is also this:
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/12/us-intel-vets-dispute-russia-hacking-claims/
BTW, did you even read this article?
Uh, you’re a lawyer, Glenn. You went to law school.
You know damn well that a whole lot of people ~have gone to the chair~ on an order-of-magnitude less circumstantial evidence than there is on Trump’s Russian connection. To suggest that this stuff is just a distraction is to empower Trump.
You’re great on civil liberties. Stick to your forté, thanks.
“You know damn well that a whole lot of people ~have gone to the chair~ on an order-of-magnitude less circumstantial evidence than there is on Trump’s Russian connection. To suggest that this stuff is just a distraction is to empower Trump.”
The quote above does not sound like a logical argument to refute the points that Glen made, but appears to be, “yea that black man in Selma was lynched because of made up accusations, so why can’t Trump? And by the way if we do not take the opportunity and Lynch him it will make him legitimate.
The last part about legitimacy you may have got right because most of this Russian omnipotent president maker is attempt to de-legitimize Trump’s presidency. Fact is that Trump’s presidency is made legitimate by the constitution of the USA and any trial based on innuendoes and falsities to de-legitimize him is equivalent to a coup. I did not vote for Trump, and did not feel particularly sad that Hillary lost, however, this flurry of Russia nonsense actually ended up making me feel satisfied that the better person for the sake of mankind won as Hillary would have been a sure bet for nuclear conflagration with Russia.
Glenn has a grate logical mind and able to gather the facts and marshal out his thought process based on the facts. It will do you a lot of educating to learn from him and use your mind in a liberated fashion, not controlled by what you wish to be.
you know what empowers trump? resisting him with such dumb bullshit instead of actually, you know, RESISTING his ACTUAL FUCKING POLICIES THAT HURT PEOPLE
deportations. program slashing. war on women. white supremacy.
you dems are so fucking clueless you think russia is your big shot, well you can take down some folks here and there but it ain’t shit as a real resistance
you’d rather die than really do something, so it’s off to the cold war fantasy factory
first guy ever to suggest executing people on flimsy evidence is good model
No.
Not the first. :/
Maybe defunding the State Department isn’t that bad an idea. US A.I.D. and the “National Endowment for Democracy” are both State department political slush funds used to promote right-wing U.S. interests, all over the world – in Venezuela, in Russia, where-ever. However, the defunding won’t happen if the Deep State says no.
“it’s very difficult to credibly object to – let alone prevent – other countries from interfering in U.S. politics if you make no effort to object to U.S. interference in theirs.”
Because an unconstitutional coup in Ukraine is the same thing as funding independent press that can compete with RT’s propagandist stranglehold on information in the region. What if I objected to the last two imperialist wars as well as CIA coups and domestic political corruption, now can I object to this stupid false equivalence?
And as the cold war starts to heat up again, seems Glenn is the only one on his own site still banging the “there’s no proof” drum. Brush up on some basic infosec before you tell a dozen security vendors you know better than their research teams. You sound ridiculous denying the existence of something that’s been documented by a litany of whitepapers going back to 2012, Glenn.
You’re a fool, Lamda. I’m trying to parse your 2nd paragraph, which is poorly written and illogical, and the best I can determine is that you falsely claim Russia engineered the coup in Ukraine. If that’s what you’re trying to say, you’re flat out wrong. It was the US that engineered the coup.
As for your so-called “basic infosec”, I’ve been working in the computer industry for more than 40 years. The so-called evidence presented by the alleged dozen security vendors (if you actually research this, you’ll find that it’s really only one security vendor, owned by a Ukrainian ex-pat, that is the root of the claims of all of the companies) is garbage. The plain fact is that Podesta fell for a phishing attack that any 10-year-old kid could have pulled off and the security at the DNC was so bad that my dead grandmother could have gained entry to their system.
Stop warmongering before you get us killed. If you want to go fight a war, I hear ISIS is hiring.
Whoo-whoo Ed, you’ve been in IT for 40 years?. Well I’ve worked in the cyber security sphere for about as long and I know – as anyone with a credible relationship with IT knows – multiple MULTIPLE security vendors in the US alone. And they absolutely salivate at the prospect of making the news with information on a new form of cyber-risk. They don’t all have access to all the intel the WH does but the findings are clear and in accordance with a long history with these hacking groups. Internet search for Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear. They’re real and the cyber-security world has know for years.
The democratic party and their hangers-on are just just like the empire they serve. If they’re going to go down they’re going to take everyone down with them. Progressive my ass.
I was chatting with the Russian under my bed (there’s one under EVERY bed) the other night, and he told me he hasn’t had much to do since they got Trump into the White House.
He’s awaiting orders from Putin.
And here I thought it was a jihadi under every bed. It’s getting crowded under there. Give ’em a Swiffer so you can get some use out of them.
I thought it was a White Supremacist under every bed.
“I thought it was a White Supremacist under every bed[sheet].”
Cleaned that up a bit.
Good work! I think you are too willing, however, to fall back into a more or less agnostic view about whether US aggressiveness conditions Russian responses. As you demonstrate, it is not necessary to review debates over William Appleman Williams’ take on the origins of Cold War I to see that the US blew an opportunity to drastically cut back on the potential for a militarization of competition with Russia. In my view, it is clear that , in a manner similar to the stupidity informing the Iraq invasion, the US assumed that a “comprador” elite would come to power in post-Soviet Russia that would accept integration into a US-led system. Just like in Iraq, national interests asserted themselves and gradually reasserted what, given the weakened state of Russia in the 90s and 00s, can only be thought of as a defensive stance.
The strongest evidence against the claim that Russia “hacked” the election is the fact that Wikileaks continues to assert that the emails came directly from an individual who had access to them. They have implied that Seth Rich was the source but in keeping with their stated policy they won’t confirm the identity of a leaker.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/noam-chomskys-8-point-rationale-voting-lesser-evil-presidential-candidate
You are correct, A nuclear war will not happen by accident . It will be contrived manipulated and forced on Russia and China through covert actions by US war hawks. As they are out manned and out gunned Russia will have no choice but shoot first. Then, we all lose everything.
I worry less about superpowers accidentally launching nuclear war and more about a nuclear weapon falling into the wrong hands via black market sale. Everything has its price and the world has no shortage of wealthy fanatics with a death wish.
Israel has an unregulated nuclear program. I can see our ally selling a weapon (or just using one) and pop goes a city. Who couldn’t we invade if we declared terrorists from country X had just used a nuclear weapon? (Russia, China don’t count)
But but, they “share our values” and they are the Middle East’s “only democracy” and have gay parades and medical weed etc. The start up nation… ;)
Surely our great bestest ally would never ever pop off one of those clandestine undeclared nukes and start up(tm) the dominoes.
Thanks for your insight it makes sense.
Nothing is true and everything is possible
It’s the Long Wars
Two ideas.
1) Criticism makes things better. Ideas/processes/inventions are made better through a constant process of evaluation and refinement. Truth —> Belief.
2) Criticism makes things worse. Appearance and belief are most important. The improvement of ideas/process/invention are irrelevant. PR and Propaganda drive the system. Belief —> Truth.
This is one the battles playing out here.
For a whole bunch of reasons, #1 tends to encourage a belief in Democracy–while #2 tends to encourage people to dislike Democracy.
Great comment!
That’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think I agree – especially given the theme of “all journalism is biased” (which I tend to agree with) that The Intercept itself promotes. If that’s the case, it’s not a dynamic tension in criticism and PR – in that case competing PR IS the criticism. So what one sees in authoritarian countries is a lack of an ecosystem, of diversity in narratives.
I think at its best, propaganda or PR actually has a strong ‘light side’. First, if it’s sincerely believed, it’s a genuine promotion of another narrative – when we support that narrative, we call it “vision”, not propaganda. (Imagine sentimental Lifetime Original Movie stories about a teacher who believes in the student everyone gave up on – that is a very positive case of belief – treating someone like they are good and worthwhile in an unconditional way, not waiting for them to ‘prove’ it via evidence – leading to truth.)
And propaganda can, at a more mundane level, simply be incredibly humanizing. After seeing all of the Russia coverage in the news, I am absolutely fascinated by Ruptly. To me the psychology behind it is so interesting. So often people from faraway, non-Western countries are portrayed as either blocs of enemies or blocs of victims – even sympathetic ads for charities show ubiquitous, almost interchangeable wide eyed little children staring pleadingly up at the camera. Contrast that to a video of Putin visiting a children’s cancer treatment center and having one of the children to the Kremlin for tea. There is something so recognizable about him talking to a bald little girl playfully and her easy rapport back, despite the fact that her mom, who is old enough to understand the dynamics of the situation (OMG it’s the President!) is standing behind her looking like she’s about to have a heart attack, prompting her to answer the President, answer! Or the little one who goes to the Kremlin and sits in some kind of throne-like chair swinging her little feet, who has the kind of “cute but I know I’m cute even though I shouldn’t be self conscious at this age” attitude that can be kind of universal to sick children who have spent the bulk of their time with doting adults, not other children. Even the fact that she is eating a lollipop made to very realistically resemble a bug at the end of the video – there is something deeply humanizing about feeling simple curiosity about other people (Why the hell would you make a lollipop that exactly resembles some hideous bug? Is there a story behind that?) that is devoid of any fear OR pity.
That is not to say that I have no issues with Russia’s behavior. If they are engaged in interference, bribery, meddling, and so on, that is absolutely not ok, and should be of huge concern to us. And to cries of “Well maybe we’ve done that too!” – I mean, certainly self-reflection about one’s morality is very very important, but it’s also not a good idea, when you’re getting punched in the face, to say “I should probably stop now to quietly reflect on whether or not I myself have ever punched anyone. Do I really have a right to complain? I mean…” No, I’m sorry, but if you’re getting punched in the face, that is of immediate concern in its own right. So I’m not advocating for jumping to conclusions – due process, investigations, and so on are important – but I think standards for international behavior are important. However, I do think that’s a very different topic from “PR” or even “propaganda” – to my mind criminality is the problem. Truthful but diverse narratives are in a different category, ethically and consequentially, at least to my mind.
As always, Glenn, and another brilliant and sobering piece. Thank you, and keep up the fight.
> dystopically depicting a UFO-like Red Square hovering over and phallically invading the White House
Glenn = genius
Mr. Greenwald
Criticism is one thing, but you offer nothing for a solution.
Obviously, no one wants a nuclear war, but you are fear-mongering. Are you suggesting that appeasement is the only way to avoid a nuclear confrontation? Detente is a two way street. Indeed, you apparently want to >blame the entire confrontation on the US</em. So far you simply have not taken any position on how we should confront Russian aggression in Eastern Europe (or the US elections). There is a reason that NATO expanded to the doorstep of Russia – and it is on display in Ukraine right in front of you. No one forced any country to join NATO!
Additionally, you never mention what “detente” means to you, Mr. Greenwald. What are you willing to give up for detente? Does this mean withdrawing NATO from Eastern Europe and throwing ethnic Ukrainians under the bus? In an early article you seemed to favor that option by quoting As’ad AbuKhalil: “…the U.S. and EU are blatantly conspiring against Russian interests there [Ukraine]…”. Are you giving Vladimir Putin a free rein to continue the war in Eastern Ukraine? Are you going to allow Russia to illegally annex Crimea to ensure total appeasement to Russian’s interests and sphere of influence? Do you believe that a political settlement in Syria should include Russian ally, Assad, remaining in power? Where is the beef, Mr. Greenwald? Talk is cheap.
Additionally, you cannot seem to figure out that Democrats view the 2016 election as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twenty-first century”. The hacked emails released by the Russian-bot, Assange, might have made the difference in the election. That cannot possibly change until the investigations are completed on Russian involvement in the election, and investigations move forward regarding the connections between Members of Trump’s campaign team and the Russians. Don’t expect Democrats to quietly roll over on this issue just to appease Russia, or because you fear confronting the Russians.
Quit quoting the New Yorker, Mr. Greenwald. Either you have evidence that the US interfered in the Russian “elections” or not. The US might have interfered in the elections in Lichtenstein as well. Three private cyber-security firms identified the Russian malware in the DNC computer system. They all have experience working with Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. It’s a given that Russians hacked the DNC. What is missing in evidence is a smoking gun that the Russians turned over the emails to WikiLeaks (ordered by Putin). Interestingly enough, you said that the election of HRC was potentially a serious military threat to Russia.
Some have even referred to the threat to Russia as existential. Hillary Clinton is a military hawk – and proudly so. Isn’t that a good enough reason for Putin to risk additional sanctions by turning over Russian hacked emails to WikiLeaks? Favoring Trump would seem to be a requirement for Putin in the 2016 election considering that Trump supported detente! Is this not obvious?
Thank you. I have found the amateurish rhetoric employed by Mr. Greewald when talking about Russia very distressing. He was once my hero, but he seems to have lost any objectivity when discussing Russian-U.S. relations.
Thanks. Greenwald is a talented writer and journalist. You just need to bear in mind his political agenda.
He doesn’t even have to generate a solution but just play his part to keep the ball moving forward, by doing some investigative work himself. Glenn may not be happy with the US Intel community sitting on the evidence of Russian intervention but it’s a legitimate excuse. His role is to present information and evidence that casts doubt on these claims. He and TI are capable of doing this type of work – they have financial and personnel resources, do they not? – but I can’t help but feel his preexisting predilection for downplaying Russian actions has frozen him in place. So instead he plays the role of media critic, summarizing a fantastic New Yorker piece for his own purposes.
There are a lot of great journalists out there, including Remnick and Evan Osnos trying to put the Trump-Russia puzzle pieces together to present a clearer overall picture. Glenn isn’t one of them. He’ll point and scream if journalists miss a piece or if the less competent players try to jam-force the wrong pieces together, but he is unwilling to really enter the fray himself. This puts him in a win-win situation. If it turns out that the Intel community and news media were wrong, Glenn will remind us until the end of eternity about it. But if they got it right, Glenn can kind of slink out of the conversation, having never truly put some skin in the game in the first place.
“……. His role is to present information and evidence that casts doubt on these claims…….”
That is definitely the defense lawyer in his approach to journalism. Thanks for your reply. Good and accurate comment.
Thanks. The rest of your post was really good but I was/am in a pinch for time.
Referring to your point about Glenn’s desire for definitive proof of Russian intervention:
Last week Glenn speculated that Haim Saban was behind Thomas Perez’s candidacy for DNC chair. He acknowledged having no evidence but suggested that common sense would suffice.
However when it comes to Russia, the USG has no credibility, FireEye has no credibility, Crowdstrike has no credibility, Russia’s muted response to allegations and decision to not retaliate are glossed over. An evidential double standard.
Interesting. Greenwald did the same thing when Rousseff was under fire before she was ousted. He admitted there was no evidence but that did not keep him from speculating that the US might have been behind the political instability in Brazil:
Evidence? Details……
Thanks.
” He admitted there was no evidence but that did not keep him from speculating …”
Have you looked at the definition of ‘speculate’?
Tanks.
“Last week Glenn speculated that Haim Saban was behind Thomas Perez’s candidacy for DNC chair. He acknowledged having no evidence but suggested that common sense would suffice. ”
lol! Haim Saban has only given more money than anyone to the Clintons, started AIPAC, and vowed he’d rather “cut off his balls than not be the top donor.”
What privilege might the top donor receive?
Or do you have the common sense to believe a self-declared Israel-Firster would never demand consideration?
Common sense would suggest that Russia was behind the hack of the DNC with Putin ordering the emails to be given to WikiLeaks to help elect Trump – considering what was at stake for Russia in this election. It seems that politics rules for Greenwald exactly what constitutes “common sense”.
” Glenn may not be happy with the US Intel community sitting on the evidence of Russian intervention but it’s a legitimate excuse. ”
You. Are. Priceless.
You are divining the content of unviewable intelligence … maybe as an example of ‘speculation’?
Perfectly said…the bottom line? Glenn is a coward
Nothing new. I am surprised Glenn just wrote this and had been silent on Russian. Some of The Intercept reporter are actually on the neoliberal camp. It is like Glenn just discovered Prof. Stephen F Cohen’s elegant arguments on the podcast for three years now.
Silent on Russia? From someone who obviously hasn’t read much of anything by Glenn Greenwald…
Greenwald has been silent about the role of Russia in Syria as well as the role of Russia supporting ethnic Russians (secessionists) in Eastern Ukraine. He has spent all of his energy on “Russophobia”.
Yet again, GG demonstrates he is more of a political blogger than a journalist: the article above is a mishmash of Trumpian propaganda, both in accepting Trump’s assertion that the Democrat/liberal media is the enemy/problem, and in the agreement with respect to Russian baiting as a non-story attempt to distract from the Democrats own shortcomings.
The first two paragraphs are a framing of the issue as Democrat-Republican divide, while the New Yorker article is US-Russia relations (“a large bulk of the article is devoted to … feeding Democrats ..”; calling Mother Jones a “Democratic media outlets” is a direct adaptation of conservative media –see here)
Some musings about GG’s point 1-5:
1. First point actually dispels the entire previous Democrat-Republican distinction, by pointing out the fundamental distinction between Clinton and Obama. It also contradicts its own statement, by again equating New Yorker with Democrats “the Democrats’ current obsession with depicting Putin as the world’s Grave Threat”. That is, if the Democrats are in effect divided, to which faction is he referring when using the designation ‘Democrats’?
2. Second point ignores the fact Putin himself is on a war path (or in the least controversial with respect to innocence): The 2nd Chechen war, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria. Strategic alliance with the freshly minted Turkish dictator Erdo?an, annexation of Crimea, rejuvenation of Russian base in Syria. In the least, the question as to whether US posturing is defensive is an open one. In addition, while the record of US aggression toward small and militarily weak states is indisputable, they have NEVER initiated aggression against a nation with a strong military or nuclear capabilities, and the adaptation of ‘past aggression’ narrative to explain current US-Russia relations begs many questions, to say the least.
3. Third point hinges on “how often Putin publicly makes this claim [‘that the U.S. Government has repeatedly interfered in Russia’s political process’]”. So are we to start taking seriously Trump’s, or Republicans’, claim to voter fraud simply because it is repeated many times, or to the topic at hand, is Putin’s involvement true simply because it is repeated often?
4. As to fourth point, while sort of true, it conveniently ignores the fact Trump can easily dispel the accusation of collusion if he so wishes.
5. One out of thousand of daily publications does not a “fixation” make. The New Yorker article revolves around the natural curiosity as to Putin’s current international manoeuvring, and a growing need for clarity about possible election meddling, possible continued contacts with the Trump campaign, and real concerns of similarities between Trump and Putin.
Yet again, GG attempts to distract: even if the New York article tries to whitewash US “own sins and systemic failures”, it does not automatically means the accusations against Putin are incorrect or unjustified in themselves. The assertion of a new cold war completely ignores the new administration’s Putin posturing, or the fact that there actually is another side, and that it does not only impacts the outcome of the interaction, but requires, if true, a response, and certainly a clarification, a fact which GG repeatedly ignores.
Again GG and Trump agree: if it questions Trump in any way, it is a Democrat plot (see Trump’s assertion the Democrats are responsible for the Jewish bomb threats and graveyards desecration; GG’s assertion that questioning Putin’s intentions is Democrat attempt to divert attention from their own failings, and has nothing to do with Putin militarism, anti-democratic maneuvering, support of a global extreme right-wing policies and personnel, and oligarchic kleptocracy at home).
If it looks like a Trump apologist, and sounds like a Trump apologist, it’s probably a duck, and an obvious, if not sloppy, one at that.
You have some serious problems with your second point, summed up with your assertion that Putin and Russia are “on a war path”. The situation in Chechnya was an internal matter and not really a confrontation that should have overly concerned American observers other than to use it later in screeds like yours.
The other examples you give of Russia “on a war path” are the typical NATO-ish talking points on why NATO should build up a massive amount of military might on Russia’s western border, but they hardly show any evidence of Russia being “on a war path”. Russia, for the most part, is reacting to what is going on around it, not instigating confrontations. Georgia was the target of one of the United States’ “color revolutions” and American fingerprints were all over it, just as they were with the coup in Ukraine that installed pro-Western leaders.
Not only did the US handpick Ukraine’s new leaders, we did so fully aware that Ukraine’s new government has deep ties with Nazi sympathizers who are rabidly anti-Russian and are looking to bash some ethnic Russian skulls in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. This is why the Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia and the reason Russia accepted the request. American and European leaders have been fully in support of Ukraine’s new leaders waging full-fledged war against their own people, a fact that is downplayed since we use that phrase (“making war against his own people”) to justify interventions, as in Syria.
Russia was invited by the Syrian government to intervene – everyone else, including the US, is in Syria in violation of international law (another wrong conveniently glossed over in the US media).
Wow. Glenn nailed it on most fronts.
Glenn’s laid back Obama
“But after more than six years in office, Obama has a much better sense of what Congress can and cannot accomplish. That is especially true after his experience in 2013, when his push for congressional authorization to use force against the Assad regime in Syria similarly went nowhere.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-war-against-isis-will-go-undeclared/390618/
That wimpy Congress wouldn’t let warmonger Obama bomb the hell out of the war crime barrel bombing Assad.
You’re propounding lies.
Obama didn’t want to go to Syria, and so he passed the buck to the Congress. If congressional approval was so important to Obama, why didn’t he seek it for Lybia.
You Democrats are such liars, and you think people can’t see through your bullshit. You’re no better than republicans. Just saying that Hillary is better than Trump or that Obama was better than Trump, doesn’t make it so. It doesn’t un-deport, or reunite families. Trump is coarse, and Obama had finesse, but the tools Trump is using were fine tuned by Obama. Everybody with half a brain can see that.
And this tooting the Obama Horn is really not going to make the Democrats any new friends. Tell me ONE thing Obama did for Black people. Tell me ONE thing Obama did for Unions. Tell me ONE thing Obama did Native Americans. Tell me ONE thing Obama did for poor people, Black, White or whatever.
I’ll make it even easier for you. Tell me about ONE time, where Obama sacrificed his political capital, or his political position for ANYONE. Give me an example of something where he fought expended his political capital for anybody but for Obama. And Obamacare doesn’t count, because healthcare without the public option was what republicans and the insurance companies wanted anyway.
You can fuck off with your Democratic Party. They’re no better than the republicans.
Name one thing: Affordable and available Health Care
Wow.
Thank you for proving his point.
(Er, was that irony? Is that what that was? If so, sorry!)
I did not see where the question was for one thing Obama did for the insurance companies. So answer his question because the ACA was a government hand out to the insurance companies.
Nail, meet hammer. You’re going to be waiting a long time for any examples you requested. Any sentient person knew that BO and crew didn’t give two shits about anyone but the rich after blowing their mandate from 2008-10 by not using budget reconciliation. They didn’t use it, not because they couldn’t, but because they didn’t believe in helping the marginalized. How people kept (and still do) believing the BS rhetoric is staggering.
And I’d argue the Dems are actually worse than the GOP precisely because they pretend to give a shit and dopes still believe them.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/noam-chomskys-8-point-rationale-voting-lesser-evil-presidential-candidate
Never. Because Clinton Corporate Democrats and Neoliberals aren’t for the working class. They ignore Class and Inequality, while emphasizing race and gender as a way of creating enthusiasm and the appearance of conflict without having to fix anything economic, or endanger their cozy IP Troll/Finance relationships.
Let’s see, Obama did, ONE time, take a firm stance on filesharing by going all out to get NZ to prosecute and extradite Kim Dotcom. Had to thank his Hollywood IP Troll Donors.
The article was great until
>[…] is that prevailing neoliberal policies have destroyed the economic security and future of hundreds of millions of people
While the prevailing neoliberal policies certainly helped, one must note that it would have happened anyway. Automation (and ergo deindustrialization) is a process that can’t be stopped, only sped up. I’ve no idea why this isn’t part of the mainstream discourse, even as everybody I meet seems to get it. Then again, I meet mostly techies.
That being said, I must iterate once again, great article!
Ignoring the dubiousness of the claim “automation cannot be stopped” (which may be true, but simply isn’t the hard-and-fast iron rule some claim), we must acknowledge that Neoliberalism isn’t only hurting the middle class directly, but is also the prime cause behind Western societies’ deindustrialization troubles. Neoliberal policies are why rises in productivity and automation don’t translate to shorter hours and better conditions in the jobs that remain. Instead, the fruits of automation drift up and manifest themselves in ever-widening corporate profit margins. All the while, skewed public spending policies leave public education programs woefully underfunded where they are needed most, and fail to create the sort of highly skilled labor force required in a post-industrial economy.
Great article
Its hilarious to see that just because you defend mental sanity some
people almost called you a PutinBot
They should go to elementary school and learn to interprete the most basic texts
Keep up the great work
Cut to the chase for godsakes on Russia + Trump / Flynn :-
Prof. Stephen F. Cohen’s 51 mins. Interview w/ TYT’s Michael Tracey, hot off the griddle:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BciYxlKfHH8
I agree that the stampede to crucify Flynn was very, very, odd. Every incoming administration since forever has engaged in exactly this type of contact.
Flynn screwed up by (for some reason) deciding to lie to Pence about this. So it is pretty clear that he had his own game playing going on in Trump’s den of iniquity… But all of the nonsense about illegal behaviour or even treason? It’s just derangement.
stephen cohen for Russian Embassador!
I agree. I listen to Professor Cohen whenever John Bachelor has him on his radio show. Cohen is eminently qualified for the role, he is a Russian scholar and he speaks Russian. Trump needs him.
Chickens-henhouse. What could possibly go wrong?
er…fox in the henhouse.
Just wanted to add that your “concern” for the Democratic party is truly heartwarming. How would they ever survive without your wise counsel? Political parties go through this from time to time. The message gets stale, the leaders have been around too long and are out of touch with what’s happening on the ground, associate with the money people too much, etc. There’s nothing new about it. They either evolve or die. Look at the Labour Party in the UK. It’s on the fast track to oblivion after having been in power for over a decade. They will either evolve or die.
The faults of the party are so obvious that your chiming in is superfluous and redundant at this point. There are people involved in the party, mostly the younger set that might help it evolve.
But hey, how about that Republican Party lol
By the time Trump is kicked out or expires or ends his term, it might be “anything but a Republican” next time. Politics is a strange beast.
ha ha, “political parties go through this from time to time”
I take it you mean from century to century?
“The losses in November are part of a sharp and unprecedented decline for the party at the state level. Since Obama took office eight years ago, Democrats have lost over 800 seats in state legislatures. For the first time in history, they do not control a single legislative chamber in the South. Overall, the party is now at its weakest point at the state level since 1920.” – New Republic, November 22, 2016.
Doesn’t even mention all the governors either, that paragraph. Losers. You.
We’ll see. Things change.
NATO never offered Ukraine membership despite Chompsky’s claim.Ukraine applied for membership but was never accepted due mainly to France and Germany.
NATO did not promise Gorbachev it would not expand to other countries.
“We now have a very authoritative voice from Moscow confirming this understanding. Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not “insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.””
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/
Russia is a good boogeyman because it ignites the half of the country that the dems speak to, or wish to speak to, and further solidifies their monopoly of control over them. lgbt, feminism, immigration are the micro-life issue that abortion used to be. Meanwhile, this distraction allows the dems to continue to play their globalist wars games – so they thought – which enrols the support of multinational comporations.
With Trump and Russia, all I see is the obvious reality that the major corporations in Russia obviously support a candidate that does not want to continue to push the “world vs. russia” narrative that has restricted the Russian market which has, incidentally, been used as a tool by the democrats to run the military industrial complex, dominate Europe so it doesn’t run counter to US interests and gain markets – well, gain, at least in theory. NATO is a joke. Turkey was buying ISIS oil, funding ISIS and putting into action a state of affairs that allowed for continuing war there, too, as well as enough to push Europe under with restraint that would keep the US on top. Altogether, a terribly hollow strategy.
Why the lib-left joins the ranks the globalists they are supposed to hate (major corporations) and why anyone from that ilk would be egging on a conflict with Russia to further the military industrial complex is completely baffling. And a true disgrace, because the media is the main guilty party building this narrative. Hey lib-left, if you want your war, go fight it. Instead of instigating it so the ones who actually do go fight wars – the military – give their lives for your hollow cause
What really bothers progressive liberals about Putin are not his actions regarding world affairs.
It is his rather homophobic stance on LGBT issues in Russia, and his overt misogyny regarding the role of woman in Russia.
Obama did nothing over Ukraine, looking the other way. We meddled in it’s politics early on, essentially causing the chaos in the country there.
Syria’s another Obama boondoggle.
The nonsense about “Russian hacking” and Barry’s newfound “toughness” on imposing sanctions on Russia over purportedly being behind it…….100% joke.
The sad thing is the Dems must continue to perpetrate this hardline stance toward Russia or their “Russian hacking” meme goes soft.
Stupid and dangerous.
What a superb article. Reasoning has become so rare on this subject.
Completely agree. Like a breath of fresh air.
So the New Yorker depicted St. Basil’s Cathedral attacking the White House. Perhaps they meant to depict the Kremlin – not the Red Square, Glen. What’s the symbolism here – or maybe it’s just wilful ignorance of most things Russian, including actions regarding Georgia and Crimea, and no motivation to find out. Sad.
Seeking better relations is not some activity on Facebook. It is dependent on the interests and policies of both countries.
That’s like someone saying let’s seek better relations with the guy down the street whether he’s a serial killer or a nice old grandmother. It’s a stupid thing to say.
Since the world’s power distribution is centered in nation states, they seek their own interests to maintain power and increase it. It is not a moral or ethical pursuit as both US and USSR policy demonstrated during the cold war.
It’s still the same today. We’re not going to make friends with Russia if Russia is busy trying to subvert our or our allies interests. It’s as simple as that.
Surprise, surprise. Russia has objectives that are counter to ours and our allies. NATO and the EU, Ukraine for starters.
The Russia thing is amplified because it is not a settled matter. There is still the extent of Trump’s campaign’s interaction with Russia during the campaign and a rational explanation to Trump’s weird Putin love affair. It’s a political issue. Wow, that never happened before!
Tired of your harping on this worn out theme. Write some original investigative expose for a change that is your own work and not a snarky critique of other people’s work.
Yeltsin invited those western experts to come to Russia.
The list of groups the US contributed to are mostly human rights organizations, not political parties or engaged in politics.
Russia did hack the DNC and Podesta despite your fervent wish to ignore the US intelligence agencies and private security companies’ evaluations and conclusions.
You harp on the same old tired themes. Are you doing any origianal reporting or just snarky critiques these days?
Glenn hasn’t written a genuine investigative reporting piece in years, not that any of the superior geniuses at The Intercept have noticed.
I don’t come here expecting a Chris Hedges article imbued with mentions of the culture of the community I’m reporting from, or a Max Blumenthal article about the interviews he’s had people in a war zone. I come here for Glenn’s opinion, and his cutting through of the bullshit. Because nobody else does it like he does.
If you want “investigative reporting” that suits you, maybe you should watch cnn, or fox or msnbc. I hear they do that over there. Specially Maddow and Hayes. They’re always investigating Susan Sarandon. It’s really interesting.
Liberals of your sort guarantee the continued irrelevance & powerlessness of the Democratic Party. You don’t like Greenwald’s message because of your magical thinking. Greenwald’s critique is not a bit hostile to the Democrats or the mainstream liberal press; he obviously wishes they would do better and there isn’t any “snark” in his article.
Me, I AM hostile to you and your kind, the enablers of crap Democrats, the people who encourage them to continue stinking and continue sinking.
I think they want this Russia stuff to be true. I think they are desperate for it. It is their only hope. Because they are pathetic. They would rather die than engage with their own failures.
“Greenwald’s critique is not a bit hostile to the Democrats or the mainstream liberal press”
Astonishing you could type this with a straight face
Yeah it’s called constructive criticism.
Whereas I don’t bother, you are beyond help.
You are a bunch of fucking clowns and whatever I can do with my vanishing spare time & energy to help make sure the fortunes of the Left in America are no longer tied to your determined uselessness and total failure to do an actual resistance to Trump & fascism instead of this fake revive the cold war bullshit – — I will.
Why is it even important that Greenwald’s critique *not* be hostile? Isn’t that one of the points of this article…that until or unless the Democrats and the “liberals” are able to engage in some real self critique and face up to some of the massive glaring hypocrisies that have taken root in politics and foreign policy, that demagogues like Trump will take more and more powerful positions in the US?
You are either naive or plain ignorant…or both. You really should shut the tv off and start listening to decent liberal voices like GG. I always saw myself as a liberal until 2016 but I’ve also always required that evidence be presented that supports any claim, political, scientific or otherwise. Unfortunately I’m seeing that evidence is the absolute last thing that most liberals are interested in nowadays and your comment helps to reinforce my perception of modern liberalism as anything but a legitimate ideology. Emotion is now the primary driver of liberal identity politics. Is the modern GOP the answer? Absolutely not, they’ve never kept promises in the past and have given no reason to be believed going forward. Not until logic and reason return to political discourse will any of this be rational. To hell with perception.
Since when Ukraine is your ally? Its your client, more like. The US has certainly not acted in the interests of Ukraine – quite the opposite. Frankly, I cannot imagine what the US objectives would be in Ukraine except to undermine Russia.
The net results of this effort is a total destruction of Ukraine as a country on every level – economic, political, social. You know it, I know it. No wonder the Ukraine theme so totally disappeared from the Western media. Things didn’t go too well there, did they? But someone else would eventually have to clean up the mess you leave behind, as usual.
But perhaps, just perhaps, if the US weren’t so keen on destroying countries but wanted to do something useful for a change, perhaps, we could find some common ground and do some good together like fighting terrorism instead of the US financing it?
“Given that these points are made here by a liberal media organ that is vehemently anti-Trump”
This right here is proof positive Glenn is no longer a liberal by any stretch of the definition when he repeats Republican talking points verbatim.
lol partisan democrats, adjust your scorecards, get one for the team
Coming from the man who said Glenn never a word to disparage Democrats or “the mainstream liberal press”, I have little reason to take the word of a liar who supports liars like Greenwald.
When did Glenn ever claim to be a liberal? (Hint: Never.)
Have you heard of Breitbart? Think it’s just your speed.
Gee I wonder what shaped your perception of Breitbart? That mirror in your bathroom is a good place to start.
The Americans instinctively hate any nation that stands in the way of America’s unipolar domination of the planet … sorry, I mean… America’s noble and selfless defense of freedom, democracy and McDonald’s.
That is the real reason why the Americans hate Russia–or any other country that has the gall to oppose the USA’s thinly disguised criminal wars (like against Syria) or regime change operations (like in the Ukraine).
America is defined as a nation by a psychopathic belief in American Exceptionalism and that the vaunted “Land of the Free” has a moral right and even duty to rule the world in all but name.
This is the underlying issue that Americans of all political stripes dare not question.
Americanism is a kind of fundamentalist religion–and questioning this dogma will invariably induce all the good Americans into a rabid moral lather denouncing any heresy against the (false) god that is the United Snakes of America.
Why is Glenn Greenwald investing all of his energy to defending Russia and by extension Trump? Take a look at his columns and they all follow the same lines. Russian is perfectly innocent, the mainstream (however you define them) are evil, nothing to see here in connections between Trump and Russia, how dare anyone ask these sorts of questions, no evidence to see here, nothing at all.
Personally, I think Greenwald thinks he can secure a pardon from Trump for Snowden, if not for Glenn himself.
Russia is guilty of lots of things. But hacking John Podesta’s emails and electing trump? I’d rather believe in Alice in Wonderland, as Chomsky says, unless you provide me with the evidence.
Contrary to whatever spin Glenn feeds you, it is established fact. Russia did hack the DNC and made substantial efforts to intervene in our electoral process. I don’t know what makes you or he know better than 9 separate intelligence agencies staffed by Americans. Glenn is not an American. He is a Russian agent and has been since Snowden’s leak.
It is not ‘established fact’ – it is just repeated a lot…..Oh, I can’t go on Hobart, my conscience is bothering me.
I am a Russian agent too.
Personally, I thought it was terrible that we revealed the corruption of the DNC through that hack. On behalf of the rest of the Russian agents, I’m sorry.
Fact: a thing that is known or proved to be true. I’m afraid that’s precisely the problem though; it’s really *not* an established fact. As even the New Yorker article underscores. Glenn is just re-iterating this uncomfortable (for the likes of some) point.
Pot – Kettle, Much? Don’t dish out what you cant take – pussy-hats!
Even IF the Russians derailed the election of that serial failure and war monger the US has been actively screwing with everyone else’s elections for at least 50 years. Maybe longer. You lot set the precedence, made the rules, now you get to suck it all up too. Crying and whining all along. Pathetic.,
What effin’ planet are you living on?
There is a huge difference between claims and facts.
Consider if anything that the US government has released on the alleged ‘hacking’ would ever be entertained in a court of law. It wouldn’t, as it is merely assertions and claims about what the Russian government could do (presumably based on what the US government does do, as made clear by Snowden).
“I don’t know what makes you or he know better than 9 separate intelligence agencies staffed by Americans. ”
hahahaha! So great!! You’re referring the the assessments. They don’t provide proof, at all. But good on you for believing what they’re feeding you!
Carry on, copper top, the Dems need you!
@ Hobart “I don’t know what makes you or he know better than 9 separate intelligence agencies. ”
Those same intelligence agencies got it criminally wrong on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
“Russia is guilty of lots of things”.
Like what? Like surviving and defending itself against every imagined form of attack from the West? Remember “economy in tatters’? It’s the intent that counts, and it’s not your fault it didn’t quite work out.
What always amazes me that in the US even reasonable people that are trying to use their brains as intended still feel obliged to repeat these tired cliches.
This is what we call calling out bullshitters. It’s a fair attempt at objectivity in reporting. There are plenty of other sites designed around triggering your emotions you may like better, go with CNN and MSNBC for starters
Great article Glenn. Thanks!
Oooh–a new TM from Glenn! “As Even The New Yorker Admits.” Love it. Good column name for some pesky journo, btw….
Interesting watching them try and push hard the “Russia Interfered With US Election–Oh No!!” (TM) meme while simultaneously trying to maintain some shreds of doing real honest journalism.
NYT too, sporadically. Like a Dinosaur in Its Death Throes (TM). If not too divergent from / threatening to NYT-perceived Israel interests. WaPo doesn’t even bother. They’re too far in the bag as House Organ for CIA Propaganda (TM).
You have the humor of a Dennis Miller. You must be some sort of Democratic Republican. You’re not as funny as you think you are. You should watch Bill O’Reilly.
Had to google Dennis Miller. A neocon, according to my research. Like NYT and WaPo on foreign policy then.
Why on earth should I watch Bill O’Reilly? Life is much too short.
???
Well what’s your problem with Glenn’s article?
My problem with all of Glenn’s op-eds is how he has abandoned his post as a journalist to engage in the thrilling world of writing fact free propaganda, not to mention his alarming allegiance to Russia over the United States.
What did he say that was fact free?
I presume you skipped right over the part where he stated this:
“(and, even though they are loath to say it, they believed the same about Obama)”
Or how about where he called the media liberally biased?
This is one of the problems with his emphasis on emotionalism. Glenn, following in the footsteps of his Dear Leader Donald Trump, has encouraged his supporters to follow their feelings and base their opinions upon them as opposed to established fact.
What? You are saying that it is not a fact that those citations quoted in the article exists?
I loved Glenn’s piece. I thought it was spot-on and very well-articulated. Have already sent to friends and family who persist in believing in US media propaganda re Russia Interfering With Elections BS.
As I communicated in my comment that you replied to with such bizarro insults.
Why should you be surprised? They take their signal from Glenn. Bizarro insults are their currency in trade. Notice how Greenwald treats anyone who dares to utter a whiff of disagreement with his fact-free allegations? To demean the person as inherently evil. This is the signal of righteousness his ardent fans have received and internalized. Any disagreement with their views is evil.
Don’t believe me? Spend some time here expressing dissenting opinions from The Intercept doctrine, or better yet, write some dispassionate criticism to Glenn sometime via email ([email protected]). The results should be….educational.
Um, I’m a Glenn fan. I am very concerned and dissapointed with how quickly my fellow USA-ians have seized on anti-Russia propaganda based on nothing more than the CIA’s say-so. The CIA. Think about that. Especially after CIA lies re WMD and Iraq invasion nightmare / unlawful, illegal murders of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. US war crimes. And all the other CIA lies and incompetence and destruction since WWII.
And this anti-Russia CIA propaganda is promulgated by WaPo and NYT–currently running sanctimonious house ads re how it stands for Truth in Journalism–down the rabbit hole we go.
Would be funny cause it’s so ridiculous–except war with Russia is a real potential consequence, as Greenwald points out. And this US war propaganda from NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc continues to fuel the 7 illegal wars we’re already in. Does this not give you pause?
Okay. Nevermind. I read your post again. I thought you were trying to… never mind.
Forget I said anything. I suck.
Thank you.
You hurt my feelings btw, even tho you are an anonymous Internet person. : (
Don’t know what a Democratic Republican is. I’m a DemExiter, after 30 years voting Dem, due to all this nonsense that unfortunately is real. Greenwald, Consortium News and a few others keep me sane in face of US Deep State propaganda spearheaded by NYT and WaPo.
Hurting people’s feelings is how Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept readers, and ever so coincidentally President Trump interpret “winning the argument”.
My sincere apologies. Really. This whole internet anonymity thing makes me lose controls sometimes and I’m a total dick. Also, in my head, I think I’m writing something really witty, and I get full of myself, like Dennis Miller.
Haha!
I beg your forgiveness. A DemExiter is too honorable a person for me to even address, let alone chastise.
Cheers :)
When will the US establishment overcome its bottomless reservoir of hostility toward Russia and realize that the Soviet Union has long been dead and is no longer a communist enemy ??
I’ve aways respected you enormously Glenn. And that respect has only increased after reading this piece. Clip of Chomsky was perfection itself. I’ll take a look at the recent New Yorker.
Thank you. Always appreciate your thoughts.
Glenn needs to make a correction. Russia did NOT invade Georgia. The official investigative body of the Russia/Georgia conflict declared this point. Georgia invaded South Ossetia. Russia repelled Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia.
Heidi Tagliavini of the E.U. investigation into the war wrote:
“In particular, there was no massive Russian military invasion under way, which had to be stopped by Georgian military forces.
In addition, the official report by the Council of the E.U. states:
“The shelling of Tskhinvali by the Georgian armed forces during the night of 7 to 8 August 2008 marked the beginning of the large-scale armed conflict in Georgia,”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/30/AR2009093004840.html
I look forward to Glenn’s correction. Thank you.
What an awesome article. The only voice of reason in this messed up world. Every Glen’s piece just reminds me of what a trash the regular media has become. Do these people have no morals?
Blaming Clinton and Democrats for Cold War Redux is about as silly as holding America responsible if North Korea lobbed nukes at us. Putin is a thug, maybe why Donnie admires him so much..
Obama was an appeaser. His Wimpy lack of assertiveness help give rise to Trump and set Dems bk years from an image perception…
What’s a thug?
I looked up the definition. But it could define almost any president of any country, now or in the past. So I’m really confused.
I totally believe that Putin is an asshole. I’m pretty sure Glenn has no admiration for Putin. But calling him a “thug” doesn’t make your point for you. It makes you sound like an irrational Democrat without a point to make, other than, it wasn’t your fault, and it was Russia, Russia, Russia.
Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!! (TM)
A thug is someone who uses force or fear to control his territory. Although I agree that every national leader needs a forceful personality and tries to intimidate that’s a far cry from someone like Putin who has destroyed or diminished his opposition by making human rights ineffective in Russia. Read anything by Masha Gessen. She lived as a journalist under Putin and “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin” which I think will clarify the definition of thug for you.
To people who make the rather lean and hungry argument that you are making — people such John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and a cast of other cockeyed characters throwing back to the first Cold War — I can only say, “So what are you going to do about it?”
Go ahead. Start it. See where it goes. See where it gets you — and everybody else.
But don’t dare complain if (when ) it doesn’t go the way you thought it would — because it never goes the way you think it’s going to.
In Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, we were (or are) stalemated by forces so vastly inferior to ours that we practically have given up understanding why have found (or are finding) easy victory so elusive.
Yet there are those who delude themselves into believing — against the growing track record of failure to prevail in smaller wars — that if we go toe to toe with Russia we are sure to win.
Attack Russia — or give them a reason to attack us — and the lines will form, with China and Iran and a host of other, smaller nations backing the Russians against us and Europe.
But will all of Europe in fact be with us?
Aha, now we begin to see the truer nature of the problem with the west’s Project Bellicosity.
As it turns out, we are not as unified as we like others (even within the so-called coalition) to think.
Sarcastically speaking: when the nuclear weapons begin to fly, we’ll all be so relieved to know at last which way things are headed.
Why do you consider Putin a thug? Do you mean domestically or on foreign policy or both? Or for riding around shirtless on a horse?
I consider him the Only Adult in the Room (TM) viz US / NATO aggressions (encirclement of Russia’s borders with troops and missiles in new NATO satellite states, violating post Cold War promise not to expand NATO east toward Russia after Warsaw Pact disbanded, US-backed coup in 2014 of pro-Russian, democratically elected govt in Ukraine for neo-Nazi regime (!!!), sanctions re taking in Crimea, and now more missiles and 3,500 new US troops in Poland), general unfounded belligerence and lies / spin / propaganda about Russia as agressor, when US is actual agressor.
Putin continually, carefully adopts defensive posture viz US and keeps reiterating Russia wants good relations with US and EU–and has done nothing to contradict that.
???
P. S. Under Putin, Russia got national debt down to $500B. By contrast Obama ratcheted up US debt from $20 trillion to $30 trillion–and Rullia spends less than 1/10 of US on military. While Trump and Co are gunning for more US military spending. Crumbling Empire (TM).
I don’t know perhaps the fact that he constantly violates human rights in his country. Pick up a computer and do some research past certain “news” websites and you might discover what the rest of the population already knows about Russia.
Seriously? There are no bad or otherwise thuggish characteristics you’re able to attribute to Putin? You honestly think that all leaders of world powers should behave the way Putin behaves? The counter-arguments to this should be obvious, and they’re highlighted in the New Yorker article, which must be given some credit unless you honestly believe that the entire article is a lie, in which case you’re participating in Trumpian “fake news” accusation dishonesty. I’m worried that Glenn Greenwald is doing the same thing here, dismissing the “large bulk” of the article as “often-xenophobic, hysterical Russia-phobia.” That’s a criminally reductive take on the original article, even a Trump-like move that dismisses competing viewpoints out of hand. I think Greenwald is moving in a dangerous direction by eschewing the complexities of the source material and dumbing it down to suit his reductive polemic. This is exactly what he’s been rightly accusing others of doing, but he’s just making the same mistake, arguing that if you believe anything bad about Russia or Putin, you must have been brainwashed by the evil liberal Democratic media. It should go without saying that this is exactly the same move that Trump makes in his populist appeals to people’s lizard-brain reflex response. Typingperson, your inability to imagine why others might see Putin as a thug mirrors Trump supporters’ inability to imagine why anyone might see Trump in a negative light. Greenwald, with this article you’re not doing anything to improve political reporting, you’re just a participant in the stupid all-or-nothing partisan divide.
His capital W”Wimpy lack of assertiveness..”, I understand that Hillary felt that way about Obama, he should have been tougher on…wait. tougher on… I’m having a hard time finding a country he should be tougher on?! Maybe you mean Obama should have been tougher on Big Banks, or Big Corporations, or Big Oil, Big Drug companies or Saudi Arabia? Hillary likes to be tough. Tough on anyone who isn’t writing her checks, or paying off her husband in speaking fees. Nuke the Clinton’s! Cold Warrior’s, those Clinton’s!
So what?
Neither are in power.
Their separate opinions of Russia have absolutely nothing to do with Putin’s interference or non-interference in the 2016 US election. If anyone claims otherwise, that Putin intervened or didn’t intervene because of Obama or Clinton’s opinion of him/Russia, they have a three year old’s understanding of how the world works.
This first point is not interesting, informative or germane.
Why continue beating this dead horse? Unless you want to argue that The New Yorker or Mother Jones are proxy voices for the Democratic party, your specious history lesson is little more than a dead straw horse you use to disparage out of power democrats.
Putin/Russia intervened in the US election on a scale of 0 (not at all) … to … 100 (flipping votes in crucial precincts).
This scale of intervention seems to me a rather important question to address and answer.
Again, so what?
Of course the US intervenes in other countries internal affairs. How is that even slightly in dispute? The US invaded Russia in 1918 on the side of the whites. The US has been sending spies to Russia — to spy, to recruit, disinform, to promote and sabotage, etc. — since 1918.
Intervention in sovereign nation’s internal affairs has been going on since the Mexican War. Let’s remind everyone of Chile 1973, the installation of the Shah of Iran (which the CIA has acknowledged) in 1952 or the 1954 coup in Guatemala and — literally — a thousand other examples.
Not only is this not controversial, it’s again not even interesting, informative or germane. I doubt Putin/Russia said (or didn’t say) to himself/itself … “gosh let’s fuck with the US elections because they fucked with us.”
What’s the point? (Except to reiterate Trump claims about the press being an enemy of the America people.)
Really?
Thank you Mr. Bannon. Obviously accusations of interference in the US election helps the elite steal jobs from the middle class while they send those jobs to China and Mexico. Then these “elites” invite illegal immigrants and crime cartels into the US where they can rape and pillage the innocent American people. Only billionaires understand these tools of deceptions. Us poor people are too stupid. Fortunately we have Breitbart South to keep us informed. [note. This is what’s called “sarcasm.” I thought you understood sarcasm because you use it so often, but your comment downthread indicates otherwise.]
On 1, Clinton’s opinions certainly had bearing on alleged Russian interference. I feel somewhat embarrassed to point out to you that Clinton was not “out of power” prior to Nov. 18.
Point 3 matters because “it’s very difficult to credibly object to” Russian interference if we do not object to our interference in Russia. Your reaction to this article is based on something other than reading.
So shoplifters can’t complain about bank robbers?
Poor people who want to be rich can’t complain about rich people?
Penguins can’t complain about albatrosses?
My reaction to this article has to do with … why don’t you just read my post and complain about what I say rather that trying to read my mind to discover something sinister within it. Okay?
Or google “Procrustes.”
And btw, what is significant about Nov. 18? Did you mean Nov. 8? Anyway what official position of the State did Clinton hold after she resigned as SoS and before November 2016?
It may have escaped your notice, but there are people in DC in both parties who still hold elective office or work for the intelligence community or in the military or in think tanks or in media outlets who want a Cold War with Russia. Some even work for Trump. These people have influence.
(shhh) The enemies of truth are everywhere. Even in the deepest recesses of our government. They have influence! I have a list of these enemies names. But don’t tell anyone. We’ll let the FBI secretly ferret them out. Beware of the pumpkin patch. (shhh)
There are 310 million people in the US. I imagine some want a new Cold War. I imagine some don’t want a new Cold War.
I am not in either group.
I don’t care who belongs in which group.
I do want to understand how a dolt like Trump became President of the United States. I don’t care if it was Russia, Republicans, stupid Americans, Lizard People or sly Democrats pulling off the most miraculous flim-flams of all time.
If history books are any indication, many others besides me want to understand the why of a what.
You want to understand. It’s easy:
The Democratic party ran the worst candidate it possibly could in the sense it ran someone with Clinton as a last name. It was guaranteed to motivate the GOP voters, bigots and anti-Obama types, bleed off some independents and undecideds that otherwise went for Obama, and totally destroyed any enthusiasm from the “left/progressive” end of the spectrum and doesn’t get the turnout she really needed particularly in swing states where she didn’t campaign long and hard enough–and she loses by a thin margin.
What’s so complicated about that?
Oh yeah it was all Comey and Russia’s falt and the media for making a big deal about e-mail servers. Nonsense.
The Dems did everything they could to run a person who was perceived to be “establishment” through and through and got knocked off in a “change election” by a whacko, because people are sick to death of the marginally better same old same old LOTE bullshit.
Doesn’t mean they made the choice that won’t screw them, just that they didnt’ care because they’ve totally lost faith in most every institution of government (why and who is to blame is a complicated question, but mostly because the Dems stop standing for anything other than sucking up to billionaires and trying to have their third way cake and eat it too.)
That was a silly response. It doesn’t matter what you or I think. It does matter if most people in DC, including people close to Trump, are eager to restart the Cold War. Trump himself is not terribly consistent as you might also have noticed and there is considerable pressure for him to demonstrate he isn’t Putin’s agent.
The ironic thing is that the warmongers in the administration push for pressure and ultimately war against Iran, but because that is a position taken by people in both parties we hear little about that danger.
Glenn is impeccable. He’s always been great to me, but I think he’s on a roll.
It was Hillary, my take. Self-obsession with power and a suspicious, and an all too easy rise to riches! Your ultimate downfall and betrayal to me and millions is palpably nauseating. All that we cherish as being human – telling bold-faced lies (like the Donald) as the truth; and consequently becoming the living lie, yourself! And to this day, you doubled-down your need to be judge and jury, to feed your psychosis of superiority, by endorsing Tom Perez over the people’s choice (and Senator Sanders’ choice and others), Keith Ellison. Riddance to you Mrs. Clinton. We may not have a livable planet, anyway, but your interference in the will of the people, so you could have your selfish rip-off of a desire to be the “first”, was at least infantile and incredulous. Your reprehensible move to quash the majority will, last election, will go down as one of the biggest betrayals in modern-day electoral history – allowing a fascist takeover of America by a businessman, casino operator, over a dedicated humanist like Senator Bernie Sanders, shows your arrogance, only surpassed by Trump, himself. But even monumentally worse, the loss of a livable world and the countless suffering that will come of it – and I doubt that you even lose sleep over it. May that ill wind coming to sink your boat, be waylayed in time for you to repent – and apologize to me, Bernie, them, Keith, Nina Turner, Tulsi Gabbard, RoseAnn deMoro, Dr. Cornel West, Bill McKibben and all us 18-million voters whose votes got counted for a real change – in spite of you.
While I don’t agree with all of GG’s opinions, I do consider him one of the few reliable sources of information. One thing in his article, though, stands out, his reference to: “years after Russia invaded Georgia.” To say this, without providing a proper context, creates the same sort of confusion of facts which he has so competently criticized when done by others. According to the Guardian, an EU-commissioned report found that the conflict was started by Georgia:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/30/georgia-attacks-unjustifiable-eu
While I agree that GG is not obliged to discuss matters that are not within the scope or purpose of his article, when he does mention something he should not do so in a way that suggests that there is no dispute about it.
Ótimo texto. A manipuladora mídia brasileira herdou todo essa artimanha da mídia norte-americana. Hoje o Brasil está dividido graças à mídia local, o que favorece o tio Sam que está de olho no petróleo do pré-sal, na base de Alcântara e até mesmo no Aquífero Guarani. O que seria dos nossos políticos corruptos sem a ajudinha dos norte-americanos… Essa é a “América para os americanos (norte-americanos)”. Eles podem tudo.
The whole article is excellent but I think point #5 is the most important. It is truly pointless to try to talk to East or West Coast liberal elites about US self-evaluation and how hypocritical and dangerous it is to provoke Russia and China. I have tried and failed too many times, they just don’t want to hear it. I am beginning to think those of us who read books by real journalists, academics, historians, scientists, etc. and who use alternative news sites to get news updates and analysis must be a tiny minority rendered insignificant by holding a minority position on just about every issue out there. I have never felt so completely alienated. And I came of age right in the middle of the painful “generation gap” era, and I’m saying that this is far worse. I don’t know what to call this era’s social communication dysfunction – The Selfie-Delusion Gap?
Flick, your emphasis on liberal elites a d point #5 brings to mind a crucial analogy, between this Russia/Putin hysteria (scapegoating for Hillary’s defeat), and Hitler’s scapegoating of Jews for Germany’s WWI defeat.
Both defeats were huge shocks to these respective groups, and both groups were/are determined to grasp at any straws, to avoid facing the unhappy truths that the brass of, respectively, Hillary’s campaign, and the German General Staff, richly deserved these defeats.
I’m moved to fall upon this analogy partly because of all the recent noise about a possible analogy, between Trump’s victory and Hitler’s rise to power (see e.g. the recent Special Edition of Newsweek, “Hitler… can he happen again?”).
To my mind, this analogy is mostly grasping at straws, for a host of historical reasons (esp. Hitler’s mega-power over the Nazi Party, vs. Trump’s very-much weaker hold over the GOP).
Correction: “… liberal elites in point #5….”
Maybe Glen Greenwald should be working from Russia. Why not put him on assignment to follow Snowden around. Do we need to give Russia special treatment and have they influenced the elections already. Suddenly the Conservative Right is so hateful of liberals that they would rather deliver the goods for Russia (a nation that still silences its own citizens) than save the environment, our schools or even our troops.
I very much appreciate and respect the Intercept as a reader as well as an one-time interviewee. Questioning the Democratic fixation with Russia is probably worth examining but it really doesn’t take a genius (or a prize winning reporter) to raise serious questions about Trump’s connections and probable indebtedness to Russia and how that may influence policy. And for all the tit for tat spy stories, I don’t hear anyone reporting that Putin’s inner circle has been penetrated by western spies. Trump’s inner circle ALL have connections to Russia.
Additionally, and more importantly, the Intercept does its readers a disservice by not acknowledging that any story you publish on Russia could be laced with a conflict of interest. Let’s not forget that the Intercept’s existence is tied to Snowden’s intel release & GG’s interviews with Snowden in Mosscow presumably with the blessings of Russian intelligence.
As a long-time reader and fan of Glenn Greenwald, I find this article disturbing because of its roaring silence on the topic of the neo-Nazis in Kiev’s US-backed government, and on their leadership role in the US-backed Maidan uprising.
Several mainstream US politicians have even expressed concern about supporting Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and a couple of them (Democrat John Conyers and Republican Ted Yoho) submitted legislation to put a stop to some of it. Glenn Greenwald doesn’t say a word about any of this, but there’s no way he doesn’t know. “All that is solid melts into air,” I guess, but I hadn’t pictured Greenwald melting quite so suddenly. Am I missing something here? This is really weird!
Really? Glenn can’t put everything into every article. I can assure you that he is well-aware of what you claim he ignores for some reason. Relax.
Yes, you are missing the central thing to wit: the point of the piece. This article is not about Russian policy in Ukraine or Valdimir Putin’s policies in that part of the world per se. The article is about establishment Democrats’ myopic fixation on Russia to the exclusion of crucial other matters, including their own failings as a party, and as a cudgel to rhetorically those who depart from their preferred policies where Russia is concerned.
Additionally, the piece addresses the extent to which U.S. media happily reports on alleged Russian behaviors that it virtually always omits to observe when the same sorts of behaviors are committed by the United States or its allies.
So, yes, you missed quite a lot.
The Alans of the world really need to learn to read and understand the meaning of the word ‘purpose’. Both could take a while. Sigh.
Dispatches from Mordor.
Aren’t most US claims of “Russian aggression” based on events in Ukraine? Even this article seems to suggest that. How would it be off-topic to mention that the Obama administration instigated the Maidan uprising, and that said uprising was spearheaded by neo-Nazis?
Congressman Dana Rohrbacher (R-California) can be seen on You Tube getting Victoria Nuland to admit that this is what happened, yet Greenwald doesn’t mention it, and you tell me it’s irrelevant. Very bizarre!
Oh my god. It has finally happened. Glenn Greenwald has not lived up to your expectations. And after all, that’s what everything is about. Your expectations.
This article is about something totally different.
Glenn is more emotionally invested in defending Russia and their puppet Trump. He could give a flip about any real issues besides securing his (and Snowden’s) pardon from Republicans. Every single moral value he ever espoused before is immediately expendable and subservient to the goal of securing his vindication by the United States govt. He would sell his own mother into slavery before uttering a whiff of criticism for Trump.
Greenwald is an excellent and honest journalist. A very good one.
And he’s not Trump supporter either.
He just knows Democratic partisan BS when he see’s it, and exposes how unhealthy it is for the country.
You need to take your meds because your drinking way too much Obama / Hillary kool-aid.
It still amazes me how everyone simply ignores the lack of evidence of Russian meddling. I suppose it shouldn’t, given all the propaganda this nation swallows on a weekly basis. But still.
Aside from that glaring fact, it is Obama’s own very mild behavior regarding this supposed meddling that strikes me. “Cut it Out”? Really? That’s all you’ve got? Russia supposedly commits a cyber-coup on the US and Obama complains in the mildest of terms and ejects a few RF staffers?
hmmm, I seem to have heard a sound floating on the wind..something like..sanctions. hmmm, must be my hearing Nevermind.
OK–good point. The sanctions were against 4 Russians. Four. Sanctions also covered a very limited number of spy ops.
Your point is entirely correct–there were sanctions levied. But my point remains that–considering the scale of the alleged crime–that of materially effecting a US election and altering its outcome–the actions Obama took were laughably inadequate–laughably out-of-symmetry–with the gravity of the crime he and Democrats claim were conducted by the RF.
And it is the weakness of Obama’s response–in addition to the lack of evidence he has provided to substantiate his claims–that leads me to question this matter.
Easy enough for the US Govt to settle this matter–simply release the evidence to the public. Put up or shut up.
What a wonderfully pro-Russian article. Do they pay well?
First it started off with Giving Syria Missiles and letting ISIS multiply and gaining the middle east. Then Putin nuked Ukraine for their oil. Now Trump and Putin have ties with oil that they just stole from our Native American’s on treaty land. It was all for an agenda and greed and profit that’s conflict of interest. Then Russia threatens war if we have Hillary. Then Russia messes with the electrical vote system. This isn’t Russia it’s America. We won’t be Russia’s puppet. I hope not.
It’s profitable for both sides to stoke the flames of war I’m sure. Its plausible and highly likely there are factions that exist in both the US and Russia that work together to create this nuclear nightmare in order to build up defense spending. Nuclear…Winter is Coming.
One of the best most hard-hitting News stories I have read in a long time. I’ve tried to make the point to my friends and family that Saudi Arabia is just as bad if not worse than Russia, yet Hillary Clinton took millions from them, they fund Al Qaeda and Isis, and yet they are a strong US ally?? The US has become too corrupted to the point it has lost the moral high ground… I love my country… But I can’t stand the criminals that run it.
While the story’s lead cartoon is a UFO, it’s worth mentioning that it’s a very specific film reference, Independence Day. It is more than a throwaway image.
To briefly recap Independence Day: space aliens arrive in orbit, undetected until they enter the atmosphere, then they start positioning their ships across the globe. Plucky scientist Jeff Goldblum discovers a secret message encoded in the radio signals being sent between alien ships through highjacked Earth satellites, but his analysis arrives too late. The alien attack is launched in a spectacular fashion with the destruction by energy ray of the White House, the Empire State Building, and the Capitol Records Building.
To keep with the phallic anxiety that you note, it’s bad enough that the alien craft penetrate iconic US buildings with their energy rays, but in destroying the skyscrapers, the aliens effectively emasculate the US. Airspace, satellite networks, major buildings, and entire cities are penetrated. The aliens cut off America’s oversized but impotent phallus; they feminize the heroic American warrior. For a country that perceives itself in decline and which has lost several recent wars, this is a particularly noxious situation.
So, to open the article with that widely recognized image reveals the masculine anxieties about being penetrated and un-manned that cooptation by the Russians still provokes. Images of warriors being penetrated by their enemies are at least as old as the Iliad, where instead of energy rays shattering buildings, spears pierce flesh. Missiles served in the Cold War, while today cyber-espionage is the image of penetration.
Beyond framing the Russian intervention as penetration, the image also conveys ideas of surprise attack, unjustness, asymmetrical power, technological sophistication, refusal of diplomacy, and national existential threat. The image also presents America as the victim, rather than the bully, odd considering how much larger our war and national security budget is than any other nation’s or considering this nation’s long history of overthrowing democratically elected governments from Iran to Chile to what was then the Congo.
That red-saturated image is a potent frame, showing us truths not so much about the details of Russian electoral hacking, but of what sorts of deep assumptions and biases are implicit in our national debate.
Independence Day also indulges in several references to alien anal probing, and the climax (pun intended) involves a fighter jet literally giving it to the alien ship in the ass. The fighter pilot screams “Up yours!” as he flies into the ship’s technoanus.
All of which is to say that a great deal of the Russian agita is a matter of who is fucking whom. The assumption is that there is always going to be fucking, and it’s vital to be on top. It’s difficult to think rationally when the subject is framed so archaically. The image reveals deep cognitive distortions, and such distortions become a form of propaganda that prevents a clear assessment of the situation with Russia.
Well Todd,
Your Freudian ANALysis of the kremlin-like edifice was replete with rare penetration… In fact, it provides a whole new dimension to the term “blowback.” However, it dawns on me that there might be another explanation for that particular image.
The etymology of the word kremlin reveals that its original form, Kreml, meant fortress. Thus we have the image of a flying fortress hovering over the White House while delivering a beam of light from a spire topped onion dome which, in turn, rests upon a tower that is the highest projecting architectural element of the Kremlin like structure. The origins of the Moscow Kremlin began with the construction of a fortress upon a hill – which was commissioned by Yuri Dolgoruky in 1147. The fortress became the heart of Moscow which grew up around it. However, the city of Moscow did not attain primacy among the Russian principalities until 1326 when the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church moved there from Vladimir. In 1329, Construction on Moscow’s first stone bell tower began in affiliation with the Church of St. Ivan of the Ladder-under-the Bell.
St. Ivan of the Ladder (AKA John of the Ladder) was a 7th-century Christian ascetic monk of great renown who resided at the monastery on Mount Sinai. John’s literary output consisted of a single volume called the “Ladder of Divine Ascent.” The Ladder describes how to raise one’s soul and body to God through the acquisition of ascetic virtues. As the peak of Mount Sanai was the location where Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, the symbolic significance of St. Ivan’s ascension to Sainthood was/is meant as proof of the church’s own claims of Divine direction. Saint Ivan is revered as a saint by the Roman Catholic, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches.
The Cathedral of the Archangel is currently the enduring symbol of the Russian Orthodox Church within the Kremlin complex. However, in close proximity to the cathedral is the Ivan the Great Bell Tower which rests on the spot where the Church of St. Ivan of the Ladder-under-the Bell once stood. Through the centuries, the original bell tower received two major renovations which resulted in it being the highest man-made structure in Moscow for centuries beginning in 1508. Currently, the bell tower is the tallest tower in the Moscow Kremlin complex. Thus we have a veiled reference to a “city upon a hill” that, when inverted, becomes the United States Achilles heel.
The term “flying fortress” was a nickname applied to an evolving series of American made fighter-bomber aircraft that began with the B-17 in 1938. The aircraft developed its reputation as a flying fortress from its ability to take incredible amounts of damage while achieving its objective. By the end of WW II, the B-17 Flying Fortress had become a symbol of the United States uncontested air power. The Boeing made B-17 Flying Fortress was the operational predecessor to the B-29 “superfortress” that successfully delivered two atomic bombs to their destinations in the Pacific theater. The capacity to deliver a Nuclear Bomb by air to any location on earth gave the United States godlike powers. The initial sense of this power was captured in a quote by Robert Oppenheimer after successfully exploding an atomic bomb at the TRINITY test site:
The United States status as the world’s only Nuclear power set the stage for the implementation of the Truman doctrine which was devised as a countermeasure to a decade of unchecked Soviet hegemonic aspirations that had already claimed most of central Europe. Yet, the Soviet development of an atomic bomb in 1953 redefined the balance of global power in a way that necessitated competing, cold war strategies that lasted for four decades. It was only upon the dissolution of the USSR that the cold war was declared over. It was at that moment that the United States once again became the sole superpower in the world. US preeminence in the world predominantly relies on its ability to sustain a technological edge over all would-be challengers. Thus the suggestion that the Russians are capable of rigging a US presidential election via the hacking of DNC servers necessarily implies that Putin’s Russia has risen from the ash heap of history to once again embrace its own manifest destiny by beating the US at its own game via the subversive manipulation of the very information technology upon which the US relies to sustain its edge.
We have met the enemy, and he is US.
Provocative article, Glenn Greenwald. Nice job.
I’m busy checking the facts, by way of historical records, so I am not yet up to the present:
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/30/why-russia-shut-down-ned-fronts/
While I fully support GG’s anti-Cold War, anti-Hot War, anti-propaganda stance with respect to Russia, I’ll offer a contrasting profile of Obama vs. Clinton with respect to hawk vs. dove. Yes, HRC is more hawkish, but Obama was no dove. Obama loved covert actions – coups in Honduras (also heavily involving HRC people) and Ukraine, a large expansion of drone assassination around the Middle East, support for an overthrow of the Syrian regime via proxy insurgents which mostly turned out to be al Qaeda and ISIS. Obama did make a rhetorical push for war with Syria (“drawing a red line”) but backed off due to tepid support from Republicans and an inability to tie the use of chemical weapons conclusively to the regime rather than to the groups that the US was supporting. Overall, the mount of new conflict initiated in Ukraine – a large country on Russia’s border, and Syria, a country in the region that was a long time strategic ally of Russia, was very high under Obama. Would HRC have been even more hawkish? Possibly…HRC seems more likely to embrace phony narratives in public while Obama seems to prefer the phoniness of CIA covert action that is publicly denied. Neither is a pleasing route.
Another reason why the intervention in Syria did not happen is because Russia threatened to use their veto in the UNSC.
This is when Russia became the new Iberia villain .
Bingo.
This is why I strongly support USA re-instituting the draft–which was bagged, uncoincidentally, after Vietnam disaster /massacre and subsequent outcry, finally, by US people, especially middle-class, college-educated men with low draft numbers–and better things to do with their lives. (Draft was why me and my sister–and several of my friends–got born, incidentally–cause my dad finished grad school and didn’t want, understandably, to go to Vietnam.)
Sure, let’s do illegal war with any and all non-threat, non-agressor countries, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc. But not just with mercenaries to supplement inadequate voluntary recruits–who are mostly poor people seeking college funding– (Bush) and not just bombs and drone murders instead of boots on ground and Gitmo prisoners (Obama) to keep the American public from getting wise and squawking.
Enough of all that. If USA is going to illegally invade, bomb, kill innocent people in whatever countries wherever, then let’s re-institute the draft and do it with American citizen boots on the ground–unwilling, middle-class US citizens who have to see who they murder. And will then actually give a shit and protest US wars.
Go get em pussycat! I would say tiger, but you are being a pussy. It seems unseemly for a jounralist that desires to be held in the highest of esteems to be dealing in so much speculative iffing and butting and maybeing. I thought the whole point of being a journalist – especially one so critical of the mainstream media – would be to be dealing in FACTS obtained through journalistic investigation and through a myriad of contacts and gathered evidence; or am I just being romantic?
I have been following The Intercept for some time now, and it seems totally lacking in real proper investigative effort and there have been no new leaks or whistles blown. Given the present propensity for politicians and powerbrokers to indulge in endless bouts of barefaced lying and fake news, now seems the ideal time to put on the deerstalker, summon Mr Watson, lay off the opiates for a while and get out there and root out the real facts.
But then I guess standards have dropped so low that bitching from a distance is all Joe Public is left to celebrate in these dark days…
The so-called difference between Barack and Hillary on Russia was one more of style than substance. Barack blessed the intelligence community’s “assessment” that Russia had interfered in the election. He called for an investigation–pure cynicism. It is a disinformation campaign because the establishment is miffed that Trump the buffoon won and it might not be able to control him though the hit on Michael Flynn is an early sign of success. Barack rebuffed Putin’s offer at the UN in September 2015 to work together in Syria. Barack was the plaything of CIA director John Brennan.
Point well taken, Glenn Greenwald, from Mr Obama’s less warlike interview with The Atlantic.
While searching for the CounterPunch or Consortium article I read about State Department funding of groups stoking unrest in Ukraine (I was sidetracked), I found this article from 2014 – apparently a banner year: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/09/hong-kong-protests-mixed-blessing.html
The angle Mr Greenwald covered about who benefits from perpetual war seems to me to explain why exactly nobody seems to be pulling back from the dangerous and persistently stupid rhetoric. They – the hawks and neocons – want war. There is no down side to their quest for global dominance and there are inherent reasons why politicians won’t have to pursue an agenda to placate the citizenry about whom they surely don’t worry. As far as the establishment Dems, they don’t give a damn. Their children won’t be fighting these wars and they don’t hear the rest of the country.
As the supposedly only opposition, they may feel their power is secure. The way the Dems are acting shows there is no reason to change course. They don’t have a constituency to whom they feel they must respond. This is about satisfying the needs of those who are in their political, economic, ideological, and social strata.
Both parties prove this in ways large and small, in almost daily or weekly increments.
More short-term-ism, as surely none of this ilk has to worry about what happens after they are dead. Their progeny will be the next generation of rulers, because – well – it will be their turn.
We don’t have to threaten Russia or return to cold war activities to find out what the hell tRump has going on there. The investigation should focus on how he will be enriched by Russia and all his other financial conflicts of interest. He has no business being president regardless and to collude with ANY foreign government should be considered treason.
How much has Hillary accepted in cash gifts from the Saudi dictatorship?
As every President since 1948 has colluded with Israel, this would include them as well…
Speaking of uncomfortable issues people don’t like to address, is Glenn Greenwald an ethnic nationalist? Take this, from a blog post of his:
“Current illegal immigration – whereby unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability to assimilate – renders impossible the preservation of any national identity”
*This* is the sentiment that propelled Trump to victory. Is it any surprise that Greenwald, while being against Trump’s crassness and disregard for the law, nonetheless feels more negatively towards democrats?
Here’s the link: http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.ca/2005/12/yelling-racist-as-argument-in.html
You’re posting out-of-context snippets to a comment section filled with readers and commenters who were around to read the original and who have a fairly through understanding of Greenwald’s position on such issues. It’s a great way to dig yourself into a hole and you’ve made a good start. For instance, here’s the rest of the paragraph you cherry-picked and the paragraph following:
Emphasis added. That doesn’t sound like an “ethnic nationalist,” now, does it? On the other hand, your post “sounds” like a half-assed and incompetent effort to promote an unmitigated lie — even something on the slippery slope toward libel — against Greenwald.
I could, of course, continue, but I’ll leave you to what you should probably hope are the tender mercies of the others here who actually understand Greenwald, his philosophy, his policy positions and his core ethics.
People like Glen Greenwald and Doug Salzmann make me feel a little better about the world.
Seconded.
Thanks, Doug. Glenn’s detractors have been quote-mining that particular 12-year-old post for some time now.
He’s almost entirely changed his mind since on the subject of immigration policy since that was written. I’d be quite surprised if by this point he didn’t see, as so many of us do, the obvious and naked racism at play in many (not all) of those most vocal on the topic of immigration.
I know previously he’s addressed his more current views when others have brought that old post to his attention, but I just can’t recall where, or I’d link to it.
I’m quite sure you’re correct, Mona, that Glenn’s position on immigration has changed over the years since that post. However, for the purposes of refuting Citizen_Fur’s untruthful and defamatory accusation, it isn’t even necessary to address that change.
Glenn Greenwald has never shown the slightest indication of ethnic nationalism, ever, which should be perfectly obvious to all who know his work, as adopting such a position would require him to undergo an a total personality and ethics transplant — for which procedure we do not, yet, have the technology. ;^)
As for the refinements his position has undergone, could we remind the torch & pitchfork crowd that this is exactly what we expect and desire of smart people who continue to learn, reflect and review as they gain life experience?
I mean, sheesh.
Nope, Glenn has explicitly stated he is not a nationalist.
As a non-White immigrant, I will have you know one thing: I completely agree with Glenn’s point of view, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with why Trump happened.
What Glenn was talking about was the view that assimilation is a good thing. When I first came to the US as a college student, they told me that Multi-Culturalism was “awesome,” and I should find a student group that suited me and they suggested the Muslim Student’s Association. I was like “I already know these fuckers. I didn’t come all the way to the US to meet the same kind of people.” And so I met with Americans, and Nigerians, and people from Iceland, and Sweden and Ireland, with Gays and Straights. But non-assimilation, keeps the Gays with the Gays, and Straights with the Straights, and the Irish with the Irish and the Italians with the Italians and the Pakistanis with the Pakistanis, and the Jamaicans with the Jamaicans and the Americans with the Americans. It’s no fun. And it’s total bullshit. Assimilation means that Gays and Straights are the same, and Italians and the Irish are the same, and Blacks and Whites are the same, and Asians and Indians are the same. Assimilation means that people don’t have to be relegated to their corner. Assimilation doesn’t mean a loss of identity. Assimilation is acceptance, from both sides.
I agree with Glenn 1000%.
You people amaze me. You don’t like Glenn’s politics, so you comb through his writings and find a line that you think libs will take offense at, and then you post it in an article that has nothing to do with it. Pathetic.
Glenn! Russia “annexed” Crimea?
Seriously, you of all people are parroting that beltway nonsense?
Sorry to say the rest of the article was similarly toned, I didn’t take you for a Russophobic rube, guess I was wrong.
Great work in the past Glenn, your slipping though.
Russia has a major Black Fleet base in Crimea. Russia now owns Crimea and will not give up that waterfront gem. They were preparing to lease the base for another 25 years from the Ukraine.
Russia did, indeed, annex Crimea. It did so with the full and enthusiastic support of the overwhelming majority of Crimeans (as expressed in a free and fair referendum), who have considered themselves Russian since Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet were founded, under Catherine the Great, in 1783.
Annex does not necessarily suggest hostile takeover. For instance throughout the history of the US, cities have annexed suburbs and other adjacent areas into their limits and have seldom need to do so by force of arms. ;^)
For a while, I lived in Madison, Wisconsin.
When I first moved there, the apartment I was in was officially located in the Town of Madison, however, which is a completely different entity than the City of Madison.
However, after a while, the aoartment building I lived in, along with 3 other buildings, were annexed by the City of Madison.
There was no invasion needed to accomplish this, it was just a bureaucratic shift. The only changes I noticed were a change in my apartment number (to match the standardization required by the city for emergency services), a far more convenient voting location, and a greatly reduced penalty for cannabis possession (along with a law stating plainly that my apartment could not be entered by cops for suspiscion of possession, even if I was blowing smoke at cops outside my window.)
Annexation is the commonly used term when any city expands into its surrounding area, with consent of those who are included in its expanded coverage. It is value-neutral. Mr. Greenwald did not say invaded, siezed, or any other word that would imply an aggressive act.
Russia did annex Crimea. How is Glenn wrong? How is it wrong to say that Russia annexed Crimea?
It’s one thing to say that Crimea should never have been Ukranian in the first place. But to suggest that Crimea was not annexed by Russia is another fantasy world. And by the way, I think Russia had every right to annex Crimea. But I don’t deny that it happened.
You’re living in a made up world. Fortunately for the rest of us, Glenn is not.
I truly hope Trump gets with Putin and makes Russia our ally… Putin drained the swamp in the 90’s and sent Soros packing.Now with-out all the criminals in office Russians live very good and Putin is loved by over 90% of his country….
Every one should know by now that Obama over throw Ukraine and Syria using NAZI hate group in Ukraine and Muslim terrorists in Syria…..
While many people are rightly worried about a war between Russia and the United States, such an outcome is unlikely. Mr. Friedman’s thesis from 1996 that no countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war has been disproved in specific cases, but so far has remained true when both countries also possess nuclear weapons. The thesis can be proved mathematically, although the models for doing so are too complex for anyone but a climate scientist to comprehend.
While those still reading are no doubt sneering at such a naive hypothesis, at least one of Mr. Friedman’s predictions in the article proved to be spot on:
After six years of civil war in Syria, with involvement by Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States among others, it is clear that the World has a serious vendetta against countries that don’t sell Big Macs.
Hopefully those who are dismayed by the prospect of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States, caused by Russia’s nefarious publication of the truth about the DNC, will be somewhat reassured by Mr. Friedman’s article. Those who see his article as pseudo-intellectual codswallop can still take comfort by reflecting on level headedness and prudence of the US political leaders, starting with the President. Still others will be reassured by reflecting that nuclear weapons have existed for over 70 years, so the extinction of the human race is long past overdue.
Let’s not be coy. Turkey has 255 McDonald outlets (hexadecimal FF). They have pretty much invaded Northern Syria in the last several months. Connection? You betcha.
But Canada recently reported that Big Macs were comprised of 50% soy when they tested its chicken DNA.
Oh wait, that was Subway.
As reported in RT America yesterday.
Codswallop is such a great word, though, Benito.
And Friedman is, as always, the last word on any and everything. He famously put the kibosh on the utterly absurd notion that had been circulating, that the world was round. That certainly sent the progressives packing.
Others have demurred, on the grounds that they find his articles to be balderdash and turtle pucky, as opposed to codswallop, and are prepared to vigorously defend their position.
What an intellectual that guy is. The fact that he still writes for the NYT can prove one of three things,
1. That the NYT is intellectually vacuous.
2. That the NYT believes that firing Friedman would be an admission of it’s own bottomless stupidity.
3. That the NYT believes that it’s working, and their readers are still buying the Thomas Friedman bullshit and are not howling with laughter behind the NYT’s backs or in front of the NYT.
I don’t know which. Maybe there’s a 4th thing.
even if the second-worst friedman next to milton was correct:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11047120/Russia-shuts-down-McDonalds-branches-in-Moscow-amid-Ukraine-row.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/29/mcdonalds-russia_n_5735530.html
as for “Russia’s nefarious publication”, again – no proof other than the “analysis” of a few 3rd rate infosec profiteers who put “bear” in names of anonymous hacking agents.
Finally, fucking finally someone says it plainly rather than ‘the Russians hacked the election.’ Bill Maher asked Issa about it in a not so plain way but enough so to be satisfied.
And of course now it’s apparent that Ronald McDonald has been the Puppet Master of War all these years: billions and billions served. Heavens to Betsy!
But who is Ronald McDonald? Friedman?
The explanations for our various woes are not mutually exclusive. I figure that Russia did what it could to influence the election because I can’t believe they would miss the juicy opportunity.
But they get only a few percent of the blame, because somebody like Trump should never have been CLOSE to winning an American election. Various American failures pushed him from the 10% he deserved to over 40%…
Russia probably did whatever it could to keep Clinton out of office. But:
1. There is no proof, as of yet, that Russia did anything which would either be considered illegal under our own laws or condemned by any sort of international body (such as the U.N.). Nobody claims they hacked voting machines or influenced the count. The most anybody has been able to claim is that they funded some conspiracy-theory-level websites, and also (without proof) that they hacked the DNC. (Wikileaks, for those not keeping track, says they received the various DNC leaks from a disgruntled DNC member.)
2. Since, as the article says, Clinton was sending lots of “I want to start World War III over Syria” signals, on that front Trump may even have been the better choice, difficult though it is to believe. It’s always easy to claim that someone who didn’t win the election would have been perfect.
3. It’s doubtful whether the Russians were actually pro-Trump so much as anti-Clinton. (In other words: choosing Clinton as the Democratic nominee may have been a stupid idea from yet another perspective.)
“It’s always easy to claim that someone who didn’t win the election would have been perfect.”
Perfection would have been that nobody won the election.
If there had been an option on the ballot reading “put the entire Clinton family and the entire Trump family onto a rocket and fire them into the sun, and give the parties 3 months to the next election” it would not only have won, but it would have gotten every single electoral college vote.
“Lies and Deceit”
I am Jacob “Nabucco” Price, as old as big brother, i.e. born when the first message was sent over ARPANET. I am a designer. At young age I got very stressed by the Cold War and wanted to put an end to it. I made a few drawings and sent them to an embassy. Soon I met two air force generals, or so, and explained my plan on how to come up with what is now called Star Wars. It would create quite some $$$ and afford for the fastest and most secret stealth plane ever “Aurora”. These generals were surprised as I was only in my early tens. I did get follow-up and asked if my message reached destination. “It sure did” I was told. The two generals, or so, asked me why I was doing this, I responded: “Because I can’t sleep”. I walked a couple of rounds around the block, and soon forgot because of the stress. In fact one of these two “generals” was with the Air Force, the other was CIA. I asked them for two of their future programs to be named Bernie and Have Trump, in turn they could each choose one. They chose Leo and Theme Castle (the latter after my desire to one day visit Disney World). It was obvious that Bernie and Trump would compete one day once the middle class was mostly gone. We thought that Trump would win so this would become the “Have” program.
It was around four years later that at computer class we talked about metadata. I sent another letter, and soon got company. She liked girls she said. We talked about metadata and a connected world, mobile phones, touch screens, and the miniaturisation of things. We also discussed sensors because they were available in the Boeing 747 for location purposes. It was a very interesting encounter. Got my first kiss. I knew the Russians were all over the place, and told her to secure the tapes at her home, and only tell about drones, i.e. pilot-less aircraft during her debriefing. Turns out her father worked in IT and space technology. Anyway, since we outlined the future for the next 20 years I decide to brainwash myself, putting myself in a position of lots of stress. You know, if you know too much, they might kill you. Ah, I also told her that in a couple of years I would travel to her country, with an air pass. She says that she might become a flight attendant, and maybe we will meet again. She also says that someone is going to do a piece of art at the CIA. As she explained encoding/encryption techniques, I find out that I likely will never work for the CIA. The NSA was still Never Say Anything. We decided to somehow influence the artist’s work. I would encode a secret message “The Truth Shall Set You Free”. She would ensure a passage and a very inspiring text of a speech at the Brandenburg Gate would get encoded: “PPeople to create a safer freer world and surely there is no better place than Berlin the meeting place of East and West”. She asked me if I read 1984 which I hadn’t. I went to the public library, ordered it and had to wait, and read it, with the stress and the contents of the book I managed again to think I just dreamed things up. The kiss really was a good form of brainwash too. ??Then, on July 4, 1989 disaster struck. A Russian MIG crashed. Somehow I feel it was supposed to have hit me, and don’t know why I think so. It’s kind of a clear message, drones, Independence Day… I think some French may have steered it into the house by radio control, sympathising with the Russians (I have quite some imagination). Two months later I go to school and find out a schoolmate-to-be was killed. Now I know it really was intended for me. He must have been my decoy, I didn’t know I had one. An innocent death, the pilots of the F-15 chase planes have logged “we’re under orders to kill you if we talk about it”. Obviously, the Russians don’t know of our plan build a large cloud infrastructure in 20 years from now.
I am very saddened and engage the government. We come up with the following plan, upon the first new moon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we will have our toys from Area 51, multiple stealth fighters (about to be engaged in Panama) come over. I offer my skies under the condition that only the director of the CIA and the president are aware: if not the Russians will know, they are just all over the place. We come to an agreement. For two years, my fellow citizens see UFO’s until short before the end of the Soviet Union. We did it! Well actually I think Pope John Paul II did more to end the Cold War, but this is my piece. No more stress, relief! ??I am now graduated and travel my favourite country. I will meet “Lima” again, and I manage for her to land a job at ECHELON. She lets me take the oath and I become a US citizen (it’s a requirement to get to her parent’s home and talk business. I am now Jacob Price. ??I must join the military, I meet 2 middle eastern diplomats, whom I don’t trust, but they have US passports and required security clearances and know the protocol and code word. They’re two so I can talk. I don’t trust them. They ask too many questions and soon we talk about the issues in the middle east. I tell them stupidity, keep them busy, for as long I don’t need to tell about my dreamland activity. I don’t talk about ECHELON because that is up to “Lima”. However they become too interested in my stupidity, so I try to delay the whole thing, thinking of the picture I took of the Pentagon, on 9-11-1991. This buys me time to ensure nothing will happen. ??A year later I meet with the CIA. I’ll forget everything again, you see, little brother does not know about big brother. Only big brother knows about little brother. 9-11 occurs and I am in disbelief, shocked, outraged. I must think of that other 9-11, the one in Chile. Why on earth do they do this? ??Back to reality, I find out I am on the autism spectrum, get a severe depression, and psychosis, see “Lies and Deception”. I have decided to change, albeit that I have difficulty with change. I see my life in retrospect and now understand why I acted to people like I did. I am encircled by good people, colleagues, and had the chance to have a 2nd birth (the new me). If only I could be this Nabucco, rebuild my favourite country, and help out these true heroes (aka whistleblowers), it’s a cause I would like to die for. I found out “Lima” died on 9-11 too (year withheld). She is now in her afterlife, protecting me and securing the future of America. We likely will never meet again. This is the story of Jacob Price.?
That all whistleblowers may be set free and rewarded.
That a new Cold War may be averted.
That People to create a safer freer world and surely there is no better place than Berlin the meeting place of East and West
That Trump may be a tactic and Bernie the Strategy.
Addendum, corrected links: ?
Star Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
July 4, 1989
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/05/world/pilotless-soviet-jet-crosses-europe-before-crashing.html
Fall of the Berlin Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall#Fall_of_the_Wall
Tonight, Trump will give his first “State of the Union” speech. In it he’ll call for a massive increase in the defense budget. Also keep in mind he has control over the nuclear codes. Legally, once he orders missiles, legally no one else can overrule him.
The Russian govt. has a psychological dossier on Trump. What’s the big deal? Security agencies worldwide have these all the time on foreign leaders. the key here is that no powerful national politician will publically say that Trump is mentally ill. He’s a threat to the safety and security of not only the US public but people globally. Privately, Congressional neocons will talk to Democrats. But publically? No.
Some say that Trump will be impeached in the next 3-6 months. Really? What do you base that on? How does a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist evaluate Trump when he refuses to be examined? Can you have a credible evaluation based on someone’s words and actions alone? If Trump is impeached, who’s next in the line of succession?:
Pence
Ryan
Tillerson
Are any of these people better than Trump?
most grateful for that analysis, Mr. Greenwald.
spot on!
i wish to re-emphasise the unsolved, untackled, untalkedabout, MURDER OF SETH RICH which, imho, was committed by the backers of the dem party. For some reason, it is beginning to seem that media elites are more behind these wars and murders than i previously figured.
Quite in keeping with the spirit of this website.
We don’t know who to blame but blame them we will.
Why blame the Russians, Wilt (or is it Milt? ), of course! They are behind everything, right? Oh shit, look behind you, they’re probably hiding in your closet! Or hacking your machine, they’re after every red-blooded neo-liberal American boy! Their power knows no bounds!!! We’re dooooomed, we need a war with those scary bastards, post-haste, strike first before the start dropping from the sky like Red Dawn!
I’ve been subjected to some remarkably stupid responses in the last few months, but this has to be one of the dumbest posts I’ve ever seen.
Ever,
Funny that Rachael Maddow is all concerned about the murder of a Russian politician yet has said NOTHING about the murder of Seth Rich. Why is that?
This is outrageous. An oligarchy using money as a weapon!
What next?
Rightwing libertarian oligarchs sabotaging the American political system by financing various think tanks, fabricating astroturf interest groups, establishing new media “newspapers,” paying trolls to disrupt political websites, tacitly backing a malevolent and incendiary president who attacks the most powerless while accusing traditional media of being the “enemy,” buying a compliant congress, installing a Supreme Court of lackeys, all while blaming liberals (or neoliberals, wink,nudge) for the ills of the world?
This is the beauty of Democracy. You can blame anyone you want for doing whatever it is you deplore. The Constitution gives everyone that right. The
oligarchsrich guys know this too.In America, money wins. Why shouldn’t Russian have Democracy too?
Yeehaw!
Aside from the truly hilarious fact that you believe US interference in other countries is about ensuring that their citizens enjoy the fruits of democracy – seriously, is there anything funnier than that? – you’re outright admitting that the US is, indeed, attempting to influence the domestic political affairs of Russia, exactly as Putin says they are.
As The LA Times reported last year, it was pro-Clinton PACs, led by the incomparably scummy David Brock, spending at least $1 million on an online troll army.
Watch your head Milton, there’s a mic drop coming at you.
Lemmethink… er, no!
Milton is a True Believer in Mordor! It’s a dirty job but someone has tp do it…
Aside from the truly hilarious fact that you believe US interference in other countries is about ensuring that their citizens enjoy the fruits of democracy – seriously, is there anything funnier than that? – you’re outright admitting that the US is, indeed, attempting to influence the domestic political affairs of Russia, exactly as Putin says they are.
For someone who employs sarcasm as much as yourself, I expect a more sensitive appreciation of it.
Yes, of course the US is interfering in Russia’s internal affairs. The US has been “interfering” ever since the US invaded Russia in 1918. It would be ludicrous — hilarious –to suggest otherwise. That’s the point of the security agencies in the US that makes Stasi look like schoolkids.
Not only do I agree with you, I wholeheartedly and unreservedly applaud your mere mention of this poorly kept secret.
But so what?
My point isn’t that the US is bringing Democracy (in the Jeffersonian sense) to the rest of the world, but exactly the opposite. (That’s the sarcastic part.)
There’s no more Democracy in the US than there is in Russia.
And after all, isn’t that the fear — that we will lose our precious Democracy — upon which you build your entire argument?
Undemocratic forces like the democrats (boo!), the liberal press (boo!), Washington elites (boo!) are trying to fool us (yay us!) into supporting another Cold War (boo!)
Again, so what?
Sooner or later, Mr Greenwald, you’re going to have to explain how Donald Trump is president, why the Republicans are in charge of all three branches of government, and why our neo-gestapo (ICE) is going after immigrants and Muslims rather than oligarchs and Wall Street.
As the heat of the election recedes, you’re going to have to find scapegoats other than liberals, the liberal press and democrats to blame for President Trump’s position.
People are already losing interest in such counterfactual explanations as they take to the streets in growing numbers.
Time stamp: February 28 2017, 5:17 p.m.
Actually appearing? Unknown. At least 24 hours later.
Next time stamp and post:
February 28 2017, 5:25 p.m.
I sincerely hope and believe that my response is held up solely because of the Wikipedia link I included with it.
Next time stamp and post:
March 1 2017, 12:36 a.m.
I am disappointed now, at least 8 hours since I posted a reply to this bit of nonsense that my reply hasn’t appeared.
My tone was respectful, my link to Wikipedia, my language appropriate, and my dispute sincere and germane.
Next time stamp:
March 1 2017, 9:10 a.m.
My original response didn’t appear until … I don’t know when it appeared. I was only scrolling today out of curiosity.
So here it is, finally. No response, no explanation, nothing but more nothing.
A modern comment section (like that of the Guardian) wouldn’t send a loud and unmistakable “FU” to readers.
I sincerely hope and believe that my response is held up solely because of the Wikipedia link I included with it.
Inserting the stunningly corrupt, wildly incapable and idiotic Yeltsin, obliterating the economy for the pleasure of the oligarchs, and backing Yeltsin’s military attack against his own Duma, as Clinton did, certainly qualifies, at the very least, as “influencing” Russian political affairs. And if one cares to think of it, the insertion of Yeltsin steamrolled the way for Putin’s coming to power. If things had gone the way of Gorbachev, none of this would have come to pass, and the world would be a far healthier place. But Clinton and his “brain trust”, in their infinite wisdom, had a plan, a “strategy”, for turning Russia into a kleptocratic capitalist paradise…. Now that it is, we have Clinton, H.R., fresh from her own “at bat” at the plate of murderous kleptocracy, apparently vehemently opposing the inevitable results of the “strategy” developed by Clinton, W.J. and his master planners in the CIA and Wall Street. Such irony. But undergirding it all, is simply Hillary and her “Dems” unbridled desire to consummate her idol, Goldwater’s, unfulfilled dream. To bomb Russia back to the stone age.
I am disappointed now, at least 8 hours since I posted a reply to this bit of nonsense that my reply hasn’t appeared.
My tone was respectful, my link to Wikipedia, my language appropriate, and my dispute sincere and germane.
Apparently you’re not as sensitive to sarcasm as you seem to be when you employ it.
I do not think the US exports Democracy.
I do not think the US is a Democracy now.
The US exports exactly that which it manufactures for itself.
Money and weapons.
Democracy? Why do you think the US had the School of the Americas to train people like Egyptian president Sisi?
Democracy wasn’t ever and isn’t now on the Made in United States of America™ menu.
1. “Russia invaded Georgia and numerous domestic dissidents and journalists were imprisoned or killed”
source, please. the red army “invaded” about 80 years earlier if that’s what you mean. plus it wasn’t exactly a great place for journalists to begin with. oh, and…
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/georgias-abu-ghraib-the-horrific-stories-of-prisoner-abuse-8160286.html
not trying to nitpick…georgia propaganda is very similar to the ukraine variety and thus annoys me if it isn’t specific. as with the latter, there is more to the former story than the present and immediate “facts” reported by partisan agencies with partsian agendas. history, past tensions, regional politics, NATO meddling, etc.
2. the war profiteers see this as a limitless supply of cash in a country that’s already running on war and financial fraud. i’m assuming many people at “the top” also think they can colour revolution putin outta there before any missiles are fired.
for the deep staters it supplies a focus grouped, time tested “enemy” to replace the waning “threat” of jihadi sharia takeover or whatever. it probably dawned on them that their designs on syria (to be followed by iran) will be difficult to realize without a steady stream of takfiri cannon fodder. after we’re done doing israel’s dirty work in that region and have a pliable yeltsin jr. in moscow the threat will become muslims again (if any are left). or environmentalists. or _______?
3. chomsky answers this one as well: “we own the world”. our meddling is fine because in every russian/iraqi/afghan/iranian/korean is an american dying to get out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMEViYvojtY
4. if evidence mattered, fine. too bad the prevailing cliche here is “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. evidence could have prevented most conflicts in recent history. evidence has, ironically, very little proof of its own existence.
5. again, nothing new. for someone watching from a distance and enjoying the sight of the US slowly imploding into an insane third world plutocratic dictatorship this is good news. the tighter the rubber band is stretched the harder it snaps back. this same (totes hypothetical) person might relish the idea of eventual pitchforks and torches in DC. or perhaps even the fantasy of future chinese businessmen flying to the ravaged remains of a former superpower for cheap labour and the occasional sex tourism. (this hypothetical guy sounds like a total dick, amirite?)
Wilbur Ross, the newly appointed Commerce Secretary of the Trump administration, is the majority shareholder of the Bank of Cyprus. This bank has a history of laundering money for Dmitri Rybolovlev and other Russian oligarchs. Mr. Rybolovlev is the Russian oligarch who paid Trump $100 million for a Palm Beach mansion that Trump had acquired for $40 million only 2 years earlier. This happened at a time when Trump was having trouble meeting the payments for his Deutsche Bank loan. Of course, Deutsche Bank was fined $650 million by US regulators for laundering $10 billion in money from Russian oligarchs. There are far too many cabinet members, appointees, and business contacts of Donald Trump and his administration for the Trump-Russia connection to be merely coincidence. Someone is keeping his head in the sand here. I wonder who it could be?
funny how selective “US regulators” are about enforcing the rules. unless this was the only case of fraud and laundering they could possibly find.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/business/dealbook/1mdb-goldman-sachs.html?_r=0
Russia is not a superpower. It is a large nation geographically, has a proud imperial history, and 140 million extremely well-educated people, the most educated of which emigrate to other countries and do not return.
Their team is composed of incredibly talented, smart and competent people, in every sector. Some of them sure emigrate but so do a lot of Europeans in the EU.
Check the UK, France etc. Some emigrate because the want to live in a better climate which is understandable.
I even go as far as to say that if today’s Russia had even only 10 º more in terms of average temperature and easier immigration laws, a lot of educated people from the EU may want go there.
“the most educated of which emigrate and do not return” seems like a huge overstatement.
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I only join clubs that offer secret decoder rings.
Wow I never though it could be so easy. How much emotional servitude?
You forgot to add Donald Trump and about one-half of his administration to your list of names.
Hence including : “and….??????????” for all future SOTMC inductees.
This ????? would also include many behind the scenes Oligarchal Demipubilcans as well…
wot, no mention of netanyahu?
Just fill in the “???????” with your own preferred SOTMC nominee.
Most any powerful World figure: past or present could be easily be eligible.
As in:
Tony Blair
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etc.etc.etc…..
I enjoyed it – two thumbs up and spot on!
An addendum to your media clips in this article might be David Remnick’s appearance on Rachel Maddow last night. She riled herself up into a “this article explains everything!”, Glenn-Beck’s-chalkboard-style froth, and then Remnick repeatedly put things in perspective in a way that clearly deflated and disappointed her conspiracy-clutching.
Remnick did a good job there – worth watching.
I cannot fathom how there could be any acceptance of the idea that the Podesta mails were hacked by Russians when we KNOW that he exposed them to the world himself by giving his password to a phisher. Further, the DNC mails were not HACKED. They were leaked by an insider (very likely DNC employee Seth Rich who was murdered soon after on a Georgetown street). The Russian Hack is a contemptible false narrative for all the reasons Glenn mentions. Which is why I and others find the New Yorker article deeply, deeply creepy. In the manner of Colin Powell’s white powder. Or George W*’s yellowcake.
Nice and objective article, fresh to read someone write an objective article without propaganda. The fact is that the US cannot deny interference in other countries’ politics, in turn creating global challenges through ruthless and senseless interventions especially in the middle East and eastern Europe without proper understanding of ethnic and cultural differences. A German satire once said” if Putin was as crazy as G.W Bush or Hillary Clinton, Kiev would have been like Badgad today” Trying to demonise Putin and the Russian government is a desperate move that will backfire. In addition, the US elite should realise that the alternative media and state sponsored media outlets like RT and CCTV is bring facts with evidence to people all over the world, informed people do not depend on BBC, CNN and Fox news to know what is happening all over the world again, therefore they are simply creating a knowledge vacuum on their populace, which will influence their approach and thinking on the global stage.
I don’t read TNY; I wouldn’t have know about it unless you did this above. Excellent work point it out.
You had me at “phallically invading the White House”.
Hey Melania!
““phallically invading the White House”.”
I just saw the Sword of Damocles …
not a sword fight.
Yeah, we’re definitely already in a new Cold War, precipitated largely by U.S. imperial meddling in Russian affairs and U.S.-led NATO encroaching on Russia’s borders. That is shocking, and great reporting, on the State Department-funded Russian political groups. And does that self-serving halfwit adviser Evelyn Farkas GET the horrible irony of her statement that she would not have to “fight” the Clinton campaign to be more confrontational toward Russia? Of course, Ms. Farkas, you’ll just leave the fighting – and the dying – to young people in uniform.
Thanks, Glenn, for being a voice of sanity in this wilderness of groupthink. Hang in, and don’t let the Joy Reid and Howard Dean hacks of the left discourage you. Through their partisan smear tactics they reveal only the seedy, bankrupt aspects of their character.
Among the richest hypocrisy in all of this is to juxtapose how we would react if something like the old Warsaw Pact were doing what we have in the Ukraine and by incorporating the Baltic states into Nato someplace like Mexico, or even somewhere farther away, like say, Grenada, or Panama. We would at the least immediately destabilize and destroy said country economically and politically, and more likely would simply invade and install a government to our liking. But we’re so super exceptional- if we do exactly what we have a fit about when someone else does it, even in a much milder, weaker form (like hack/leak truthful information that makes a politician look bad, because, well, they are a scumbag), it’s all OK, because USA! USA!! My country, by jingo, my country!!
you Americans need medication…..all you cry about is Russia are yo really that crazy in the head ? by the way trump ,Russia and chin are about prosperity and peace on earth not like old amercia. was…and Obama stole 619 million dollars from Obama care so that’s your hero lo;
Excellent article, although I admit to becoming nauseated whenever Mikey Morrell is featured in any context.
Although I must admit I always have reservations about the New Yorker, ever since I read an article by their senior editor in charge of fact-checking in the Nation, when he suggests that Arbenz of Guatemala was a “communist” and it was “normal” for Eisenhower to have overthrown him. (The real facts, which are obviously beyond the realm of that so-called fact-checker, are: Jacobo Arbenz was a capitalist who wanted to build a middle-class in his country, which necessitated wresting some of the economic control back from United Fruit, whose major shareholder then was Floyd Odlum who, interestingly enough, was also the primary financial backer behind Eisenhower’s presidency.
Perhaps Obama and Clinton are different, but if that is so, I would have expected to see an Obama version of Trump’s epic battle that is currently being waged against the current MIC/neocon establishment.
A man’s greatness can be measured by his enemies; and in that regard, Trump seems to be a giant.
Glenn for President. We need a leader.
I’m not sure if it was around the time that the Snowden files came out that it was revealed that the U.S. Government had tapped Angela Merkel’s cell phone. ButI don’t remember any sanctions coming from Germany back then.
The US Government has meddled in many presidential elections in several countries around the world. It has even overthrown democratically elected governments. Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Honduras-just to name a few- come to mind. I don’t understand then why some politicians and the media are now making such a fuss about this.
So, let’s assume for a minute that Russia hacked the DNC and the Podesta emails. Am I too naive for saying that the solution to this whole situation should be to say: “OK, guys you got us there. We had shitty ciber security. It won’t happen again.”
If the Democrats insist on this rethoric of “Russia hacked the elections,” the danger of World War III starting will be just around the corner.
By the way, now that Tom Perez has been elected chair of the DNC, Bernie Sanders needs to start a third party right away.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to start a third party, he seems comfortable enough in the Democrat Party. However, there IS a third party that shares many of Sanders’ stated beliefs, has some infrastructure already in place, and ballot access in over 20 states and the ability to get near 50 in presidential years: The Green Party. http://www.gp.org
I know this is off topic, but I’m absolutely flabbergasted at how monumentally historically ignorant and frankly–bigoted–someone like Trump and the GOP’s Besty DeVos must be to say something like this:
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/statement-secretary-education-betsy-devos-following-listening-session-historically-black-college-and-university-leaders
I mean I really don’t know what else to say, except at least the GOP is showing its true colors for all to see. Too bad the Democratic party at the national level appears not to have the stomach, will or political skills to take advantage of the opportunities they are being given by this administration to drive a stake through heart of these revanchist societal vampire bigots. But I guess that would involve taking a break from the multi-millionaire – billionaire fundraising circuit to actually, you know, play some political hardball and denounce idiots like DeVos in unequivocal terms.
yes, its very off topic. how bout finding a better outlet instead of coat-tailing this one.
Yeah, like totally, so sorry to have forced you to scroll through one off-topic comment.
My bad. I’ll make sure and go self-flagellate with a cat of nine tails for 20 minutes to regain your approval for what I post.
So sorry for having put you to the strenuous task of employing your scroll wheel for one comment.
I’ll make sure and self-flagellate with a cat-of-nine-tails for the next 20 minutes to regain your approval for what I post, where and when. Or maybe could you give me your e-mail address so I can run anything I want to post here past you in advance for your approval on topicality and tone? Much appreciated. Or use the scroll wheel. Up to you.
Oops, that was weird, sorry for double post, gave me a message that the first had a glitch.
somehow russia pushes all the right buttons in our government … or (more likely) inspires us to push them ourselves
and the editorial we build the most hideously advanced weapons possible
as a thrilling testament to the human spirit … one supersonic rocket plane that can level a city
I sure hope no idiot decides to push the “toast” button
So let’s summarize this.
#1. What about Obama! Seriously, that’s the best you can do? Maybe some people weren’t thrilled with Obama’s policies vis-a-vis Russia either? Didn’t you tweet something about the insidious deep state and Trump presidency? Can one disagree with Obama as well as have concern over Trump’s lovefest for Vladimir Putin?
#2. So we’ve just established that Obama was way too accommodating but now we have to backtrack because hey, ‘does anyone realize how close we are to a world war?’ Well, ok but then Obama… maybe… was on to something? I’m confused at this point. Obama’s bad for accommodating, got it, but we’re really close to a world war so we need to be… more… accommodating.
And let’s take some time to delve into false equivalencies, shall we? It’s all both sides’ fault!
#3. Of course the US is involved in Russian politics. So what? I guess in the Glenn Greenwald world of ethics, since we’re doing it too we can’t complain. Thanks, Glenn!
#4. Still whining that no proof has been shown regarding the DNC hacks, I see. First, it’s an ongoing investigation. Second, you willfully ignore a whole ton of circumstantial evidence whereby you really have to twist yourself into knots to say some dude in NJ is responsible for this. You want IP addresses and the whole 9 yards now? That never stopped you before, Glenn. It seems so odd you keep banging this drum.
#5. Is it ok to be concerned about Trump while at the same time concerned about globalization? Or is it Glenn Greenwald’s rule that until all the problems in the world are solved foreign affairs are an unacceptable distraction?
I believe in the axiom “NEVER READ THE COMMENTS” but then I went and did it anyway.
Damn.
Yup. My eyes are hurting too. And I get the feeling JP thought he was actually giving a logical argument as well…
1) Greenwald is saying that Trump loves Putin about as much as Obama, which is not at all.
2) Both Obama and Trump are actually quite sensible if they want to avoid war with Russia.
3) It is hypocritical to make a big deal over something nations do to each other as a matter of course.
4) There is no proof of Russian hacks, and this is relevant when such a huge issue is being made of something without evidence. Also see 3).
5) Be concerned over whatever the hell you like, but don’t be surprised if Greenwald pulls the illogic of hysteria apart before your eyes.
“Is it ok to be concerned about Trump while at the same time concerned about globalization? ”
You might be, the DNC and HRC apologists are not (concerned about globalization…or if they are, the concern is that it’s not happening fast enough for them)
Amazing work!!!
The real danger of the US restarting the Cold War is that it’s one thing to fight a Cold War when you are the world’s biggest economy, and seen as the protector of freedom by what, combined, is the second biggest, and when you more than dominate the world’s popular entertainment industry, and quite another when you’re the SECOND biggest economy, heading for third, and the biggest economy and the soon to be second biggest DON’T see you as a protector, but as a hostile competitor, as do most of the people of the rest of the world. Those fearing that the US will lose the ‘new Cold War’ are right to do so, though not for the reasons they think, because the entire US – Russia competition is going to be the equivalent of the women’s hockey competition between India and Pakistan, a side battle of little relevance to the main event.
Beginning with its cover image menacingly featuring Putin, Trump and the magazine’s title in Cyrillic letters, along with its lead cartoon dystopically depicting a UFO-like Red Square hovering over and phallically invading the White House
This is actually from Independence Day, with the White House being blown up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eujwxh_r43E
You need to get out more Glenn :)
Maybe you should check the New Yorker website .
Yes, I meant the New Yorker got it from the movie. It’s blowing up the White House, and not “phallically invading” as Glenn stated.
Wrong…That’s a semen ray is I ever saw one
there’s now a full quantum theory of semen rays and their interactions
Going back to what you wrote after the election, you said that Trump (and Brrxit) might be the high water mark, or he might, instead, be the beginning of extreme new voter reactions.
I think the information contained in this article is evidence of the latter case.
What evidence, if any, have you seen of the former (that Trump is as bad as it gets)?
I’m always pretty shocked the loonies in the US government and military haven’t turned the world into a smoking pile of radioactive rubble, yet. I have no doubt unless the people change, throw them all out, and demand peace and mutual respect for our 6 + billion brothers and sisters on the planet–they ultimately will turn this beautiful planet into a smoking wasteland. Assuming the fossil fuel industry doesn’t beat them to the punch.
In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living. As of August 2016 , it was estimated at 7.4 billion. The United Nations estimates it will further increase to 11.2 billion in the year 2100.
Thank you for the correction.
just you wite, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wite…
The turning point was Russia taking in Snowdon who embarrassed Obama, that is when the rhedoric really started up before the O games and before Crimea
On the timeline. Yes. Which should make most sane people ask what was it in those revelations that inspired such a disproportionately wild eyed and erratic response from a sitting administration mindlessly bleating the word “metadata” and “nothing to see here” while new (more significant seldom covered revelations like its full take collection (not just the metadata), xkeyscore, jtrig, nist, swift, optic nerve, treasuremap, equation group, gemalto etc etc etc ) kept dropping all around them.
They’re experimenting on every one of us with a remarkable ever changing palette of proliferating electronic intermediaries certainly behaviorally, psychologically and quite possibly physiologically (effecting the quality of your sleep state, overstimulating you flight or fight response, reinforcing or maintaining adverse physical or emotional states through the manipulation of news feeds, light (jet lag, depression, optogenetics) or sound (research it yourself) to effect desired changes in the subject organic batteries (thats you, your enemies, you friends and family) future behavior, likes, dislikes and proclivities.
“Its not about terrorism its about control.” Ed, Bill, Tom etc
It seems we have reached a point of insanity in our political discussions. Trump is the peace president who wants to radically build up our military, Wanting to negotiate down hostilities is treasonous behavior in polite society. Anonymous CIA sources are trusted to save our democracy–they must be trusted with absolute faith. The hacking of one man’s emails, Podesta the corrupt insider, was enough to bring down American democracy as it seems American democracy is so fragile it needed the intercession of anonymous intelligence community leakers. And to that end, the major media outlets will protect us from fake and distorted news.
It is instructive to look at the polls at the time of the Iraq invasion that upwards to 70% of the American people supported the war, how the majority believed that Saddam had WMDs. How skewered the mass media was in fomenting the invasion. Or that in 2010 polls found the majority of Americans believed the Iranians had nuclear weapons.
The mass media and the political parties are talking us step by step into outright war with Russia.
Thank you for the article.
It’s just desperate flailing by a collapsing American empire at this point. Similar activities went on within the USSR and the British and French Empires when they collapsed – and you know, I bet nobody can say whether it was “the liberals” or “the conservatives” who were at the helm when those respective empires fell apart, because historians don’t view such distinctions as very meaningful when discussing imperial collapse.
The USSR for example had to boost military spending to continue its own reckless Afghanistan adventure:
Now the tables have been turned (in this continuation of the Cold War scenario, that the dinosaurs in Washington can’t seem to get over) – the American empire, in its quest for world domination as per the Project for a New American Century agenda laid out in the 1990s, is the one going bankrupt due to militaristic boondoggles, the one with the collapsing domestic economy and rising social unrest (which is what gave us Trump, not Russian hacking).
I don’t know where Greenwald gets the notion that Obama and Clinton had radically different views on Russia from, though. They’re both tools of big money donors like Warren Buffett who will end up in the same position as the Russian oligarchs like Gusinsky and Berezovsky who thrived under Boris Yeltsin in the long run. But since this outlet is dependent on the largesse of another American oligarch, Omidyar, I don’t expect honest discussion of these issues here.
President Obama liked to play with drones, so he wasn’t focused on Russia (who would have just shot down his drones). My impression is that President Trump prefers to play with nukes and the Democrats seem to support this change. This is unfair to Mrs. Clinton, who also preferred nukes, but life is unfair.
Mr. Trump, as the only adult in the room, knows the nuclear arsenal must be modernized at a cost of several trillion dollars so that the nukes don’t explode before the missiles leave the silos. He’ll also need to make a deal with Mr. Putin to delimit areas such as Mar-a-Lago which are off limits to bombing. So I’d urge everyone to be patient, as these preparations might take several years. It might be a good idea to take up a new hobby, while waiting for the final fireworks.
nukes are aging out due to half-life issues .. we have 82 or so years left but why postpone the inevitable party for General Dynamics:
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-04/battling-over-aging-nuclear-warheads
new nukes work better and will probably have cooler-looking cases for the warhead
Mr. Trump would make an excellent nuke tester.
And it’s just about time for a remake.
loved this phrase
“…just as seatbelts made cars safer for passengers, “technology now allows safety features into nuclear warheads,…”
what a perfect analogy
Benito: You are our treasure!
I remember a TV program about our aging nuclear arsenal. A control unit shown was activated by a 8″ floppy disk (ask your granddad what those were).
“I remember a TV program about our aging nuclear arsenal. ”
Yes, it was on PBS American Experience about 6 weeks ago. A dropped wrench socket, in 1980, launched a 4 megaton warhead some 100 yards from the silo, in Arkansas. Had it detonated, a radius of ~45 miles would have been incinerated. (600 Hiroshima-sized bombs)
And that was just one case of the biggest bombs ever made being dropped by accident.
There is an engineer on the show who warns it is not a matter of if one will detonate when dropped but when it will happen. It’s a mechanical device and it has to not fail indefinitely. It is impossible to build such a device.
That is the argument as to why they should never have been built. I think it’s a good argument.
Obama was the one who stuck his foot in the door of multi-$trillion nuke “modernization” and “upgrade”, from kill to kill better
I have a theory that Pierre Omidyar has specifically banned all Intercept writers from discussing the details of the U.S. – sponsored coup in the Ukraine in 2014 in any Intercept articles as a condition of the outlet continuing to recieve funding.
Those details, such as Clinton cohort member Victoria “Cookies” Nuland’s role in orchestrating the coup, the actual events that took place in Maiden in 2014, the coordination with far-right neo-Nazi groups as “proxy forces”, or the long-term alliance between Clinton and oligarchs like Victor Pinchuk, all look extremely suspicious and point to a U.S.-sponsored coup effort in the Ukraine far more serious than anything Russia is even accused of doing – and there’s plenty of evidence, too. For example:
The close association between coup supporters like oligarch Viktor Pinchuk and the Clinton cohort is revealed in Wikileaks and State Department email collections. For example, evidence of the mafia-like nature of this Clinton ally from State Dept cables:
From the Clinton email archive at Wikileaks:
For much more on the Clinton-Pinchuk relationship via the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative:
http://www.progressivepress.net/hillary-clintons-ukraine-problem-2/
In addition, the long-term agenda of the U.S. to bring the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, something the U.S. promised it would never do when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved in the 1990s, is clearly revealed in Wikileaks State Department cables. For example, from August 2008, SECRET/NOFORN:
I seriously doubt that Obama, loyal to his big-money donors, really had a different position on this pro-Cold War agenda than Clinton did. He was just as bent on expanding the NATO/EU alliance (highly profitable for Wall Street) right up to Russia’s borders in eastern Europe and central Asia as were the Bush and Clinton Administrations, as the above link makes clear.
WOW! Until you told us, NONE of us realized it!
What is the point of your cheap sarcasm? I have no idea if photosymbiosis’s claims are all true, but if they are I certainly didn’t know of the Clinton-Ukraine links. We can’t all be like you and know the claims, counterclaims, facts and lies about every issue.
Nete Peedham’s been Twitterized and can no longer think any thoughts longer than 140 characters. Pity is the appropriate response.
Says you in 130 chars.
A few additional factors here:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22758-meet-the-americans-who-put-together-the-coup-in-kiev
Now, here is where the Omidyar Network activities are rather curious:
And lo and behold, zero reporting from the Intercept on Ukrainian shadiness. . . Is it any wonder many people are highly suspicious of the real agenda behind this “independent non-profit outlet”, Mr. Greenwald?
Why not instead of sliming Glenn with innuendo, just ask him outright if Omidyar has said Ukraine or any involvement by Omidyar with organizations linked to the Ukraine is off-limits for The Intercept journalists?
Or ask him if there is any chance that one of The Intercept’s journalists will be doing any investigative reporting on the topic in the future?
I’ve shared similar concerns about Glenn getting into bed with a billionaire in the first instance–from day one. I think it’s a reasonable concern and Glenn as conceded that it is/was generally and for him personally, if I recall correctly.
That being said, I have no concerns about Glenn’s integrity because based on his demonstrated history, I believe that if he found out something problematic about Omidyar, or Omidyar was influencing in any way what Glenn could write about and publish here, Glenn would resign and publish it elsewhere (although no one knows the terms of any of the journalists contracts with The Intercept that might prohibit subsequent disclosure).
Having said that, I’ve often posited that the surest way to establish the scope of The Intercept staff’s independence as journalists is to do a full-blown series on the life of Pierre Omidyar–good and bad and otherwise and explore fully some of the insinuations that have been documented about Omidyar’s various endeavors and activities or organizations he’s funded.
I don’t think that’s unreasonable if Mr. Omidyar has nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
Glenn specifically addressed your “theory” on March 1, 2014: https://theintercept.com/2014/03/01/journalistic-independence/
Thank you for posting. There is _definitely_ something weird about Greenwald not even mentioning Obama’s Ukrainian regime change, which was spearheaded by neo-Nazis. The New Yorker article doesn’t mention it either, but I expect that from the New Yorker.
Excerpt:
A Ukrainian oligarch paid $150,000 to the Trump Foundation in exchange for Donald Trump making a speech at one of his conferences, it has emerged…Tax returns for 2015 released by the Trump Foundation show the UK office of Victor Pinchuk’s foundation made the substantial payment that year…Despite stump speeches to supporters suggesting a warmer relationship between the US and Russia, Trump’s talk at the YES Annual Meeting promised a stronger line on Russian intervention in Ukraine.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3963204/Trump-foundation-received-150-000-donation-Ukrainian-oligarch-exchange-Donald-s-2015-Ukraine-speech.html
– “Viktor Pinchuk wants Ukraine to capitulate to Russia”:
Excerpt:
Pinchuk clearly sees himself as an intermediary, like Henry Kissinger, between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Pinchuk’s American advisor Doug Schoen has been seen at several Trump events….A decade ago Pinchuk stressed Ukraine’s cultural, linguistic, economic and energy ties to Russia and proposed a Leonid Kuchma-style foreign policy of ‘building bridges’ between Europe and Russia and Ukraine’s ‘integration into Europe with Russia.’..In 2006, Pinchuk rejected NATO membership because a majority of Ukrainians were opposed to it.
http://euromaidanpress.com/2017/01/04/victor-pinchuk-wants-ukraine-to-capitulate-to-russia-crimea-donbas/
Great piece. I found this buried gem interesting.
It is particularly interesting, although not mutually exclusive, that he is on record as saying the following:
That of course that would be the same Strobe Talbott former Deputy Secretary of State under Pres. Bill Clinton, who unsurprisingly sits on the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations (and head of Brookings Institute) together with sitting on the Board of America Abroad Media (with people like Madeleine Albright which appears to be a American propaganda disseminating endeavor), together with such luminaries as:
Sandy Berger (USNCA for Bill Clinton, and at Cornell a member of the Quill and Dagger society with Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, and of course popped and pled guilty to unauthorized removal of classified documents in October 2003 from a National Archives reading room prior to testifying before the 9/11 Commission including five classified copies of a single report commissioned from Richard Clarke covering internal assessments of the Clinton Administration’s handling of the unsuccessful 2000 millennium attack plots and subsequently lied to investigators when questioned about the removal of the documents.)
Brent Snowcroft (former National Security Advisor to both Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.)
And the rest of the CFR Board the vast majority of whom are neoliberal globalist investment bankers or hedge fund types.
What are the chances of you getting your colleague Mattathias Schwartz to pull some strings with his pals at the CFR to see if Strobe Talbott would make himself available for an in depth podcast interview with you on the purported Russian hacking incident(s), and his thoughts on the points you’ve raised in this article including why he’s fear mongering about Russia?
I think it is always important when talking about the “deep/dark state” that people include the obvious incestuous revolving door relationship between US government officials and “think tanks” particularly the influential ones who are primarily responsible for filtering and cabining almost all important issues and debates through the lens of the worldview of the neoliberal globalist hyper-wealthy and hyper-connected former members of Congress, the military, the banking industry et al.
I’m going to keep linking this, because Americans don’t live in the country they think they do:
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
After reading it I have disseminated the link under “In case you’ve wondered”.
Thanks
Agree with nearly everything in this article, but I’m wary of saying Obama was accommodative of Russia – mainly because I think this plays into the hands of the war hawks.
There’s no argument that Obama was willing to engage with Russia – on the Iran deal, nuclear disarmament, climate change, even space exploration. But he was sharp-elbowed too, he led the way in imposing sanctions after the Ukraine/Crimea, and he may have co-opted the Saudis to collapse the oil market and drive Russia into recession.
His unwillingness to escalate a military confrontation, however, did not in my mind make him accommodative. That is however the perception that the war hawks have of him, and it’s a notion that needs to be pushed back on as well. An unwillingness to start a war is not a barometer of whether someone is accommodative of another country’s behavior. And for fairly obvious reasons, it’s a very dangerous to use.
@ Eddie-g
I think that’s a very important, reasonable and legitimate point. Maybe Glenn should have used something along the lines of “non-adversarial when interests were perceived by Obama to align”, and “reasonably adversarial when perceived not to.” Or something like that.
But “accommodative” or “accommodating” without strong(er) qualifier(s) or situational distinctions I think is a little overbroad and not necessarily reflective of the differences and complexities of when and why Obama did what he did in any particular situation. Which is not to say I’m a huge fan of all of Obama’s foreign policy actions (including obvious ones like drone assassinations, bomb dropping, facilitating Saudi bomb dropping, failure to figure out how to close Guantanamo, committing future trillions to nuclear arsenal), but I think on balance foreign policy and not listening to Hillary Clinton was one of his stronger suits on balance.
On many subjects, Obama is difficult to pigeon-hole. And definitely that’s the case here.
I agree with the gist of Glenn’s article, and I don’t think the exact framing of Obama’s positions makes a huge difference in terms of his key arguments. But I do think wrt Russia he was firm without resorting to latent militarism, which for me anyway doesn’t fit the definition of accommodative.
Terrific cover by the New Yorker; I hope to see another one of Putin taking his Trumperdoodle out for a walk.
I encourage the perception that Putin controls Trump, even though I doubt it is true, because he is a menace to the country; Afghanistan, on the other hand, is the destroyer of empires. I hope Trump sends thousands of troops to be wasted, helping to bring the American empire down to ruin. I want to be a citizen of a country that respects the global community, not a drone in a neo-Soviet state.
Well, that’s a nice way of saying you hope a lot of people are harmed so you can be more comfortable
This is an intelligent and measured article. Its warnings about warmongering in the US are welcome. But it underplays some key issues:
1. Putin’s invasion of Crimea and creation of a major civil war in Eastern Ukraine show he is willing to go to extremes. (These actions differed from those in Georgia where the Georgians apparently attacked occupying Russian forces first). You cannot revert to “business as usual” with a leader who is willing to undertake such acts. He changed the game, and the West has to play by new rules.
2. Whatever Obama’s and Clinton’s differences on policy in Ukraine, both agreed that the US could not act independently of the EU. As long as the EU is unwilling to support arming and backing the Ukrainian military, the US cannot take a more aggressive approach.
3. Syria is about much more than Russia and the US. With Turkey, Iran, the Kurds, the EU, and other Middle Eastern powers involved, it is far more complex. Both Clinton and Obama surely realized this. Their policies regarding Russia in Syria were driven by many regional issues, not just by their attitudes to Putin.
4. The Cold War was a global struggle between superpowers. The struggle with Russia is a regional struggle between a superpower (the US), and one of several nuclear-armed regional powers in the world. Russia is one of many geopolitical problems the US has to manage. In global terms, China looms much larger. One unfortunate feature of the present US obsession with Russia is that it draws attention away from the global threat from China.
5. Real “proof” of Russian hacking may never be available. However, there appears to be enough circumstantial evidence to convict the country on the balance of probability. Moreover, whoever hacked the US political system did it in a one-sided manner. It is impossible to believe that the Republicans (or the Trump Organization) were not hacked, but only the Democrats were harmed. Whoever did this wanted to affect the election in a specific way, and they succeeded. It may be significant that while many intelligence leaks implicate Russia, not one has hinted at dissenting opinions or suggested someone else did this. If there was a real row going on among analysts, something specific would probably have leaked. If Russia did not do this, who did? Apart from Trump’s “guy sitting on a bed”, there have been no suggestions.
6. The US does support groups calling for democracy and transparency in Russia. It has also actively supported the “color revolutions” elsewhere that so terrify Putin. It is naive to expect Russia not to take an active role in US politics. But there is a difference between providing legal funding for organizations and campaigns, and illegal hacking. One cannot claim equivalency between NED support for registered NGOs in Russia, and the hacking of private emails. It is notable that the US has not (yet) retaliated to Russia by publishing the compromising information it must have gleaned from its own hacks – this is a sensible attempt to hold the high ground and avoid escalation.
‘But there is a difference between providing legal funding for organizations and campaigns…’ – come now, do you really believe that is all the US Govt engages in? I see no evidence (and indeed, Snowden and other leaks have confirmed this) that the US has ever stopped using the same tactics that deposed Allende, Arbenz, or many others. We interfere as a basic foreign policy tactic, and we certainly don’t ‘play nice’ and within any rules.
“I see no evidence …that the US has ever stopped…”
Seriously? You want somebody to prove the negative? I am seeing this type of argument way too often.
Tiger this is how it works. Please answer the following questions:
Have you stopped smoking crack?
Have you stopped communicating with space aliens?
Are you no longer plotting to overthrow the government of Liechtenstein?
Prove it.
For myself I would answer no to all of them.
Some of your arguments are good, some not.
See 1. In Crimea Putin had just to copy a “successful” recipe from the West made in Kosovo a few years earlier. Attack without the consent from the UN security council – illegal, even by american standards -, conquer, make an election with soldier at the front door to “protect” the elections and be happy when the vote for your side. While the US in that case saw the death civilians of their “favourite” side, they neglected the stupidity of the Ucrainian nationalists and the death of russian speaking civilians in Ucraine on the other side. It looks somehow like “only a dead Russian is a good Russian” to the Russians. The result is another tit-for-tat game on the back of innocent people to please powers.
See 4. True. But that the US is the only superpower doesn’t mean they have to make other nuclear powers their foes or bring them to an alliance. In the moment they really work hard to bring China and Russia together. Anothert clash in the Philipinean Sea oven a few rocks in the water or trade sanctions – both candidates for POTUS had potential to speed that process up.
See 5. When you don’t stop pointing to the Russians you don’t have to time to think about others. Is it really the only one single party – the Russians – having advantages that Clinton didn’t win? HRC isn’t everybodys darling, is she? She has enough foes, which were for sure interested she doesn’t make it in the WH. For most billionaires Trump will be a net win, too – when he keeps promises about tax reforms…- which I think is probable. It seems in the public discussion in the US the Russians are guilty for everything. “The Packers have lost – OMG, the Russians again.”
See 6. Why is spending money from a foreign power to influence elections no “interference in the internal affairs” while haking is? Where do you see the difference and why is one better than the other? Do you think Saudi-Arabia gives money for nothing? Don’t tell me this is valid because the US does it all the time? Like in Russia, in Georgia, in Ucraine, in most latin american countries, in southern Europe… since decades. Don’t tell me telling the dirty truth is invalid in the US because the truth is hidden in mail servers and/or it’s dirty. How can an outsider have any respect for a “democratic” party with that kind of methods? I would have expected them in Russia, but not in the US.
You didn’t mention number 7. The political system in the USA needs a restart. What are the Republicans? A colorful collection of conservatives, of Tea-Party, of Pro-Live, of Weapon-Friends, of racists who were fond of Mr Trumps Mexican-bashing… with the common denominator of nothing except they want to see an elephant in the WH – which made Mr. Trump possible. And the Democrats? Do they really have any connections between top and voter? What does the hack show? Is there any connection except they want to see a donkey in the WH?
There’s no denying that US intel didn’t prove hacking/leaking revelations in the unclassified release, beyond reasonable doubt.
However, you completely ignore any “coincidental” money ties, which might hint at quid pro quo. All of the appointments have this in common. The Russian diplomats admitted they were in contact with senators and supporters, after taking back the comment that they WERE in constant direct contact with the campaign. Trump denies anyone having been in contact. Yet, we should believe that Flynn cold called on the very day Obama initiated sanctions, when Flynn said not to worry about it. Why? Russia wasn’t going to initiate military action based on diplomats being tossed out. There already was a cozy relationship of the Trump camp by this point. It arouses absolutely no suspicion in you whatsoever.
The US interference in foreign affairs, the US war hungry elements, notwithstanding, you never delve into how Trump and camp may actually be beholden to, or made back door deals with oligarchy or other source of money in Russia. For someone who seeks enormous increases in military spending, please don’t insult anyone’s intelligence that Trump’s circle only had peace in mind with its Russian connections. Your own website mentioned Prince as insider torturer, who along with his sister DeVos would like to propagandize education and fight Christian wars.
Because the US did Sh!tty things, we all deserve to go down in a fascist-religious, corporate take-over, with sinister intent along with incompetence? Bannon’s ideal of a nation is not too different from Putin’s. A fascist religious state with condensed power. However, he calls Russia a Kleptocracy and Putin an imperialist: the often repeated refrain of those critical of the US, while defending Putin. Interesting that he sees the ‘problem’ of Russia being dealt with later. You think that he intended enduring alliance and peace?
I am no supporter of Clinton. Never was. But you look at this in a very one dimensional space. It’s possible that the Russian narrative is being played for Dem sour grapes and to continue the war machine, while Trump and Putin were also in collusion. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. To what end? To make some billionaires even more money, while enslaving the populace to dictatorship. Of course, on the other side, Putin would want to elevate his standing internationally.
For those shocked about the Democratic party’s behavior as opposed to the GOP, you need to remember the Dems were as complicit in the first cold war in their anti-Soviet rhetoric and policies as the Republicans. That we have President Trump standing against the new cold war winds is frightening.
Of course they’re sensationalizing it, and of course, old guard democrats are using it as an excuse for picking the wrong candidate, running a mess of a primary and losing to an unqualified mess. However, there is still a huge problem here of potential treason. The criticism isn’t that Trump is trying to forge better relations with Russia, is that it appears to have been a quid pro quo situation where Trump sought assistance from a foreign leader in exchange for loosening sanctions and putting Putin’s friend Rex Tillerson in a key position. And I would not at all be surprised if Trump has a personal, financial stake in the deal. That IS TREASON, and it’s a very serious issue that needs to be investigated. The threat is not that Putin is now somehow a bigger threat than he was 2 years ago, he isn’t, but that it appears our president and some of his staff is colluding with him for favors and bribes.
Well, honestly, I can help but think throughout all this that the real devil is that people who staked their entire belief system on Obama – ignoring his evils, ignoring the sufferers because they were accepted by the press as being look-down-uponable (not a protected class), trumpeting all their “smartness” based upon what “experts” told them (not being experts…or even doing the necessary research to try to be…themselves) – were completely wrong. God forbid they humbly go through the necessary paradigm shift to restake their beliefs in something accurate
let’s just blame Russia
it literally could be anything imho
Some want a new cold war, sure – arms sales, a new enemy to cow us with, good stuff! But there are also those who want a real war, “We’re going to have to fight them sooner or later, so fight them now while they are still weak.”
There is also the fact that now, for the first time in history – America, thanks to THAAD, their ABM system, has their long strived for, preemptive strike capacity. This means that America can ‘take out’ the “Soviet” triad (more or less) and THAAD can shoot down their retaliatory response before it reaches the homeland. That might not mean much to you but it means everything to General Turgidson. In short it means that ‘we’ can ‘win’ a war with Russia. “I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed up, but (we’d lose) no more than 10-20 million tops, depending on the breaks.”
And here’s the other thing, that nasty thing, called “game theory” i.e. worst case analysis, our boys in the Pentagon and their boys in the Kremlin, right now today, are making this argument, “use em or lose em”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXZF6DwKvCI
We have an unofficial retaliatory nuclear policy whether you believe it or not. And anti missiles defense is far from perfect. I don’t think a Russian Sub parked in international waters firing Nukes at us would be deterred by a battery of knowable countermeasures…
Ah. So this (my emphasis) is why they call you a Turnip Lover ™. *you can rest assured, I never figured you for a suicide, Glenn.
*editors note: I would change “prevailing neoliberal policies ” to just prevailing U.S. policies.
Thanks Glenn for continuing to confront and denounce profit driven consumer “journalism” for the propaganda it is. Without honest journalists who can practice reflection and analyze nuance in stories our society is at the mercy of the loudest bullies in the crowd.
The energy for change is palpable. I certainly hope honest and compassionate voices are heard amid the cacophony of reactionaries calling for radical upheaval. Our society is in a tender place. It’s going to be frighteningly easy for people to galvanize around an authoritarian leader because of fear of the unknown. Those autocrats will use that fear to manipulate their advantage and consolidate their power.
Stay strong and committed to the truth. Self-examination is painful and those of us who are mature and wise enough will need to be there to help people through their pain. If these frightened people are met with hostility, they will run to their strong-man for defense.
We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. When one group suffers, we all suffer. Be the change you want to see and stand up bravely against the seduction of tyranny.
HRC presenting the plastic reset button with the Russian word ‘overcharge’ , says it all. Meanwhile the Kremlin and Putin have profited enormously from this US policy and Putin had never dreamed he would ever be so popular in his own country.
”4. The U.S. Government still has provided no evidence of its theories about Russian hacking.” – fact told not so often.
While it is true that Obama is relatively less insane than Hillary, I think that this otherwise interesting article paints him in an overly favorable light with respect to Ukraine. The Obama administration and Obama personally bear the responsibility for orchestrating a violent coup d’etat against a democratically elected government.
During the cold war, there were ideological differences you could use to ascribe treasonous motives to people. Like: “You favor Russia because you are secretly a Communist.” It is much harder to make that case now. What ideological difference is there between the U.S. and Russia?
Another sin of omission the western press makes, is that it doesn’t deal with the fact that Putin has been very popular with the Russian people. The Neoliberal looting of Russia left left Russians with a grudging respect/tolerance for autocracy. I have no idea what Putin’s popularity is in Russia generally or in Crimea. If it was bad though, I’d probably hear about it. And remember, we have been attempting to destroy the Russian economy for several years now.
Also, Putin is defamed constantly in the West. People claim without evidence that Putin kills his enemies. Which Benito Mussolini no doubt would say is a sign of Putin’s competence. As in, that’s who you are supposed to kill, your enemies. But no evidence is offered. Meanwhile they ignore the U.S. President’s Kill List or even brag about it. New anchors aggressively try to force their guest to say “Putin is evil.” and “I hate Putin.”
So the Western media calls Putin a thug and a killer while ignoring their own countries kill lists, black site prisons, wars of aggression, Stasi State and so on.
I’ll come back to the ideological question. If it isn’t ideology what is it? Does anybody know why we are at odds with Russia?
Neo-liberal looting?
Mindless pablum.
http://thedailybanter.com/2012/05/exclusive-the-rule-of-oligarchy-law-from-boris-yeltsins-russia-to-aubrey-mcclendons-oklahoma/
Also, I misspelled countries. It should be country’s.
And it should be news anchors instead of New anchors. And probably other shit too.
I really ought to read this stuff before I hit the return key.
Que Sera Sera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbKHDPPrrc
OK, capitalist looting, aided by the U.S. puppet Yeltsin.
“I’ll come back to the ideological question. If it isn’t ideology what is it? Does anybody know why we are at odds with Russia?”
Randy Newman said it back in the 1970s:
“Boom goes London, boom Paree. More room for you and more room for me. And ev’ry city, the whole world round, will be just another American town.”
Israel overtly interferes in US elections and there is no outcry? AIPAC refuses to register as an agent of a foreign country.
What exact statute are the Dems claiming was violated by Trump with the Russians?
President Obama was only “accommodating” towards Russia if you’re comparing him to warmongers like John McCain or Hillary Clinton. The two biggest issues where the United States has disagreements with Russia (Ukraine and Syria), are of Obama’s own making.
The Obama Administration did support Victor Yanukovych’s opposition and the overthrow of his government in Ukraine, and the Obama Administration did support Syrian rebels whose goal was to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.
The Russians aren’t the ones who started this — the Obama Administration is, and we need to be honest about that. Just because Obama wasn’t as aggressive towards Russia as somebody like McCain or Clinton would have been, it doesn’t mean that he was accommodating towards Russia, or that he’s blameless in all of this, because he wasn’t.
bravo
Where is the Republican culpability in this? namely in nominating Trump and in resistance to an investigation of any kind? We get the Democrats issues. We do.
Frankly, I’m surprised people are still being divided that way, as most people I talk to (both know personally and strangers I meet) adamantly state they are neither
“pervasive avoidance of self-critique”
Will you avoid the self-critique that your constant vigilance against any slights to the dictator Putin and his Russian state is colored by Putin’s control of your friend, and leaker, Snowden? I know you have reason to oppose and fear the US government, but I think that your kissing of Putin’s ass is pretty revolting.
It’s a shame the MSM and cyber security firms aren’t letting the public know about the latest revelations showing that the Guccifer2.0 thing was a false flag.
It would probably help people put the red-scare rhetoric in context.
http://g-2.space and https://medium.com/@nyetnyetnyet/russia-and-wikileaks-the-case-of-the-gilded-guccifer-f2288521cdee both cover different revelations that remain mostly buried from public conscience.
Morell explains just as wonkishly and confidently who he would like have dead, as Robert McNamara explained kill rations and casualty lists back in the 60’s. Videos like this make life tough on satirists.
Maybe Clinton and Podesta used the same company for polling numbers in the election they just blew that McNamara use for his phony war stats.
Yeah, that’s a bad bit there. Especially now that we have a dead Russian ambassador in Turkey.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/world/europe/russia-ambassador-shot-ankara-turkey.html?_r=0
It will be interesting to see who gets tatted for that tit, so to speak.
thanks for this! I too am totally astounded by the Democrats these days. I read this story online 2 days ago & wondered what is going on at the New Yorker. Didn’t it used to be reputable? No more.
Another fine example of American Exceptionalism. We harp to death about Russian hacking and interference in our elections while ignoring how we’ve interfered in their society.
Greenwald sounds like he’s on the Kremlin’s payroll.
You’re proving his point rather eloquently, thanks.
I love how official members of the sHillary Clinton A** Kissers Society like the douche bag who goes by the name of “Billy Dee Williams” find it necessary to astroturf/troll The Intercept’s Facebook page.
I read the full New Yorker article and I concur with GG. The New Yorker pays lip service to the counter-arguments that haunt anti-Russian US policy-makers and the Democratic Party.
I continue to await hard evidence of Russian interference.
“And it further underscores the reasons why no conclusions should be reached absent a structured investigation with the evidence and findings made publicly available. Anonymous claims from agenda-driven, disinformation-dispensing intelligence community officials are about the least reliable way to form judgments about anything, let alone the nature of the threats posed by the governments they want Americans to view as their adversaries.” But…this is exactly the investigation the public is calling for and Republicans are trying so desperately to quash, isn’t it? Americans don’t want a new cold war, and most of us are not demonizing Russia. We just want a full accounting of the truth.
I think many of your readers would prefer to read original investigative reporting over this kind of polemical commentary. Your complaints are either personal gripes–why didn’t they write it my way?–or logical fallacies. Use your time more productively, please.
This IS investigative journalism and it’s quite good. Glenn investigated the article and critiqued it. This is one reader who’s very happy with Glenn’s writings, and those of the other excellent journalists here, with a couple of exceptions. And I’m sure I speak for the majority.
Translation = Glenn writes what I like to hear so he is right and any other reporter that agrees is also right and a good reporter.
Point #5 is by far your best point. The Trump ascent is as American as apple pie (much like the Pulse nightclub shooter). Because of his in your face style, he has brought to the forefront so many of our society’s warts that have gone on for decades, but particularly escalated after 9/11. 9/11 simply made it that much more difficult for us to back out of our neocon imperialism.
My generation and younger need to wise up, with all of our access to information, and make corruption illegal in America. It is a shame that over 60 million Americans saw Trump as the solution to the primary fundamental problem with our country that is the root cause for nearly all of our other problems. I am afraid it may be too late, as multinational corps have such a stranglehold on our federal government, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t worth the fight.
https://act.represent.us/sign/the-solution/
Russia’s GDP is 7.4% of ours (and 12.1% of China’s).
https://cdn.howmuch.net/content/images/1600/world-gdp-41ff.png
From:
Democrats, media step up right-wing campaign on alleged Trump-Russia ties
“The ABC program then gave a platform to David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine, which published a lengthy cover story on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. The article, headlined “Trump, Putin and the New Cold War,” is remarkable not only for its artwork—depicting the Kremlin firing a Star Wars-style death ray into the White House—but for a complete absence of any factual evidence, despite 13,000 words devoted to the subject.
“Remnick began his remarks on ABC by declaring, “We have 17 intelligence agencies all saying, asserting, that there was serious interference in our presidential election.” He then admitted, “Well, here’s the problem. The problem is that intelligence agencies are not giving us the evidence of this.”
“While he acknowledged that that there was good reason to be skeptical because of the lies told by the intelligence agencies before the Iraq War, Remnick drew the remarkable conclusion that the lack of evidence reinforced the case for a full investigation.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/27/trum-f27.html
In what way is this refusal to question the officially offered narrative about Russia’s involvement in US politics different from the refusal to question the officially offered narrative about what really happened on Sept 11, 2001? That story was repeated and buttressed endlessly until, like the current orthodoxy, it became toxic to question. A generation has been raised now believing the inconsistencies and impossibilities of that narrative. If we are to demand evidence now, we must also demand it regarding the incident which has fueled the event cascade that has led to our current terrifying world situation.
You think this all started with 9/11? I’d say 1776…
“You think this all started with 9/11? I’d say 1776…”
More like 1948.
Russia effectively stopped the planned destruction of Syria. That’s why they are the new bad guys.
Hear, hear!
Confirming your first point, Stephen F. Cohen repeatedly said during his weekly talk with John Batchelor leading up to the election that there were two politicians of consequence in all of DC who favored detente with Russia: Obama, and Trump.
A big reason is that Putin rescued Obama when he got mousetrapped with his ‘Red Line’ ultimatum. After Obama made his ill-advised statement, Turkey and the rebels quite logically created the sarin gas event to force Obama to enter the conflict on their side. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-12-06/anti-fraud-experts-launch-news-accuracy-site-find-us-probably-blamed-wrong-side-for-syria-chemical-attack
US Intelligence officers knew it was a false flag, and they’d just been burned with Iraq “intelligence,” so a group of them threatened to resign en masse if the WH published an “Intelligence Assessment” fingering Assad for the sarin gas attack. That’s why the WH invented the knock-off version — the “Government Assessment” — specifically for that incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Government_Assessment_of_the_Syrian_Government's_Use_of_Chemical_Weapons_on_August_21,_2013
Obama had just allowed himself to get duped with the Libya nightmare, but was fully boxed in on Syria, and that’s when Putin engineered the deal for Assad to hand over all of his chemical weapons for destruction. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/12/bashar-al-assad-syria-chemical-weapons
The CIA, obviously, has been furious ever since at Putin for submarining their Syrian dream. Their response was the Maidan revolution. Quite a way for the US to say “Thank You” for saving us from another interminable Middle East conflict.
We were even willing to directly arm legitimate Neo-Nazi groups to show our appreciation. https://www.thenation.com/article/congress-has-removed-a-ban-on-funding-neo-nazis-from-its-year-end-spending-bill/
Given the military fact that gas is a not very effective weapon, and the fact that Assad who is neither stupid nor insane, had every reason to believe that using gas would bring America into the war – pure logic told us, “it was the rebels”.
Having said that, thank you for all the background.
I have always found the story of ‘barrels dropped from helicopters’ to be oddly illogical. Nice picture, but makes little sense. Chlorine would not only dissipate rapidly, but would pool wherever it is dropped. So supposedly you can hit a small target (a tunnel entrance? next to a door?) by pushing a barrel out of a helicopter- an incredibly vulnerable helicopter, which, like all helicopters, doesn’t have a great deal of payload carrying capacity. And this is the same military that supposedly has advanced jet strike capability. Goofy. And completely useless if there is any wind to disperse the gas, which would probably already disperse considerably when the barrel disintegrated after falling from a great height.
” Chlorine would not only dissipate rapidly, ”
No, chlorine tends to linger unless there is a wind blowing. It will collect in basements but it will also just sit in a cloud a couple of feet off the ground. It turns to hydrochloric acid in your lungs and eyes. One good lungful and you’ll die slowly and painfully, frothing like a slug covered in salt.
Even if you survive your lungs are scarred (COPD) and your life will be shortened significantly.
Amazing how Hillary Clinton’s silly little idea to woo swing voters by expropriating Ronald Reagan’s Cold Warrior legacy has taken on a life of its own. I assume Hillary and her staff thought they’d trounce Trump and Russia Fever would subside and eventually fade into a minor issue like overheated campaign rhetoric typically does. Instead, Trump won, and Russia Fever has morphed into a defining attribute of the Democratic Party. Talk about creating a Frankenstein’s monster. This ought to stand as a permanent warning about the danger of reckless campaign rhetoric.
Your assumption is wrong. Clinton is a war monger, pure & simple. She voted for the Iraq War II and was the main one in the White House pushing for the attack on Libya that killed thousands and destroyed the entire country. Her no-fly zone over Syria would have serious risked a military confrontation with Russia.
I think you just fantasize that because Clinton is a Democrat, she’s not really a war monger. Time to realize that the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans on this issue.
To spell out what Greenwald’s 5 points have in common: Russophobes generally need to portray and even perceive the Russian leader as not just an enemy, but as a terrible insidious enemy, since failure to see things that way would concede legitimacy to alternative kinds of politics which are more threatening to the Russophobes’ patronage systems. Okay, so Greenwald is implying that conclusion, even though he didn’t quite say so explicitly. Is he right in what he’s implying?
I think he’s right but it’s not the whole truth. Russia’s government, after all, really is seeking to woo allies among the voters of the West, spreading misleading propaganda using its network of allied groups, a network which in part dates back to Cold War political alliances. Although there’s a shortage of evidence for the idea that Russia was behind the WikiLeaks publications about Democrats, overall it does look like Russian leaders were conducting some election-related intrusions — see this story for instance:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-hacked-emails-of-dnc-oppo-researcher-point-to-russians-and-wider-penetration-154121061.html
Democracy clearly requires that we voters need to be watchful and resistant towards attempted influence on our elections by foreign governments. I wouldn’t say that’s the biggest concern — we should be more resistant toward the far more persistent and dangerous efforts by our own government leaders to affect how we vote. But to the relatively small extent that there is Russian influence here, it’s worth keeping an eye on. The gullible attitude that some show toward Russian propaganda is something I wouldn’t want to see spreading further. The government of Russia,like other governments, is clearly not a force for good in world affairs. And it wouldn’t be good for our government leaders to be too closely allied with Russia — it’s good that some senators and others are working to investigate that possibility. Myself, I don’t believe the picture that some paint of a Russophile president easily manipulated by Putin, but even if that’s not all true it’s worth keeping an eye on the possibility that it might be partly true.
There are two opposed views I hear about Russia. One view considers Putin and his government to be kind of worth allying with, or at least pretty benign as far as world leaders go. The other view sees Putin’s government as an insidious, deadly foe of the American people, possibly even America’s biggest enemy. Both these extreme views seem to me to be more wrong than right. I think Russia’s government is a big problem for those inside its orbit, but for those of us on the outside, it’s just not that much of a threat to our biggest concerns. I believe it’s worth keeping a suspicious eye on the Russian government’s attempt to gain international power. But we have much more important things to worry about here, such as the ways in which people like Trump, Clinton, and the parties that support them are trying to cut down our freedom and coarsen our culture.
” I think Russia’s government is a big problem for those inside its orbit…”
&
“…we have much more important things to worry about here, such as the ways in which people like Trump, Clinton, and the parties that support them are trying to cut down our freedom and coarsen our culture.”
These two statements/beliefs sound pretty similar – no?
Yeah kind of similar, but I’d rather have to deal with a government like Trump’s or Clinton’s than a government like Putin’s. I see what you’re saying about the two governments being similar problems for the people they rule, but to recognize that something is a problem implies that some ways of dealing with it are better than others. Our problems in the USA aren’t as serious because the people who came before us here sometimes chose not to put up with a lot of crap. And I’d like to continue that tradition, and make it even more of a reality than it has been. So as for comparing how Russia’s elites govern with how ours do, I’ll just say: People pretty much have the governments they’ve learned to accept, and I’d like to unlearn some of that.
The respective heads of the party specific embodiments of NED/USAID are John McCain and Madeline Albright. Suffice to say, furthering democacy and the rule of law are mere facades for their real agendas.
Their groups, NDI and IRI went as far as running exit polls and counting votes in Ukraine. Somehow that isn’t interfering!
Also of note in this debate is that Clinton received 7 figure backhanders for a deal to sell Russians US uranium. That is conveniently ignored, as is Bill Clinton’s six figure sums from Kremlin banks.
Thank you for the critique and deconstruction of the New Yorker article. Remnick has been writing anti-Russia, Putin-bashing propaganda for years. I decided not to to renew my subscription to the magazine, in part because I was sick of his sloppy, fact-free so-called journalism. By the time you finish reading Remnick’s articles, you know everything that has ever been alleged, but never proven, and which the pro-war clique wants you to believe. I guess publishing rumor and innuendo saves Remnick the trouble of actually thinking about his topic, and that might be an advantage for some of his readers also. It is unfortunate though, because the the US ruling class and the bipartisan neoconservative faction, including Clinton, that is vilifying Putin and Russia, wants to march NATO right up to the Russian border and eventually make war on Russia. They want control of the land, labor and resources that are now ruled by the Russian government and oligarchs. They are a dangerous crew, and Remnick has been their shill. I guess it is no surprise though, since Remnick back-handedly endorsed the invasion of Iraq, back in the day.
Very well stated. Glenn again demonstrates superb journalistic acumen. Buttttt! It is the amusing cartoons that keep us getting the rag. Good bait and switch strategy.
The War Party — John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham — are past the wet dreams, tired of the foreplay, and they’re ready for the lube. The New Yorker is only too happy to oblige.
Bravo, esp. “phallically invading” and
Good summary of the strategies today!
Historically, there has never been an example of a dominate power backing down voluntarily by telling the truth and cooperating with its’ adversaries – and everyone surviving in harmony. A non-zero sum game.
More commonly leaders have chosen to venture beyond the Rubicon, where there is no turning back – only success or destruction. A zero sum game.
Hadrian was the only western emperor who successfully (for his life anyways), stopped expansion, built walls and lived within his territory. Historians will note that walls don’t last forever – so factions will always debate the strategies of “building walls” VERSUS “crossing the Rubicon”.
Where will our leaders take us all this time?
In “crossing the Rubicon” it sounds, at least to my ears as a discrete one off decision; but it’s more a crusade, a jihad–an ongoing struggle. It needn’t be so definitive. We’re swatting about Putin’s collar and we’ll never move to full scale war. Much more profitable to keep him busy with border insurrections, and diplomatic challenges. We wage little and don’t really seek to gain anything but a hostile adversary. We then ridicule them for being paranoid strongmen; and sanction and put them under diplomatic siege.
In todays context “crossing the Rubicon” means a conscious strategy to escalate the hostility with no intention to seek compromise.
This high risk strategy inherently contains the possibility for numerous errors and when one side sees the possibility for a knock out blow – they will take the risk. If it fails, then we all die – the ultimate zero sum game.
I would postulate that we have both factions battling it out behind the scenes. The biggest problem I see is that humanity, the media, politicians, business, employers, employees have/are destroying the concept of “trust” – when we cannot trust one another, what is left?
I fixed the Cold War once, really. Won’t do it another time.
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/16/i-am-fully-capable-of-entertaining-myself-in-prison-for-decades-if-need-be/?comments=1#comment-297896
See my tweets and replies here:
https://twitter.com/berlinclock
(to see replies you need a login as of today, for some obvious reason).
CIA’s Kryptos says “BERLIN CLOCK” also for a reason.
Have a nice day & good luck to all.
Jacob Price
Wow, Glen has really jumped the shark on this one. He is actively defending his choice of Donald Trump by trying to mislead people into thinking Hillary was pro-war.
Your claim that Hillary would escalate things with Russia has no basis in reality. She was pro safe zones that had no fly zones enforced by both Russia and the USA in Syria. You take her words out of context intentionally? Also, what the fuck does Hillary have to do with anything right now?
You claim a cold war is a real possibility. How? The Soviet Union had half the world’s GDP all of Eastern Europe. Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s. A new Cold War is just not possible.
There is a focus on Russia because it is a real threat. They are invading and annexing their neighbors in Europe while actively funding and supporting right wing nationalist movements all over the world.
You’re off the rails on this one buddy.
what “choice of donald trump” are you talking about? greenwald didn’t support trump in the election.
what “choice of donald trump” are you talking about?
Obviously the one he was talking about in this interview when he said,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3PUwSqnU8A&feature=youtu.be
Which neighbors are they currently “invading and annexing”?
Nope. Clinton’s not like that at all…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmIRYvJQeHM
Airhead.
You aren’t paying attention. The people who supported Clinton in the Democratic Party and of course most Republicans are obviously in favor of pushing Russia–they wanted a proxy war in Syria, as Michael Morell (a Clinton supporter) explicitly said. Those people are still around even if Clinton has retired from politics and it is silly to speak as though they went away. One of the dangers of a man like Trump is that his idiocy gives cover to people who use opposition to him as a cover for their own bad ideas–in this case, a new Cold and not so Cold War with Russia.
Oh don’t think Hillary ‘retired’. She is still lurking around, swinging her still considerable influence about (see Perez, Tom). She spent decades accumulating all that establishment influence, no way she can quit cold turkey. And the Clinton Cash Machine… oh, sorry, FOUNDATION, doesn’t work if there isn’t power to sell. And if you haven’t noticed, the MSM still thinks ol’ Hill is just swell. Not criticizing, just pointing out that our hopes that it has gone away are likely false hopes. Her massive unpopularity didn’t stop her from seeing the Demo nomination as hers by right, no way she will be content to just roll in her money. Bill and her are deeply sick people, IMO. Her hunger for power is pathological.
Everything you accuse others of — jumping the shark, being off the rails, etc. — is actually true about you and your comments. Your comments are a perfect example of projecting your own personality onto someone else. As to the details, see the other responses to your totally wrong and idiotic comments.
Vote for Tulsi/Nina/Iron Eyes/Bernie in 2020, then takeover congress and the senate by real progressives or it’ll only get much darker from here. The radical right wing is cancer, only leftists can solve this problem.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. I see your point, but it could be misinterpreted as the invasion happening in 2012.
Yes, that’s fair. To be clear: when one points out that Obama was so dismissive of the notion that Russia posed a threat, Dems often claim that this was only before Russia’s bad acts – meaning: he could not possibly have known. I just meant to convey that the 2012 mockery of Romney came after Russia’s war in Georgia, not that it took place in 2012.
“And, of course, in 2012 – after Russia invaded Georgia and numerous domestic dissidents and journalists were imprisoned or killed – the Obama-led Democrats mercilessly mocked Mitt Romney as an obsolete, ignorant Cold War relic for his arguments about the threat posed by the Kremlin.”
An interesting statement.
It’s also interesting to point out in July 2008, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, about to jet off to Tbilisi, publically opined granting Georgia NATO membership would help resolve the Abkhaz and South Ossetian problems in one fell swoop. It was a move that the Georgian government had been pushing for and, happily enough, allowed the US to completely and entirely ignore the existence of various ethnic Ossetian militias (and organized crime syndicates, all with ties to mother Russia) who wanted South Ossetia to secede from Georgia and become an independent state (the 1991/92 South Ossetia War being a sort of highlight). The outcome of this on-going mess: a Russian-brokered ceasefire which established a joint peacekeeping force and left South Ossetia divided between the rival authorities. And now, through some procedural, political and perhaps militaristic miracle involving US intervention on Russia’s doorstep, as per Ms. Rice, NATO’s arrival in Georgia would solve this mess.
Okay…
Moscow was predictably upset by Ms. Rice’s announcement with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov issuing some particularly blistering observations (they’re some real zingers, in fact). Ms. Rice arrived in Georgia on 9 July, and the situation deteriorated rapidly with the usual allegations of ethnic cleansings, massacres and war crimes and crimes against humanity issued by all parties to the conflict. Much like current events in the Crimea, many unusual and horrible things occurred.
Fast forward to 2009, and VP Joe Biden announces that the US was not and would not provide arms to Georgia, however in October 2009, Ukrainian MP Valery Kovaluk claimed that the Ukraine was continuing to deliver the newest military hardware to Georgia “off the books”. “Over four years,” Mr. Kovalek stated, “the sale of arms was worth 2.5 billion dollars [US], and only 200 million dollars made it to the budget.”
Not long afterwards, various Russian officials would chime in afterwards alleging NATO countries – primarily the US and Britain – supplied Georgia with small arms and ammunition, while Israel supplied it with drones while Ukraine supplied tanks and air defense systems. Russia also claimed (without making an effort to provide any proof, simply reminding everyone of “Immediate Response 2008″ wherein US trainers hosted Georgian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, and Armenian forces) that the CIA and US military were continuing to train Georgian personnel in various anti-Russian roles. Whether any of these claims were valid and reliable is almost a moot point: alas, secret drone programs and militia-outfitting happen as do the denials.
Is it safe to say we’ve seen this sort of show before? Is it even safer to say we’ll see it again?
Mr. Obama’s zinger dissing Mr. Romney’s cold war pronouncements (all of which were entirely silly) was simply par for the course, and perhaps entirely disingenuous too.
All this written, excellent article as always, Glenn. It’s always great to see someone providing thoughtful and well-constructed analysis.
I caught that too….but Glenn says, “And, of course, in 2012 – after Russia invaded Georgia and numerous domestic dissidents and journalists were imprisoned or killed – the Obama-led Democrats mercilessly mocked Mitt Romney”
He’s not referring to the Georgia invasion…he’s referring to the resulting mockery of Romney in 2012 long “After” the invasion.
Exactly. But to address the valid comment about ambiguity, I changed inserted “years” before “after” so it now reads:
This is why I always say: readers make the best editors!
I also would’ve pointed out that the EU conducted an investigation and confirmed that Georgia — not Russia — initiated the conflict. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/30/georgia-attacks-unjustifiable-eu
This is often overlooked and forgotten. It should be noted that the New York Times reported that Georgia launched the operation on day one.
The EU fact finding mission led by Heidi Tagliavini concluded that the Georgian army started 7aug 2008 shelling apartment blocks in the city of Tskhinvali, south Ossetia, which prompted the invasion by Russian tanks the next day . It is interesting to know that she was dismissed of her role as head of the observer mission of the OSCE in Ukraine…on request from the Kiev government as she is too uncorruptible.
@RPDC – It was Georgia who invaded South Osettia. Russia came to South Osettia’s defense. You can go to youtube and search (fox news cuts off girl telling truth about Russia) Russia came, they saw, they kicked azz, cleaned house, took the trash out and then went home. Russia did cross and breach the Georgian border from South Osettia, looked Georgia right in the face, dared them to do it again and then went home – problem solved. If this role had been reversed and it was the U.S. there would still be a 20 year war going on. What Russia did was brilliant.
well said. donbass is the new south ossetia. and sakashvili is in the ukraine as well.
this headline is especially rich:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/world/europe/mikheil-saakashvili-resigns-ukraine.html?_r=0
Georgia is still an independent country.
Crimeans have always wanted to be part of Russia. Let’s respect that.
US meddled in Ukraine for 20 years before Maidan and spent lots of money (Re: Nuland, Youtube)