PUSHING RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE

You could be forgiven for thinking Russian interference is what caused your toast to become burnt this morning... or the headache that appeared out of nowhere last night

They have become so ubiquitous... those Russians are not only lurking under your bed but believably in the very air that you breathe.

And they never take a lesson to heart, do they?

How many times have they been lectured about interfering in elections and how many times has the American population been warned they will interfere in the next and no doubt the one after that?

Wouldn’t it be a good idea with strong public opinion appeal for Russia to simply stop?

But somehow that doesn’t seem to be an option. Which makes me wonder if pushing Russian interference has another goal than stopping this nefarious activity.

I know a large section of the American population absolutely loathe Trump. To millions there is nothing to like and plenty to loathe about him. He’s an inveterate braggart, a foul-mannered thug and an amoral lecher by all accounts, a sociopath who combines being a geopolitical moron with a seeming love of Russia.

Ah... Russia, there we see the first "evidence" of collusion. Why should anyone love Russia or be on first names with the new Vlad the Impaler, Mr Putin?

Trump is very clearly an amoral thug when it comes to business. He is willing to lie, cheat and rob in business as Mike Pompeo equally was regarding geopolitics while head of the CIA.

Trump sees himself as CEO America, that’s clear. He clearly feels an affinity with strong leaders. Putin is certainly that. Most Russian leaders have had to be.

But Putin is a dictator, murderer and thief, isn’t he?

That’s certainly the rap he gets on the journalistic grapevine. You do have to wonder though if he is these things why he has not been called to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. And why many world leaders greet him with smiles and apparently enjoy his company and it seems respect what he has to say? Is this normal for dictators, murderers and thieves?

Getting back to Trump, he is a bit of a quixotic personality, an enigma. He appears to be a very successful showman... but was he a successful business man? From all I have heard it appears not. He seems to have driven each business he owned into the ground leaving his workers high and dry. Some say he has been an extremely successful businessman and a millionaire. Others say he is a bankrupt only saved from penury by banks who bailed him out as “too big to fail”.

His ex-Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson called Trump a “F*****g Moron” who made him want to tear his hair out at the asinine things he said when the subject was foreign policy. Why would he have this soft spot for Russia? Could it simply be, as John Bolton has said, that Trump is only ever interested in what’s in it for him? Could it be the thought of some lucrative business deal, a Moscow Trump Tower... or did he simply enjoy his stays in Moscow when he was there helping judge beauty pageants?

We may never know. I have never heard him say why he feels a special warmth toward Russia. Regarding Putin I suspect he believes all the tales of Putin being a ruthless dictator, murderer and thief. Is it too impudent to suggest Trump sees himself in that personality type? Perhaps not murderer, sociopaths don’t often murder. They act out their amoral lives for gain... murdering others usually doesn’t come into their everyday frame of reference. They use people as a con-artist uses people for they are sociopaths too... they have to be as a conscience and a con-artist simply cannot co-exist.

But we have strayed far from the subject of Russian interference and why it permeates the American political scene. It is a good way to turn undecided Americans against Trump, but is it anything more than that?

The Democrats are the most enthusiastic by far when it comes to Russian interference. That and collusion. In fact the entire package of vitriol they aim at Trump is laden with “Russia, Russia, Russia” and yet more “Russia, Russia, Russia” (!) Is there some actual evidence for what they claim?

The ears of many Russians must certainly have pricked up when they heard Donald Trump talking in friendly and cooperative terms about Russia. There had been a number of years since they had heard similar words from a previous president and his people. That was the time of the reset in relations between the USA and Russia if you remember? Things got decided pally between George W, Bush and Putin and a little later even between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Putin.

But the friendship seen then turned sour. It was around 2007, at the time Putin said Russia would set its own course in the world and did not agree with regime change wars that in his view contravene the sovereignty of nations and international law. He also expressed disagreement with the notion that a unipolar world governed by a single nation or group of nations defined a “Free World”, rather the reverse he opined.

Things soured fast at that point. From “Hail Buddy, Well Met” and glad-handed he went to persona non grata and Public Enemy Number One.

Until Trump stampeded like a bull rushing through a china shop to the White House and began running his mouth off breaking the convention that had been set of Putin as the next Hitler.

This busted the ass of a lot of people. Consternation ran rife. Something had to be done.

What better tactic could there be than to attack both Trump and Putin and Russia with one blunderbuss of a campaign that through endless repetition would permeate every brain?

In Russia people were happy to hear Trump talk nicely about their president and country. Why would they not? Russians have suffered terribly through war... they want nothing to do with it and the death and suffering it epitomizes for them.

Some of them, organized by some flaky business types do appear to have generated some particularly wacky and off-subject Facebook ads that some claim were designed to confuse Americans rather than promote Trump. Even if these 90k or so of ads had promoted Trump could they really compete with $100M+ spent on nightly, very professional ads paid for by Democrats?

That leaves Russian interference through collusion. Though some still say there is evidence for this the Mueller investigation was a long one and could find no hard evidence that anything major occurred. The Democrats of course made the most of what was available by hyping up this meager offering and ended up going off on another track over a Trump phone call and his usual thuggish efforts to attack his attackers and refuse any cooperation with them.

On another front the Russian Interference meme took some of the heat off Hillary Clinton and the DNC who had somehow let an orange-faced reality TV host beat them to the presidency when every poll showed it was theirs for the taking. What better way to mitigate your responsibility than to cry foul and consistently point over there at those Russians who stole the presidency from them? A nice out, no?

So now we approach the next U.S. presidential election and we are hearing those clarion calls again, “Russia, Russia, Russia!” You do have to wonder what would be in it for Russia to do anything in November. What COULD it do in fact? It surely would not risk anything that looked like collusion. And it is somewhat unlikely that Facebook ads, no matter how fabulously slick they were (and the ones in 2016 were not at all) would have such a devastating effect as Democrats appear to insist may be the case. I wonder, does anyone, anywhere recall seeing one of these of so fabulously convincing ads? Personally I have never looked at a Facebook ad for more than a few nanoseconds as I looked for what I was there for. Have you?

But undoubtedly we will hear of the ubiquity of Russian interference all the way up to November 3rd. But will some actual evidence of it be shown we can all see? Or will the assertion of its presence be enough for those doing the asserting, over and over and over again... (as you would do if it were simply useful propaganda)?