Putin told Trump Ukraine was out to get him and Trump believes everything Putin says. Manafort & Giuliani did it too, on Putin's oligarch payroll. It's always been about Russia's war on Ukraine. https://t.co/M6rr7sC4gk
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) November 2, 2019
Three of President Trump’s top advisers met with him in the Oval Office in May, determined to convince him that the new Ukrainian leader was an ally deserving of U.S. support.
They had barely begun their pitch when Trump unloaded on them, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the meeting. In Trump’s mind, the officials said, Ukraine’s entire leadership had colluded with the Democrats to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign.
“They tried to take me down,” Trump railed…
So far, a dozen witnesses have testified before House lawmakers since the closed-door impeachment inquiry began a month ago. One theme that runs through almost all of their accounts is Trump’s unyielding loathing of Ukraine, which dates to his earliest days in the White House.
“We could never quite understand it,” a former senior White House official said of Trump’s view of the former Soviet republic, also saying that much of it stemmed from the president’s embrace of conspiracy theories. “There were accusations that they had somehow worked with the Clinton campaign. There were accusations they’d hurt him. He just hated Ukraine.”…
Julia Ioffe is a great reporter, and an immigrant from Russia. “Here’s Why Ukraine Pops Up in So Many U.S. Scandals”:
… One main reason for Ukraine’s outsize presence in our news cycles is money: There’s a lot of it sloshing around, and, as the ladies selling at the designer store know, it tends to find its way into all kinds of crevices.
Ukraine would like America and Europe to think of it as a promising young democracy, the good little country struggling to fend off the gravitational pull of evil Russia. There is a lot of truth in that. But it is also an oligarchy where a very small number of people control the country’s natural resources, a legacy of its Soviet past. Around each of these people is a clan vying for influence, resources, and political power. They sponsor media outlets and politicians. Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for example, has promised to fight corruption but is also closely linked with one of the country’s most powerful oligarchs.
“It’s a pay-to-play democracy, or has been in the past,” says Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), who was Obama’s last assistant secretary of state for human rights, democracy, and labor. “At its most corrupt, you can get very rich, but you need permission to get very rich, so politicians and oligarchs are linked in all kinds of ways. In some ways, it’s very similar to Russia. But Ukraine is a country where you’re more likely to get rich without getting killed if you’re a Western businessman or political consultant.”
Indeed, plenty of American political operatives find there’s a lucrative market for their services in the country. Ukrainians see Americans as being really good at what in that part of the world is known as “political technology”: using data, polling, consulting to win elections. One candidate in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election, for example, made the American political consultants working on his campaign a major selling point. It didn’t work, but Ukrainians still pay top dollar for any associations with the American political elite. “It was a part of the world where there was a lot of money to be made,” says Andrew Weiss, who oversees Russia and Eurasia research at the Carnegie Endowment. “These are people getting paid in a way that is totally out of proportion to how you would be paid elsewhere.” Consider, for instance, the $12.7 million that Manafort made in just five years. Bernie Sanders’s chief 2016 strategist, Tad Devine, was handsomely compensated for work he did for Yanukovych, too. When Devine was contemplating working on the 2014 Ukrainian election, he stipulated that his rate would be $10,000 per day—not including travel…
The main reason Ukraine is in our news feeds so much is that the country marks a border—the word “Ukraine” means borderland—a point of friction between two competing empires and geopolitical visions: Russia versus the West, led by America. The two sides have been fighting over which camp Ukraine joins for the past two decades. A great way to fight that war of geopolitical influence is with money. There is a lot of Russian money in Ukraine and a lot of Western money, in the form of IMF loans and American and European aid. “Ukraine is a weak country; it’s got a weak civil society. They are used to looking to outside forces for help,” says Evelyn Farkas, who served as Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia and Ukraine. “People feel like there’s money to be made, and it happens to be an easier place because it’s in Europe.”But people’s affiliations are often less than clear. Determining which oligarchic clan a politician or journalist is associated with is difficult, as is pinning down a person’s true geopolitical leanings. In the years after Yanukovych’s ouster and the Russian invasion, the easiest way to knock out a rival was to tarnish them as an agent of Moscow, whether the claim was true or not. “It’s very difficult because of the level of distrust,” says the former Obama administration official. “You don’t know whom you can trust in Ukraine. Everyone accuses everyone else in Ukraine of being a Russian puppet, and getting to the bottom of it is extremely difficult to do.”…
Ukraine pops up in our domestic political scandals because it is in the middle of a tug-of-war between Russia and the West, and because Westerners go there to enrich themselves doing questionable work. But in our minds, it is a small country somewhere over the horizon, full of people with funny Slavic names. Ukraine is much easier to think about if we cram it into our own political dichotomies, even if that distorts what’s really happening on the ground. The problem in doing so, however, is that we become unwitting participants in someone else’s games.
Apart from his fealty to Putin, there’s a distinct taint of jealousy in Trump’s denunciation of Ukraine as “not a real country” and “totally corrupt”. How come, I imagine him demanding, these two-bit foreigners get free reign to steal so much so freely, while he’s forced to go behind closed doors to beg donors for a little taste? Just to wet his beak?
Ukraine is where the money is because that's where Putin's interests are, not because it's "so corrupt." Trump and Giuliani were led on a golden goose chase by Manafort to serve Putin's ends of undermining US support for Ukraine.
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) November 2, 2019
Jim, Foolish Literalist
this is now cromulent in this thread:
I’ve counted too many chickens in the past couple years but… one of the Ukrainian mobster-bagman who worked for Rudi, or for whom Rudi worked, has fired trump’s lawyer. We’ll see
MJS
This seems way too credulous to me. I don’t believe for a second that Trump believes Ukraine “tried to take him down.” I do believe that Putin told him to ACT as if he believes Ukraine tried to take him down.
Trump lies, all the time. He’s very practiced at it. If he in fact said in a meeting, “They tried to take me down”, he was lying then as well, and knew it.
Cheryl Rofer
I’m going to exercise my usual caution and point out that we don’t know that Putin told Trump that Ukraine was out to get him. Manafort seems to have been the first to do that, from what I’ve read so far, and a great many others continued to pour that into Donny’s ears.
We don’t know what Putin has told Trump. That in itself is a problem.
eric
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Henry Hill was a mobster until he wasnt. time will tell.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Ya know, at lest with Nixon we could blame it on the booze.
Baud
If Hillary were a less classy person, I’d love to see her take selfies at various world landmarks with her “server” and post them on her Twitter.
“Here’s one of Hillary and her server at the Eiffel Tower. Here they are at the Great Pyramids.”
Maybe someone creative person can Photoshop it.
Cacti
Ioffe is a Snowden/Putin fluffer. Hard pass.
Gravenstone
Just reading the post title, obvious answer was ‘Putin told him to ‘. Shocking to learn that plays a role (as in not remotely shocking at all).
Bill Arnold
@MJS:
Perhaps he tries them out as regular lies and/or bullshit, and if they get traction he starts believing them.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
And it’s a black tie waiter each time holding an empty tray.
Miss Bianca
@Baud: “Here’s Hillary and Her Server eating Chicken Kiev – IN KIEV! Mwah ha ha HAAAA!!”
Cacti
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Let’s hope he doesn’t get Epstein’d.
Sab
I remember Chrystia Freeland, formerly a Canadian reporter of Ukrainian background ( mother from there, she spoke the language) writing that Ukrainian politics was a war between billionaire oligarchs and millionaire oligarchs. Was this accurate? Have things changed?
Last I heard Freeland went into politics, is an MP and is Canada’s foreign minister.
Baud
@mrmoshpotato: Maybe Bill can dress up as the waiter.
@Miss Bianca:
Oh man. Barr would assign every DOJ attorney to get to the bottom of that case.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: The trick would be getting the shadows right.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I have faith in you, Bill.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
(in Bones voice)Damnit Baud, I’m photographer, not a model.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
The other Bill.
Major Major Major Major
One of my friends is getting a (“benign”) tumor irradiated since it’s still growing and will kill him and cannot be removed. He’s rented a big apartment in Houston (some sort of rare condition, needs a specialist) and invited some of us to go hang out during some of the 12-day treatment period.
So that’s fun…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Oh, that guy.
Steeplejack (phone)
Thought we settled this last year.
Mary G
The new UK Speaker has a great family:
Sab
@Major Major Major Major: How is that tumor ” benign”?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I’m not getting outa the boat.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Major Major Major Major:
It’s only benign if it’s on somebody else. Good luck to him!
zhena gogolia
@Sab:
It could be not cancerous but still deadly.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: Nice group of pets there for the new Speaker.
zhena gogolia
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m enjoying your pictures on Patreon!
Martin
@MJS: True, but narcissists lie to themselves constantly. Borderlines tend to lie consciously, whereas narcissists lie unconsciously. Trump truly believes he’s the smartest person on earth. There’s no evidence you can present him to dissuade him of that belief. He believes it because it’s necessary to his psyche to believe it. So he doesn’t think he’s lying when he says stuff like that.
Ukraine is convenient because of how its been presented to him. If he can’t deal with having lost the popular vote, he can cope with that by accepting the lie that millions of people voted illegally, or Ukraine worked to undermine him. Adam would tell us that people with secrets are ripe to be compromised. But Trump is the perfect mark for someone like Putin, because all Putin needs to do is understand Trumps psyche (he’s desperate to not be seen as a loser, and to be seen as better than Obama) so all he has to do is feed Trump lies and plans that affirm those things and let Trump internalize the lies. They then become truths to Trump, and Trump runs with them. The reason why Trump sides with dictators is that he sees the dictators as not being losers (problem A) and because dictators, unlike democratically elected leaders, are far more willing to manipulate Trump in that manner (problem B).
You assume that Trump can self-assess and differentiate between lies and truth. He simply can’t. He’s just busted in that manner. These events like showing up at the World Series and expecting to bask in adulation but getting soundly booed really fucks with him. He has to work really hard to create a lie to convince himself that people love him after something like that. It’s why I don’t think he’ll resign. I don’t think he can accept that he’s a bad president. I think it’ll break him.
Major Major Major Major
@Sab: it’s not cancer, just fatal.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@zhena gogolia: Thanks much, I was wondering if you were getting notification of new sets.
Roger Moore
@Cheryl Rofer:
I said it in a previous thread, and I’ll say it again here: the Democrats need to move heaven and earth to get the contents of the server with the ultra-secret documents. I would guess there’s a dozen impeachments worth of dirt on that system.
Sab
@zhena gogolia: @Major Major Major Major: Yikes!
patrick II
A couple of weeks ago when I read that Trump believed that the DNC server was being held in Ukraine by a corrupt Ukrainian plutocrat involved in Ukraine’s framing Russia for stealing the DNC’s emails, I commented he was not sane.
Today Trump put out a tweet that California was not keeping the forest floors clean so they wouldn’t catch on fire. Last year he said they didn’t rake them, but people made fun of him for that, so this year it’s keep the forest floors clean. The profound stupidity is physically painful, like watching a turkey drown looking up at the rain. Actually the turkey story is apocryphal, the Trump story isn’t.
And now reading this, it is just astonishing. He is the mad hatter president, circling around with the same thoughts over and over in ever-smaller circles, diminishing to a point. It would be painful to watch if it was just some random guy, but it isn’t, and he is taking us all for the joyless ride.
Cheryl Rofer
@Roger Moore: We’ve already got more than a dozen, but yes.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@patrick II: So we should continue to make fun of Trump, since all the fires around here in Southern CA have not been in our forests?
debbie
@Cheryl Rofer:
Knowing Putin’s history and behavior, you don’t feel we can extrapolate that he’s behind all this?
patrick II
@Roger Moore:
I can’t imagine any way democrats can get to the contents of that server, and those transcripts will certainly not survive any transition. The only good thing about them being on that system is that they are a part of a larger security system and it will be nearly impossible to delete them without leaving footprints.
PJ
OT: There’s a new book out that looks interesting, Dying of Whiteness, based on interviews with many members of the common clay, and it turns out poor whites continue to support policies that hurt them not due to economic anxiety, but because (surprise!) changing those policies would also help people of color. https://www.publicbooks.org/terminal-whiteness/?utm_content=buffer424b8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
trollhattan
At what point will Trump say of Ukraine, “They’ve got all that sand to play in”? Ukrainian Kurds are nothing but trouble.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@patrick II: Well that, and I’m sure the server has nightly backups including some that go offsite.
Martin
@debbie: I think Trump is such a squishy mark that he’s being influenced by so many different people.
Ella in New Mexico
Julia Ioffe is a damned good writer and is hardly a” Snowden/Putin fluffer”. On the contrary, she has written for years about the ruthlessness of Putin’s interference in western democracies, and gives some unique insights about how he manages to be so successful having fled Russia and emigrated to the US with her family at age 7 as Russian Jewish refugees.
That piece above ties in to many of the themes in Rachel Maddow’s new book “Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth”.
Hint: It’s all about oil/natural resources, money, and oligarch funded organized crime embedded in the Russian state.
jl
@Baud: HRC should send out twitter clues on where the magic server and the pizza joint basement are hidden in the Ukrainian woods. Could start with ’30 paces south of the big birch tree just west of Kiev city limits”
patrick II
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m not making fun. When I said hearing that was so profoundly stupid it was painful I was not speaking in hyperbole. It physically hurts to watch the effects his profound disassociation from reality is having on every decent thing this country is supposed to stand for. If there is such a thing as an anti-Christ, Trump is the anti-founding father.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@patrick II: I’m not sure. If they are truly unclassified and marked that way it might not be too hard to print them out and get the paper copy reviewed and released.
jl
@Cheryl Rofer: I agree. We don’t know what all Putin has told Trump in private. But directly or indirectly, seems like Putin, Erdogan, MBS and Netanyahu, and maybe a few other sundry strongmen are running US foreign policy.
Anne Laurie
@Cacti: This is bullshit, and if you’ve ever actually read anything Ioffe published, you’d know it.
Try getting your jollies in some form other than deliberate trolling, for a change.
Redshift
@debbie: He’s certainly behind Manafort selling Trump this conspiracy theory. The only question is whether he talked to Trump about it directly during their unrecorded pillow talk.
Dan B
@patrick II: And because Gavin has not raked the forests Trump wants to cut federal funds. And he’s offered US assistance to fight fires in Siberia.
Ella in New Mexico
@Anne Laurie: Amen. See my post at 43. I’ve read her stuff for years and have NEVER seen anything indicating such a thing. So much garbage character assassination.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Apparently from the Muller papers that were released; Trump seems to think that when the Democrats saw Trump posed for the most awesome election sweep ever in 2016, so the Democrats ran to their Ukrainian friends who hacked to the DNC servers and the election just to spoil Trump’s victory. Yes, Trump believes his enemies conspired to help him win the election as an attack against Trump.
And there it is, Peak wingnut.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
from time to time I think of the letter a large, bipartisan group of former Senators published in the Washington Post, a rebuke of trump that had been watered down to a call for civility and patriotism in order to get Rs to sign on. I wonder what they’re all thinking now. Will any of them come forward ? I fucking doubt it.
Aleta
i’m wiped after the working all weekend. Got home, fell asleep for a sec on the couch. Open my dreaming eyes to Trump groping Suzuki on TV. What?!?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Dan B: I’ve already seen my first “Recall Newsom” bumpersticker.
Cheryl Rofer
@debbie: Martin makes a good point.
Certainly many of Trump’s actions have benefitted Putin. But many of those actions can be attributed to what Trump has always been and believed. Connections to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs are surfacing, and they are connected to Putin, but none of those connections goes directly to Trump.
I think it’s dangerous to attribute too many things to Putin unless we have more proof than what we have now. There is already a faction on the left ready to discredit all mention of Russian interference, and we shouldn’t give them ammunition. Another reason is not to give Putin more credit than he deserves. What the Mueller Report describes is something of a free-for-all among the oligarchs to influence the administration; that could give a similar result.
It’s a thin line to walk, but I’d like to keep to it. The circumstantial evidence is that there is a connection to Putin. We don’t have a convincing description of what that connection is, although there are many suggestive bits and pieces, like those unrecorded (so maybe they’re not in that highly secret server?) conversations. I’d still like to know why Trump looked like he had been hit in the head with a two-by-four when he emerged from the Helsinki meeting.
Mike in NC
Zelensky should hold a press conference where the actual transcript and audio of the phone call from the Ukrainian side are released to the public. Tell the world press that he’s being extorted by Putin, Giuliani, and Trump, who are nothing more than gangsters.
Cacti
@Anne Laurie:
You were quite the Snowden fluffer yourself, back when it was trendy on left wing blogs.
dm
Yanukovich covered all the bases: in addition to Manafort, and Sanders’ strategist Tad Devine, John Podesta’s brother, Tony, also worked for him.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Cheryl Rofer:
what about the Agalarovs? “Putin’s Builder”, isn’t he? My theory has long been that, whatever came of Trump Tower Moscow*, the real goal post-2016, for trump and Putin, was some kind of network, TV and/or online, of Russian-subsidized trump propaganda: Isolationist, anti-NATO, anti-President HRC, of course. A weakened and chaotic US political situation for Putin, cash and attention for trump. My Pillow ads and reruns of Celebrity apprentice while he was golfing
* I don’t know from the construction business or money laundering, but I’ve seen it said that a massive, drawn-out construction project is a great way to launder money.
ETA: and I’m assuming that a lot of trump’s connections to oligarchs already has to do with real estate linked money laundering. Someone was posting pictures of one of trump’s buildings in Miami last week. None of the balconies had furniture or gills or towels like all the other buildings in the neighborhood. Then there’s that whole story about the mansion he bought and flipped to an oligarch who promptly tore it down.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Cheryl Rofer:
Not to mention it’s not that straightforward. Trump is so utterly gullible that he can be manipulated indirectly. We’ve seen the Democrats in the House do it. Trump is more like a bull in a china shop just running headlong into anything that catches his eye.
Baud
@jl:
The Da Clinton Code. A new novel by Dan Brown.
jl
@Cheryl Rofer: From what I’ve read about the Trump scam real estate empire’s finances, the Trump family owes shady Russian oligarchs a lot of big favors, and Trump may fear their financial, or other, retaliation, if he doesn’t serve their interests. So, that is enough to explain a lot of Trump’s behavior. And most oligarchs are friendly with Putin. And Trump’s actions as president are very much in line with BS he’s spouted for decades.
So, I tend to agree, no direct Putin direction or orders are needed to explain what we see. We have reason to suspect Putin has an indirect influence and confluence of interests and obsessions, though.
debbie
@Cheryl Rofer:
It would be foolish not to speculate. ?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: (applause)
Mnemosyne
@MJS:
Trump can’t act worth a damn. He’s a narcissist and a compulsive liar, which means that he creates his own reality inside his head. He really believes the shit he says at the moment he says it, but will turn on a dime to say the exact opposite if that’s necessary for him to maintain his narcissistic shell.
It’s a really hard thing for people to grasp if they haven’t encountered a narcissist or pathological liar before, but it’s true: at the moment they spew the lie, they really believe it.
FlipYrWhig
@MJS:
On the contrary: I ENTIRELY believe it. He’s a stupid insecure monomaniac with a persecution complex who refuses to revisit anything he’s ever thought and mainlines Fox News and racist conspiracy Twitter all day, every day. I figure Don Jr. or Giuliani told him about this between the election and the inauguration, while other people told him about the millions of illegals casting votes. He believes this nonsense because it validates to him that the world is against him. He’s not acting, he’s not taking orders, he’s just a toxic narcissist who’s easy to manipulate if you can activate the parts of his brain(ish) that still work and still hate.
Cacti
Things published by Julia Ioffe:
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: Wow, virtual synchronicity between us! Like the old days. ;)
Cacti
Other things published by Julia Ioffe:
Cheryl Rofer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Good point about the Agalarovs, but Putin knows how to use cutouts. None of the money laundering is proved, or even a plausible story beyond all those Russians who were buying apartments in Trump Tower. Or Ryobolovlev’s dealings with Trump on that estate in Florida. I just saw another reference to him coming from the Mueller documents just released. Funny deals, yes. But no sure indication of money laundering.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
?
Chris Johnson
@Cheryl Rofer:
If you have been OF that faction (like I was) and on places where it’s cultivated, you could see the sausage being made. Again: I was pretty into the r/chapotraphouse subreddit for a while there (Russiagate mockery central) until I started seeing comments get downvoted to -12 or so within seconds, started checking out the ‘new’ category, started seeing the amount of effort that went into stage-managing the place so those people ONLY saw anti-‘Russiagate’ perspectives. This doesn’t happen by accident. There are places like Reddit that are way more vulnerable to meddling than others. It’s a mercy BJ doesn’t have ‘comment ratings’ or it’d be just as manipulated, to the extent that people were able to make accounts to do that with.
Regarding giving Putin too much credit you’ve got to remember the known approach Russia uses: weaponized chaos. It’s a lot easier to get results with than trying to make specific outcomes. First internally, and then as foreign policy, Putin has been listening to specific advisors who’ve persuaded him to ‘help’ not just the obvious allies, but ALL sorts of competing factions. Understanding that is very important, because it means Putin does not have to have a plan, or make sense. All he has to do is feed all the rival narratives, produce a sort of crab bucket scenario.
That’s why ‘well, which candidate are YOU recommending?’ is a decent riposte to negative nancies here. It’s so easy to find weaknesses in our politicians and call ’em out, try to cancel ’em, that it’s most of what Putin does, from any available angle. And ‘none of them, they are ALL garbage’ is not so much an admission of defeat as the Putin-endorsed end state. It’s ‘the Zone’, a state where you can’t trust or believe anything and might as well just lay down and die.
And it is unnecessary. It’s not that hard to govern, to make sense, to try your best. ANY of our people could do that and be doing better than Trump, because Trump is more chaos politics: he is not following direction from Putin, because he doesn’t have to. He’s flailing like the fool he is. It is that flailing behavior that Putin’s able to use. There will be no parade in Russia for Trump when all this is done. He’ll be another Epstein story: horrible person who served a purpose for a time.
The free-for-all among the oligarchs is both accurate and the state Putin wants us to be in. Specific winners are unnecessary. It’s the chaos he’s fostering. Anything we do to counter that chaos is useful, and it really wouldn’t take much: we’re pretty far down the chaos hole at this stage and even relatively competent leadership would look pretty good.
Cheryl Rofer
@jl: I think that’s about it.
Cheryl Rofer
@debbie: Oh, speculation is fun! But keep in mind what’s speculation and what’s supported.
Cacti
Yet another thing published by Julia Ioffe:
For not being a Snowden/Putin fluffer, she had quite the rose colored view of Vlad’s role in it.
Including her conclusion:
Roger Moore
@patrick II:
It’s probably less important to get the files than it is to demand the files and have the courts uphold their right to get them. If the Trump administration continues to hold out after the Supreme Court says it has to turn over the files, for instance, that would be an impeachable offense by itself. The other possibility is that if there’s a definitive court ruling in favor of Congress’s demand for the files and the Trump administration refuses to turn them over, a whistleblower might access the files and turn them over without approval from their higher-ups. It would doom their career, but it’s a possibility to consider.
PPCLI
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I would be very surprised if this didn’t turn out to be “cooperation” in the same sense that Manafort “cooperated”.
Cheryl Rofer
@Chris Johnson: Thanks for your insights on Reddit. I just don’t go over there, only occasionally when a post of mine is linked to see what they are doing with it.
I agree that Putin is fine with chaos in the US, no well-defined plan necessary.
Additionally, he keeps his oligarchs competing with each other. This is why there were so many different Russian attempts to make friends with the Trumpies and, more generally, the Republicans.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Cacti:
You didn’t actually address AL’s point that Julia Inoffe is not a Putin/Snowdan fluffer. That’s what a troll does
Mary G
@Cheryl Rofer: My back hurts, so I’m not googling for links, but people have also alleged that Iran and China are also stirring up shit on social media in favor of both the right and the left to strengthen the partisan divide. Then we’re too busy fighting amongst ourselves to see what they’re up to.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Joy Reid at that Politicon thing, last year or the year before, spelled out a really clear and convincing case for trump as a money-launderer for the Russian oligarchs. I assume that’s what she developed into her book, The Man Who Sold America. I may get that audio for my upcoming travels.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Cheryl Rofer:
Isn’t that incredibly irresponsible of Putin? Does he truly believe he can ensure the current situation will be beneficial to him and not spiral out of control and end in nuclear war? Or does he just not give a shit?
Jay
On the bright side, in Canada the “Safe Third Country Agreement” is heading to Court as a sufficient case has been made that the US is no longer a safe country for refugees and asylum seekers.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/safe-third-country-1.5346557
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Mary G:
Wouldn’t it be in Iran and China’s interests for Dems to prevail and win?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@PPCLI: they know by now that the Attorney General of the United States is an ally, so unless Laetitia James has something big on him, I’m not gonna get too excited yet.
@Mary G: also the Israelis. What was the company of ex (?) Israeli intelligence officers who were harrassing Ben Rhodes and another one of Obama’s close FP aides: Black Cube? I wouldn’t put anything past Bibi Netanyahu
Major Major Major Major
@Chris Johnson:
Eww
That said, reading diverse opinions is good!
Gvg
@Cacti: your examples are not Putin fluffing or apologizing. The second example reads to me more like a warning to us not to blame everything on a particular villian so that therefore we are not responsible for anything. We need to not devolve into learned helplessness.
Let’s just say I don’t agree with your conclusion sofar.
Cheryl Rofer
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: That’s as good a question as the one in an earlier thread about what the Republicans want. I don’t know in either case, of course, but a couple of thoughts on Putin.
Russia can’t be a competitor with the United States in anything but nuclear weapons. Their economy is the size of Portugal’s (I think, might need to be updated), and, except for nukes, their military is puny. They barely have a navy. But they can be a spoiler, so that’s what Putin does. It’s all he can do.
Putin is also not a strategist, but he’s a pretty good tactician, so he doesn’t think further ahead than the next step. Maybe two steps. Is it dangerous to have two such short-sighted people in charge of 14,000 nukes? You bet.
patrick II
@Roger Moore:
My lack of imagination strikes again. Here is hoping it works out that way.
Mary G
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Where are you going? Is it for fun?
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne:
And Trump started this lie back during the 2016 election. He’s had plenty of encouragement to harden his belief more and more, and emotional prodding to get obsessed with it. Yes, he honestly thinks there’s a server with 33,000 of Hillary’s emails proving she’s a criminal, and he thinks it’s in Ukraine, and that’s where this all came from. Note that the OP isn’t about Biden. Biden is an afterthought. People need to accept that Trump is not just an asshole, a nutjob.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I can’t speak on Iran, but China (IMO) has decided that with their economy slowing & a trade war already at full throttle, they aren’t here to make friends. It’s why they’re recently moving so hard on HK, rapidly expanding their panopticon, aggressively policing the content put out by companies that want to do business there, etc. The cost of losing face on the world stage is much lower now, thanks in part to Trump’s trade war & the TPP failure.
dm
So, Cacti seems to be getting most of his stuff from this 2013 piece by Ioffe, here:
https://newrepublic.com/article/114234/lawrence-odonnell-yells-julia-ioffe-about-putin-and-snowden
…about a dust-up between her and Larry O’Donnell on his show about Snowden. It’s short, you can read it all yourself in very little time.
If it were the only thing by Ioffe I’d ever read, I might regard her the way Cacti does, too.
Mary G
Le sigh:
Frankensteinbeck
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Adam has made posts explaining it. I don’t know about the nuclear war part, but A) he personally hates the United States, and B) a world in chaos is a world where he has no opposing forces when he acts. It’s a whole Russian strategy thing. There are formal papers on it and everything.
jl
i think it’s a fools errand to try to figure out what Trump really believes, because he is such a con-person and insecure narcissist and so ignorant. He’s easily swayed by BS he gets from Fox News and other propaganda organizations, QAnon conspiracy nonsense. If he’s talking with some one who knows the QAnon stuff is BS and bold enough to dismiss it directly to Trump’s face, Trump will pretend to think it’s nonsense too. If Trump runs into a believer, he’ll be all in.
Trump is such a mess in the head, he probably doesn’t even know what he believes.
Southern Goth
@dm:
From that article:
For fuck’s sake, does that full quote sound like Putin fluffing?
Patricia Kayden
Dev Null
@Cacti: While I am aware that trolls should not be fed, I cannot refrain from noting that cherry-picking, facilitated by the inherent ambiguity of the English language, can prove almost any counter-factual proposition.
You sure post a lot of troll-ish crap.
Omnes Omnibus
@dm:
If I had read only one thing by a journalist who has been publishing frequently for the past 13-14 years, I’d tend to refrain from making any kind of judgment.
different-church-lady
@Patricia Kayden: The man needs better taste in friends.
Dev Null
@dm: Or perhaps Cacti is a troll.
(And yes, I’m speaking as a commenter who has been accused of being a troll. Your point would be…)
dm
@Southern Goth: take it up with Cacti. I think you can judge for yourself.
@Omnes Omnibus: @Omnes Omnibus: we’d all be better off if we observed such restraint, but then our “hot takes” would be unappetizingly lukewarm.
Calouste
@jl: Look, if you’re going to hide something in Ukraine, hide it in Chernobyl.
Chris Johnson
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Again, there are specific advisors who have persuaded him to adopt this tactic (the chapos call it The Zone, after a Russian sci-fi dystopian novel) and he’s seen it be so unexpectedly successful, first internally to Russia and then as foreign policy, that he’s gone all-in on the strategy. Russia is not the biggest most powerful country, but this course of action suggests that ‘spiraling out of control’ can be turned to Russia’s advantage. For instance, if America flips out and starts nuking people, suddenly Russia is the peacemaker. He’s basically trying to set up a situation where he as the authoritarian strongman is the most stable, trustworthy option because everybody else has gone bonkers. Cynical as fuck, but that’s the basic strategy.
Mary G
OH FOR FUCK’S FUCKING SAKE:
Regarding the decision today that Twitler’s tax returns cannot be withheld:
A seven-month first extension? Whose side is Vance on?
Cacti
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Except for printing excerpts of her Snowden/Putin fluffing. Reading is fundamental.
Dev Null
@Chris Johnson: It works as a strategy … until it doesn’t. From personal experience, a cost-benefit analysis which omits the “cost” analysis sometimes results in suboptimal outcomes.
But so far Putin looks golden …
Frankensteinbeck
@Mary G:
I heard, and I don’t know that this is true, that because of the geographical location the appeal goes to RBG, who has the option of deciding it on her own without bringing in the rest of the court.
Omnes Omnibus
@Frankensteinbeck: No.
Cacti
@Dev Null:
Whatever you say, new person.
different-church-lady
@Cacti: Wouldn’t it be easier to just admit you were wrong?
Chris Johnson
@Dev Null: I didn’t say it was truly smart. I more or less said that’s what he’s doing and why. Underscores the remark about ‘don’t overestimate Putin, he is not a strategy guy, he just reacts’. It generates new opportunities to react, and to a point it cuts down his enemies.
Sucks for the environment and leaves everybody scareder, poorer, and more undermined. He does not give a shit about that, because the only thing he cares about is money and power for himself, like most of these people. It always comes down to money. Wealth tax for the win: that or guillotines :)
Raven
I spent the entire day looking for my wallet. We went to a wedding yesterday and couldn’t locate it this morning. It was in the bottom of a closet where I had fooled around with a couple of pairs of shoes. It was agonizing walking the grounds of the wedding and up and down the street but. . . damn!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
twitter is so freaking weird, all my imaginary on-line friends running into each other from all corners of the ideological spectrum and different parts of media
@Mary G:
I’d guess that agreement is a legal formality, i.e. the accounting firm would refuse to hand over the docs while the appeal is pending, and Vance’s only recourse would be to go back to court? Lawyers in the house?
Dev Null
@Mary G: Seems like a poison pill, all things considered. Vance’s proposal (assuming I understand you correctly) requires Trump to dump his tax returns 4 and a bit months before Election Day?
Why would one object to this?
Cacti
@different-church-lady:
That would require error on my part. Snowden/Putin fluffers get awfully testy when you bring up said fluffing.
Dev Null
@Cacti: Fuck off, troll. I’ve been here since the Esteemed Blogmaster had his coming-to-Jesus moment with the Terri Schiavo circus.
Which was what, 2005?
Asshole.
“if you can’t make a coherent argument, smear your critics.”
Mary G
@Frankensteinbeck: My reaction is emotional because though IANAL, I worked in a somewhat litigation-related job, and my personal experience is that attorneys like Twitler’s, who are trying to run out the clock, will call the day before their pleading is due with a “the dog ate my homework” excuse and ask for more time. If Vance is giving them seven months now, who’s to say they can’t extend it five more months or past the election one way or the other, especially with help from 5/9ths of the court?
That said, it’s been 20 years since I worked, and my purpose was to avoid trials, so I know nothing about appellate law. Maybe someone can talk me down off the ledge.
Cacti
@Dev Null:
Self-awareness isn’t your strong suit, is it?
Dev Null
@Cacti:
Every accusation is an admission.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I enjoy how about half the replies to that thread are requests to sticth it back together into something Twitter isn’t suited to do.
Dev Null
@Cacti: “every accusation is an admission”
Cacti
@Dev Null:
Is that a round about way of saying you’re an asshole?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
listening to the O’Bros talk about the big Liberty and Justice Dinner (formerly Jefferson-Jackson) in Iowa. Buttigieg and Warren had the best, most organized crowds. Biden couldn’t fill his sections. Bernie didn’t have his supporters in the hall because it had corporate sponsors.
Warren saying that anything less than her plan is “going back to the status quo”. The motherfucking goddam public option is not the status quo. It is something Barack Fucking Obama couldn’t get with a goddam fucking supermajority. Now it’s a popular idea. So of course, we should campaign on the thing that’s not popular! Brilliant!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Raven:
Kinky.
Dev Null
@Cacti: [ROFL]
Speaking as a “new person”, of course. /snark
rikyrah
???
CJ Carrell, Länskrim Malmö (@DrCJCarrell) Tweeted:
@charlasek @dontboohvote @Ange_Amene @blackwomenviews Tom Steyer’s top aide, who is a former head of the SC Democratic Party, stole Kamala Harris’ SC voter files. As such he has been banned from all DNC computer systems. https://twitter.com/DrCJCarrell/status/1191516466325213186?s=17
Cacti
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
All hail the new prog cult leader.
different-church-lady
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Weddings do bring out the randy side of folks, don’t they.
RAVEN
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I guess I should have said trying to “find” a couple of pair if shoes.
Jeffro
@Dev Null: That’s interesting. I genuinely have no idea when I first started coming here, but I’m guessing it wasn’t too long after you did.
(Mods: any way to check this? And do I really want to know?)
Cacti
@Dev Null:
I was just wondering, because you had just finished calling me an asshole, and then followed that with “every accusation is an admission”.
I’m sorry you think you’re an asshole. But I don’t think your self-assessment is off the mark.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@RAVEN: Yes, but your initial comment was much, much more amusing. ??
?BillinGlendaleCA
@different-church-lady: …and not just in the bride and groom.
Mnemosyne
@Dev Null:
Cacti used to be a rational commenter, but being wrong in 2016 drove him around the bend and now he mostly trolls.
RAVEN
@different-church-lady: This was really interesting. They had a clap and stomp song sung by sister of the groom and a Klezmer band for entertainment.
Jeffro
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yup. Totally unrealistic.
Didn’t someone much more famous than me once describe politics as the art of the possible? No wonder Dems are bad at politics.
I have been a Warren fan, impressed by her energy and willingness to think big. And I’ll still support whomever the Dem nominee is (unless it’s one of the nuts like Williamson or Sestak, LOL, which it won’t be). But whew, we could do ourselves a world of good by not kicking so many own goals here.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve seen this handle around the twitters, I forget their real name, this person identifies as a never-trumper and publishes at NRO
letting gay people get married and buy cakes makes him (odds are) suffer? These are the people who define “religious liberty” as “You have to live according to my reading of two-thousand (plus) year old book of magic.
Dev Null
@Jeffro:
I remember posts from before l’Affair Schiavo, but not much earlier. 2003, maybe? (I’m guessing.)
Based on responses from other commenters (er, Another Scott) to my similar inquiries, I gather that there’s no easy back-threading. You can search on the site: and user name (correct me if I’m wrong, AScott!), but that’s about it.
That doesn’t help you find another jackal who has commented under a series of names, er, as I have over the years.
RAVEN
never mind
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Since being a modern conservative Christian entails preemptively believing that everyone who is not a conservative Christian hates you, I’m not sure what point he thinks he’s making.
Dev Null
@Mnemosyne:
Thanks for the heads up, M. I didn’t spend much time here reading comment threads until I retired a couple of years ago, and assumed he was a relatively recent jackal.
“Assumptions make an ass etc…”
Mary G
@RAVEN: Private video
Fair Economist
Here’s Ioffe “fluffing” Putin:
I always fluff people by claiming they’re deluded conspiracy theorists.
Dev Null
@Chris Johnson: Well, maybe.
Still, unless Putin wins all the marbles, the pushback from trying to win all the marbles … and failing … will be YUUUGE.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already, but people have written books about “unintended consequences”, in fields as diverse as Afghan and paper clips. (Cites available on request; I don’t have them at hand.)
And yeah, you’re probably right that Putin thinks short-term (I’m guessing that’s what you meant) … payoff huge, chances of winning all the marbles … well, small.
I think.
Another Scott
@Dev Null: There are lots and lots of captures of the stuff here at archive.org, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to search their web archive.
Google seems to be culling their old stuff from search results. The oldest thing from my oldes ‘nym that I was able to quickly find in Google is from 2011. Maybe we’ll get to be forgotten after all? ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Jay
@Dev Null:
Putin’s tactic is to use chaos to work inside an Opponents OODA loop.
Dolt 45 does the same thing.
It forces the Opponent into a position of almost constant reacting and responding rather than being proactive.
Another Scott
@Jeffro: The new iteration of the site here is supposed to have a decent ‘site search’ function. Maybe we’ll find out soon!
Cheers,
Scott.
Dev Null
@Another Scott: Thank you, Sir!
I know a bunch of peeps at Teh Goog, (er, yeah, I know: as do we all … that said,) if you have a question that you might want answered, I can ask …
With the caveat that even with ex-colleagues, answers from teh Goog are few and far between.
Roger Moore
@Jay:
I think the Democrats have finally managed to overwhelm Trump with more attacks- several different avenues of impeachment inquiry, lawsuits, etc.- than he can personally deal with. He doesn’t trust anyone else enough to let them deal with those things, so he’s flailing around trying to get inside the OODA loops of more opponents than he can manage. It doesn’t help him that the legal process (and the quasi-legal investigations Congress is carrying out) are designed to be deliberate and not to let one side overwhelm the other with a flurry of moves their opponent doesn’t have time to respond to.
Dev Null
@Jay:
I don’t doubt the claim, but what does this mean for us’ns? (Sorry, I’m drunk on a French white. Please overlook my dropping the ball, SVP.)
Dev Null
@Another Scott: I hope. Many many threads I would still be commenting on were I able to find the thread.
I realize that’s an argument for a limited search function. [dryly]
Roger Moore
@Dev Null:
I think the main thing it means is not to let Trump dictate the terms of engagement. As long as we all spend our time responding to Trump’s attacks, he can keep making new ones faster than we can defuse the old ones. Instead, we need to divide up the effort and have different groups doing different things. Some people need to respond to Trump’s attacks so they don’t sit out their unrefuted. At the same time, though, our candidate needs to be pushing their positive ideas and trying to bring attention to all the good stuff we can do if we get control of the government. And another group, probably the folks in the House, needs to be attacking Trump on all his misdeeds. We want to turn the tables and present Trump with more things to respond to than he has time and energy to deal with. That’s when his inability to delegate effectively will hurt him, because he’ll have much more trouble than we do depending on surrogates to do this stuff.
Jay
@Dev Null:
Roger answered the question in regards to Dolt 45,
but for Putin, there is little the US can do as long as Putin has the White Supremacy House and the Senate.
When that changes, then just seriously shutting down the dirty money cash flow out of Russia, and the dirty money cash flow into Russia, ( Syrian oil, Venezuelan Gold, Mozambique and Nigerian Security Contracts and Gold, Diamond Mines, Rare Earth Metals, illegal/legal arms sales), will cut him off at the knees.
Anne Laurie
@Cheryl Rofer:
Excellent point! I have seen it pointed out elsewhere (quite possibly by you) that Putin is himself “in thrall” to the oligarchs currently looting Russia. He’s as powerful as he is because he’s been careful not to inconvenience the big money guys… just as our GOP is powerful because Mitch McConnell, Mick Mulvaney, Paul Ryan et all have been careful not to do anything that would annoy the Koch family or the Mercers into stomping them.
Getting Trump elected was the next big step for the Bad Money guys to turn America into Russia. “Our” kleptocrats didn’t necessarily encourage ‘their’ GRU to intefere with America’s elections… but they sure the hell haven’t done much to deter them, either…
Anne Laurie
@Cacti: And when more information about Snowden was revealed, I learned better.
But you’re flat-out lying about Ioffe. Or you’d post something other than lazy smears.
Anne Laurie
@Cheryl Rofer:
Yeah, unlike our own Disgrace in Chief, Putin at least did fight his way up from relatively humble beginnings, as I understand it. He’s not a Soviet Abe Lincoln, but he’s as smart / cunning as, for instance, Andrew Jackson (who Trump also admires). A guy who makes the most of his natural gifts, and his chances, to take his grievances to the top of the government… with the eventual assistance, grudging or not, of the country’s financial oligarchs. That’s plenty dangerous enough!
Fair Economist
@Anne Laurie:
Khodorkovsky and Berezovsky might disagree with that. Well, might *have* disagreed in Berezovsky’s case since he died under mysterious circumstances a few years back.
Dev Null
@Roger Moore: @Jay: Back after dinner… sorry for the hiatus.
I get what you’re saying, but I think there’s more to the problem than that. Or a different way of looking at the problem, perhaps
I haven’t thought this through, and, uh, French wine, but two points:
1) it seems to me that Trump is reactive, which isn’t what I take “OODA loop” to mean in the context of “what do we do?”
I mean: Trump isn’t trying to get inside our heads. Trump does Trump, and what Trump does is bully and distract. I think I’m trying to say that Trump doesn’t set the terms of engagement unless we let Trump do so.
Put differently, Trump doesn’t think, not in any way that makes sense to me. Trump deals from the hand he imagines he was dealt, with no consideration of the hand his adversaries were dealt.
Which suggests that Trump should be far more susceptible to OODA loop strategeries than we are (well, “than we should be”).
I have wondered why Dems have not worked this angle more effectively / obviously, although one could argue that that’s exactly what Pelosi is doing, intentionally or not.
2) As Jay says, as long as Senate Rs hold a veto, what Dems can do is limited. Perhaps Dems should be focused on using OODA loop strategizing to pry Trump and Senate Rs apart?
(If none of this makes sense, I blame
ObamaCanadaFrench wine!)Dev Null
@Mnemosyne: Missed this on the first couple of scans of the comments.
This is more-or-less the definition of an extreme narcissist, from what I read: they re-write their personal reality to suit the needs of their ego.
From the PoV of OODA loop analyses, extreme narcissists are extremely predictable.
opiejeanne
@patrick II: I think a lot of the fires in California are burning on Federal land in US Forests and National Forests, but most are not in forests at all.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
lol, this is the same guy that coughed up some homophobic shit about buttigieg and then doubled down after people called it out.