This is what real analysis looks like. I actually had to laugh out loud at the irony of the last bit. The truth it presented is undeniable and another nail in the coffin of al those phony wacko Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.
Don’t Worry, It’s Worse for Putin
Though idiocy and partisanship are rampant in D.C. it’s no ‘win’ for Russia.
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Updated April 7, 2017 9:18 a.m. ET
The Russian president at a press conference in St. Petersburg, April 3. Photo: Planet Pix/Zuma Press
Dick Cheney unburdening himself on Russian meddling in the U.S. election has already been lost in the flood of new revelations of the last few days. “In some quarters,” the former vice president overstated to a New Delhi audience last week, Russia’s action “would be considered an act of war.”
One might quibble with the legal basis for this claim, but Mr. Cheney’s statement is one more reason it’s increasingly hard to imagine that Vladimir Putin judges the outcome to be anything but a disaster.
Let’s see, his hacking adventure has turned even Democrats into Cheney-like anti-Russia hard-liners. The chances of the U.S. removing sanctions now are nil. Western governments no longer can cover up for Mr. Putin to make him an acceptable interlocutor. The Brits failed to keep a lid on the Litvinenko murder. The Dutch have not kept a lid on the MH17 shoot-down. In The Hague, Russia’s annexation of Crimea is on trial.
Marco Rubio, in a Senate hearing, publicly aired the most dangerous dirty linen of all, a possible secret police role in terrorist bombings that propelled Mr. Putin to his first presidential election.
Even Rep. Adam Schiff was demanding the Central Intelligence Agency open its files on Mr. Putin’s corruption until he decided the real opportunity to position himself for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat was to attack Mr. Trump.
We hasten to add, none of this remotely represents a “win” for the U.S. either. U.S.-Russia relations are spiraling, if not out of control, into a state of hostility that likely won’t be relieved as long as Mr. Putin (age 64) remains in power.
Two bombshells landed Monday in relation to the competing partisan scandal quests here.
The Washington Post claims a typically dubious Trump hanger-on, with help of an Arab government, arranged a meeting with an unnamed Putin associate to see if Russia could be lured away from its alliance with Iran and Syria.
Not that the idea is a bad one, but everything about the episode, including the Trump White House’s response to the disclosure, was characteristically amateurish.
The other big revelation was that then- Obama aide Susan Rice plumbed legitimate “foreign intelligence” in search of possibly illegitimate intelligence on the Trump campaign.
Mike Doran, a Bush security official now at the Hudson Institute, tweeted a prediction: “By 1/1/18 most voters will have concluded that Obama criminally abused the foreign surveillance machinery.”
Unlike the Trump allegations, at least we know these acts took place.
The quality most lacking in media coverage of these events has been judgment. Paul Waldman in the Washington Post has shown himself ready to believe unsubstantiated allegations about Mr. Trump, and now defends Obama spying on the Trump campaign, fairly shrieking that such monitoring is justified because “we’re talking about associates of a presidential candidate communicating with representatives of a foreign power.”
Huh? Really? Doesn’t the Washington Post, like The Wall Street Journal, communicate incessantly with “representatives of a foreign power”?
Seminars, conferences and confabs occur daily all over America at which said “representatives of foreign powers” are invited guests.
Between 1994 and 2013, U.S. presidents made 14 trips to Russia, dragging along hordes of U.S. business leaders to schmooze with “representatives of a foreign power.”
Isn’t the likelihood that any presidential candidate would have associates who “communicated with representatives of a foreign power” virtually 100%?
In this vein, perhaps the most truly useful revelations of the past 24 hours are those concerning so-called Trump adviser Carter Page, whom a Russian agent apparently called an “idiot.”
Mr. Page, it turns out, was “Male 1” in U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s 2015 prosecution of a Russian spy ring centered on the New York office of government-owned Vnesheconombank. Google the details of the criminal indictment for an idea of the lameness of Russian espionage efforts in the U.S. these days. Read the long Politico magazine article on the vaporous wannabe Mr. Page.
Now use this information to reframe your thinking on the competence of Russian intelligence as it handed the fate of Moscow’s diplomatic interests over to hired hackers from Russia’s cybercrime netherworld.
When the chaff is boiled away, the real story will be the one U.S. institutions are still choking on: Donald Trump—ignorant of and contemptuous of the byways of America’s governing class—is president. A decisive part of the U.S. electorate decided he couldn’t be worse than the standard-issue alternatives.
In this context, one Trump-Russia connection really does leap out. Present at his 2005 wedding was a man who would soon raise $140 million for his personal foundation from parties variously associated with the sale of a U.S. uranium business to the Putin government. His wife controlled a U.S. agency that gave a needed approval of the deal.
That wedding guest was Bill Clinton.
Appeared in the Apr. 05, 2017, print edition.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-worry-its-worse-for-putin-1491347653
Don’t Worry, It’s Worse for Putin
Though idiocy and partisanship are rampant in D.C. it’s no ‘win’ for Russia.
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Updated April 7, 2017 9:18 a.m. ET
The Russian president at a press conference in St. Petersburg, April 3. Photo: Planet Pix/Zuma Press
Dick Cheney unburdening himself on Russian meddling in the U.S. election has already been lost in the flood of new revelations of the last few days. “In some quarters,” the former vice president overstated to a New Delhi audience last week, Russia’s action “would be considered an act of war.”
One might quibble with the legal basis for this claim, but Mr. Cheney’s statement is one more reason it’s increasingly hard to imagine that Vladimir Putin judges the outcome to be anything but a disaster.
Let’s see, his hacking adventure has turned even Democrats into Cheney-like anti-Russia hard-liners. The chances of the U.S. removing sanctions now are nil. Western governments no longer can cover up for Mr. Putin to make him an acceptable interlocutor. The Brits failed to keep a lid on the Litvinenko murder. The Dutch have not kept a lid on the MH17 shoot-down. In The Hague, Russia’s annexation of Crimea is on trial.
Marco Rubio, in a Senate hearing, publicly aired the most dangerous dirty linen of all, a possible secret police role in terrorist bombings that propelled Mr. Putin to his first presidential election.
Even Rep. Adam Schiff was demanding the Central Intelligence Agency open its files on Mr. Putin’s corruption until he decided the real opportunity to position himself for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat was to attack Mr. Trump.
We hasten to add, none of this remotely represents a “win” for the U.S. either. U.S.-Russia relations are spiraling, if not out of control, into a state of hostility that likely won’t be relieved as long as Mr. Putin (age 64) remains in power.
Two bombshells landed Monday in relation to the competing partisan scandal quests here.
The Washington Post claims a typically dubious Trump hanger-on, with help of an Arab government, arranged a meeting with an unnamed Putin associate to see if Russia could be lured away from its alliance with Iran and Syria.
Not that the idea is a bad one, but everything about the episode, including the Trump White House’s response to the disclosure, was characteristically amateurish.
The other big revelation was that then- Obama aide Susan Rice plumbed legitimate “foreign intelligence” in search of possibly illegitimate intelligence on the Trump campaign.
Mike Doran, a Bush security official now at the Hudson Institute, tweeted a prediction: “By 1/1/18 most voters will have concluded that Obama criminally abused the foreign surveillance machinery.”
Unlike the Trump allegations, at least we know these acts took place.
The quality most lacking in media coverage of these events has been judgment. Paul Waldman in the Washington Post has shown himself ready to believe unsubstantiated allegations about Mr. Trump, and now defends Obama spying on the Trump campaign, fairly shrieking that such monitoring is justified because “we’re talking about associates of a presidential candidate communicating with representatives of a foreign power.”
Huh? Really? Doesn’t the Washington Post, like The Wall Street Journal, communicate incessantly with “representatives of a foreign power”?
Seminars, conferences and confabs occur daily all over America at which said “representatives of foreign powers” are invited guests.
Between 1994 and 2013, U.S. presidents made 14 trips to Russia, dragging along hordes of U.S. business leaders to schmooze with “representatives of a foreign power.”
Isn’t the likelihood that any presidential candidate would have associates who “communicated with representatives of a foreign power” virtually 100%?
In this vein, perhaps the most truly useful revelations of the past 24 hours are those concerning so-called Trump adviser Carter Page, whom a Russian agent apparently called an “idiot.”
Mr. Page, it turns out, was “Male 1” in U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s 2015 prosecution of a Russian spy ring centered on the New York office of government-owned Vnesheconombank. Google the details of the criminal indictment for an idea of the lameness of Russian espionage efforts in the U.S. these days. Read the long Politico magazine article on the vaporous wannabe Mr. Page.
Now use this information to reframe your thinking on the competence of Russian intelligence as it handed the fate of Moscow’s diplomatic interests over to hired hackers from Russia’s cybercrime netherworld.
When the chaff is boiled away, the real story will be the one U.S. institutions are still choking on: Donald Trump—ignorant of and contemptuous of the byways of America’s governing class—is president. A decisive part of the U.S. electorate decided he couldn’t be worse than the standard-issue alternatives.
In this context, one Trump-Russia connection really does leap out. Present at his 2005 wedding was a man who would soon raise $140 million for his personal foundation from parties variously associated with the sale of a U.S. uranium business to the Putin government. His wife controlled a U.S. agency that gave a needed approval of the deal.
That wedding guest was Bill Clinton.
Appeared in the Apr. 05, 2017, print edition.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-worry-its-worse-for-putin-1491347653
