I see the media is running its usual confirmation bias about
the Trump-Putin meeting. They are displaying the same fake outrage that they
have for months that Trump didn’t dispute Putin’s assurances that the Russian
government didn’t try to influence the 2016 election.
If he had, Putin naturally enough would have just denied it
again – did they really think Trump could get him to admit it? I suppose they
expected Trump and Putin to get into a childish “Yes you did, no I didn’t”
tiff.” Since Trump is obviously trying to set up a working relationship with
Russia that will get them to help us on some issues of mutual interest, like
restraining Iran, of course he butters up Putin. It is an obvious thing to do
if you are trying to pry a favor from someone – people do it all the time.
Of course Russia tried to influence our elections, just as
we try to influence Russian ones, though they apparently weren’t particularly
good at it. All large nations, and many small ones, try to influence other
nations by both open and undercover methods, and have done so since the dawn of
history. American media and political outrage at this issue is entirely manufactured
outrage for political spin. No one who has even an elementary knowledge of
history is really surprised. The American government itself has a long history
of messing in other nation’s political affairs, and even in managing more than
a few outright coups as well as swaying elections (in Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua,
Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Japan, and the Philippines, to
name a few we know about, and who knows how many more we don’t know about).
And of course it is no coincidence that special prosecutor
Muller indicted 12 Russians just days before Putin and Trump met. The
indictments are meaningless, because Russia is no more likely to extradite those
12 to the US for trial than we would be to extradite any of our CIA or NAS
hackers to Russia if the Russians accused them.
Moreover there is nothing in the indictments that hasn’t been public knowledge
for more than a year, including the exact names of the people who did the
hacking. We apparently hacked the security cameras in that building and were
able to watch some of the activity. So why issue the meaningless indictments
just before Trump and Putin met if not to try to embarrass Trump and interfere
with whatever plan he might have had to improve relations with Russia, who
after all we need to help us on some other issues, like the Middle East wars.
But then the Trump haters will drink the media Cool Aid just
as they have for months now, as the media has fed them spin that feeds their
confirmation bias.
I don’t much like Trump, but I don’t make the mistake that
so many others do of underestimating him and thinking he is an idiot. (Pray for
opponents that underestimate you!). The man is certainly a con man (as are many,
perhaps even most, politicians), but he is very, very good at what he does, as the
last election demonstrated. There is clearly much more going on under the
covers, both pro-Trump and anti-Trump, then we see in the media spin, and this is
clearly brutal Washington hardball politics.
It leads me again to remember Nassim Taleb’s argument that listening
to the daily news not only doesn’t increase one’s knowledge, it actually reduces
it.
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