wait till Goooliani gets busted for telling lies to the FBI
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 14, 2016 9:59 pm
by JackRiddler » Wed Dec 14, 2016 10:07 pm
by Elvis » Wed Dec 14, 2016 10:46 pm
Rory » Wed Dec 14, 2016 4:38 pm wrote:
What planet are these fuckers on. An elector revolt would be met with an armed uprising. Happy days indeed
by Searcher08 » Thu Dec 15, 2016 8:16 am
seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 15, 2016 1:59 am wrote:
wait till Goooliani gets busted for telling lies to the FBI
by seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 15, 2016 8:58 am
by Searcher08 » Thu Dec 15, 2016 11:22 am
seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 15, 2016 12:58 pm wrote:put her in jail too ..
I just want Trump taken out
because this makes me vomit
by seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 15, 2016 11:24 am
Donald’s Beautiful Dark Fascist Fantasy
What do Trump and Kanye have in common? Totalitarian aesthetics and disconnection from reality.
By Katy Waldman
President-elect Donald Trump and Kanye West walk into the lobby at Trump Tower in New York City on Tuesday.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On Tuesday morning, Kanye West became the latest eminence to cross the marble floors of the Trump Tower lobby. He wore a black sweatshirt and a slender gold chain, and arrived with a small entourage. “We’ve been friends for a long time,” Trump told reporters after their meeting while West stood silent and unsmiling at his side. “We discussed life,” he added. West, pressed to say something—anything—about his conversation with the world’s most powerful man, shook his head. “I just wanted to take a picture right now,” he mumbled.
Whatever else it was—E! News reports that West and Trump convened “to discuss a potential role for the rapper” in the administration; Trump communications director Jason Miller hedged that the PEOTUS simply hoped to “reach out to people from traditional and nontraditional political viewpoints”—the Donye caucus made for a strange tableau. True, Trump has recently been on a minitear of summoning black people to the palace; he also met with Jim Brown and Ray Lewis. But West is a hip-hop luminary, and a noted critic of presidents. Furthermore, though West’s subdued affect bore some resemblance to the scowling Kanye we’ve come to expect, it felt more hesitant than bratty, a timid garbling of his grandiose persona. There was Trump, glad-handing, vigorous, very much himself. And there was Kanye, looking lost, looking like someone else.
When two stars swing close together, it’s interesting to see whose light bends first. This meeting, taking place on Trump’s home turf, cast West as a character in someone else’s pageant. For the transition team, Kanye served as a useful provocation and a distraction from Trump’s Cabinet controversies, unkosher business dealings, and alarming links to Moscow. West is also a prominent black artist who supports the Republican president-elect. That makes him at once a prop and, because Trump’s political calculations can’t be unsnarled from the narcissistic Trump Show playing in his mind, a bauble for the kingpin to gloat over.
“You take care of yourself,” Trump said to West at the end of their photo shoot, as if he cared.
But even before they cohabited a camera frame, the gravity of Trump’s star was pulling on the light from Kanye’s. The rapper was recently hospitalized for a “temporary psychosis” that some have connected to incoherent stage banter about Trump in the preceding few days. During the second leg of his Saint Pablo Tour, West insisted that he would have voted for Trump and reaffirmed his plans to run for president.
There’s something queasy-making about such ardent political rhetoric followed by hospitalization, and all from an artist who regularly speaks out against bigotry and donated thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2015. Trump’s use of West on Tuesday morning didn’t just feel indelicate, given that the rapper had just been released from psychiatric care. It seemed like a cosmic sign that insanity is baked into this transition—that in Trump’s America, the loss of contact with reality that is a hallmark of psychosis is indistinguishable from political strategy.
Trump and West share an aesthetic, too—the taste produced by a fragile vanity feeding obsessively on ever more glittering signifiers.
For his part, Trump, with his finely tuned antennae for praise, noticed he had a fan in West back in 2015. During a campaign rally, he offered a solipsistic thank you, boasting, “[Kanye] loves Trump. He goes around saying ‘Trump is my all-time hero.’ He says it to everybody. So to Kanye West, I love him. … I would never say bad about him because he says such nice things about me.”
Whether Trump himself has a personality disorder—and whether experts are in a position to diagnose him from afar—has been endlessly litigated. I’ll say instead that it may not be shocking that Kanye, whose visionary tirades about the potential of the artist have a fascist undertone, gravitates toward a bully like Trump. Mussolini’s favorite thinkers exalted the heroic, and curiously amoral, promise of man hurtling toward perfection; West speaks in similarly bombastic terms when he declares that, as a musician, “I can do whatever I want to do. … If I’m gonna take a stage and like, open up a motherfucking mountain I can do that.” (Of course, West’s life is nothing if not monumental, which can make even his true statements hard to separate from delusions: On the tour where he said this, he really did literally split apart a mountain, of his own design, night after night.) West and Trump’s dynamic—the artist and the strongman—evokes a traditional symbiosis between aestheticism and fascism. In the visually ravishing films of Leni Riefenstahl, the crisp goose-stepping of smartly uniformed troops, the propulsive fervor of futurism, we’ve seen politics married to the pursuit of the beautiful before.
But there are other reasons that Trump might appeal to West. Both men are improvisational, controversial performers with megalomaniacal dreams and a history of rebuking the “politically correct.” Both have made inflammatory nods to white supremacy, whether by inciting Twitter’s “alt-right” or wearing (however ironically) Confederate arm patches. As Amy Zimmerman at the Daily Beast points out, both have vacillated between bankruptcy and astronomical wealth; both married conspicuously sexy wives; both complain that the press is out to get them. Furthermore, both have been criticized as egomaniacal man-children even as they relish playing the misunderstood outsider.
Trump and West share an aesthetic, too, one that transcends the mogul’s longstanding resonance with hip-hop. It is the gilded ostentation of the hotel lobby and of Watch the Throne (with its gold-plated album cover). It is well-done steaks at Mar-a-Lago and gold bottles at Le Meurice. It is the taste produced by a fragile but overweening vanity feeding obsessively on ever more glittering signifiers. “I alone can fix it,” this bad taste insists. “I am a god.”
In a reasonable world none of us would have any idea who either of these people were. More...
The scary thing about Trump’s (and West’s) taste is that it turns everything around the person into a proxy for that person. Every luxury object exists to sing his praises. Every associate is just a metonymy for his terrificness. Consider the president-elect’s habit of referring to Mike Pence as “one of my great decisions,” rather than, you know, a human being. Or look at the way both men talk about women as status symbols. (“I bet me and Ray J would be friends/ If we ain’t love the same bitch/ Yeah, he might have hit it first/ Only problem is I’m rich,” brags Kanye in “Highlights.”)
Perhaps this aspect of Trump and West explains why the rapper’s diminished glow at the politician’s side, his participation in the politician’s agenda, felt so dispiriting. On Wednesday morning, West tweeted an image of Trump’s Time cover, across which the 2016 Person of the Year had scrawled his autograph and a personal note: “To Kanye. You are a great friend. Thanks.” The unstoppable force of Trump’s ego met the immovable object of West’s self-absorption in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday. The ego prevailed, transforming West into one more Trumpian signifier, one more thrilled fan waving his signed magazine.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... desta.html
Sorry y’all, Kanye West never cared about black people
By Michael Arceneaux
Whenever Kanye West offers naive and infuriating racial commentary—a hallmark of his career—fans often wistfully recall the one powerful thing he ever said about race. It’s what many referenced yesterday while trying to make sense of the sight of West standing alongside our president-elect and noted bigot, Donald J. Trump. It happened in 2005 at A Concert for Hurricane Relief, the hour-long, celebrity-filled benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina victims during which West declared on live television: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
As moving a statement as it was at the time, it has long deluded people into thinking West cares more about the plight of black people than he’s ever proven to. West standing alongside a man whose political career started in earnest with questioning the legitimacy of the first black president isn’t the anomalous act—his remarks about Bush were.
Kanye getting cozy with Trump is no political about-face. This is the culmination of man who, outside of a single action more than a decade ago, has only spoken about racism when it impacts him directly. In 2014, while performing at London’s Wireless Festival, West had this to say about racism and how he’s treated as an aspiring designer: “I’m just saying, don’t discriminate against me because I’m a black man or because I’m a celebrity and tell me that I can create, but not feel. ‘Cause you know damn well there aren’t no black guys or celebrities making no Louis Vuitton nothing.”
Never confuse the desire of wanting to be treated equally with the desire to enjoy the perks of white manhood.
On its face, this seems like a brave indictment of bias in the fashion industry. But look closer and it becomes clear that West is not for all; he is for self. Despite these critiques, West reportedly gave his blessing to A.P.C. founder Jean Touitou, who chose to include the word “nigga” in a fall menswear presentation. West also once donned himself with Confederate flag imagery, claiming “It’s my flag.”
And we know that West fancies Vanessa Beecroft, a woman who has used blackface in her work and once declared it was “very stressful to work with black women.” West may not find it quite as stressful, but he shares Beecroft’s habit of questionable statements about women of color—like, say, when he tweeted his casting call for “multiracial women only” for his Yeezy Season 4 fashion show.
Beecroft—like Trump, like the Grand Old Party, and like many people who dabble in racism—often use black people for cover. In an interview with W magazine, Beecroft argued: “I am protected by Kanye’s talent. I become black. I am no longer Vanessa Beecroft and I am free to do whatever I want because Kanye allows it.”
There are those who condemn racism because they genuinely want equality for all, and there are those who only do so because they want to belong. Never confuse the desire of wanting to be treated equally with the desire to enjoy the perks of white manhood. No wonder West feels a kinship with Ben Carson, whom he praised last year in an interview with Vanity Fair. “As soon as I heard [Ben] Carson speak, I tried for three weeks to get on the phone with him,” he said. “I was like, ‘This is the most brilliant guy.’”
Reminder: Carson is a black man who has likened Obamacare to slavery and, in a 2015 op-ed about Obama’s new housing rules, wrote “These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse.” Now, as the likely next head of Department of Housing and Urban Development, Carson could very well be the black face behind a vast expansion of housing segregation. Men like Carson and West appear more than willing to align themselves with prejudiced elites for self-gain or white validation.
West figures if you can’t beat racists, join ’em. Which he did formally at Trump Tower on Tuesday.
It’s not just the company West keeps—it’s also what he says. In the same year West was touting Carson, he referred to racism as a “dated concept.” After he voiced support of Trump’s presidency, West told concertgoers to “stop focusing on racism,” adding, “This world is racist, OK? Let’s stop being distracted to focus on that as much. It’s a fucking fact. We are in a racist country.”
This acceptance of the status quo is encouraging nihilism. West figures if you can’t beat racists, join ’em. Which he did formally at Trump Tower on Tuesday.
Taking to Twitter to explain himself, West wrote: “I wanted to meet with Trump today to discuss multicultural issues. These issues included bullying, supporting teachers, modernizing curriculums, and violence in Chicago. I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication with our future President if we truly want change.”
When it comes to “multicultural issues,” Trump has been pretty clear, both through his own statements and cabinet appointments, with how he feels about “the blacks,” not to mention Mexican immigrants and Muslims. If West really wants to curb violence in Chicago, he probably shouldn’t be chummy with a man who supports ineffective racist policing policies like “stop and frisk.” And judging by his false cries of massive voting fraud, Trump and the Republican Party seem eager to usher in a nouveau Jim Crow. Not that it matters to West, who didn’t even bother to vote.
Both last year and this week, Trump has referred to West as a friend. They do have a lot in common. West is a “proud non-reader of books”; Trump’s ghostwriter told the New Yorker that “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” Most of all, based on their public statements, West and Trump have little discernible regard for the wellbeing of black people. What West did in 2005 might have been resonant, but that moment has long been negated by remarks made after.
Kanye capped off his tweetstorm about Trump with “#2024,” suggesting he will delay his own 2020 bid in favor of endorsing Trump’s reelection. I wish him as much failure as I do Trump.
http://fusion.net/story/375776/kanye-we ... ck-people/
How Many Times Does Kanye Say "Kanye" In "I Love Kanye"? It's Way More Than You Thought
By SABIENNA BOWMAN Feb 14
How much does Kanye West love Kanye? Let me count the ways. On his latest album, The Life of Pablo, West debuted "I Love Kanye," a song that is either creepily sincere or amusingly satirical. In it, West says his own name a lot — way more times than you would think a person could in just one 44-second song. So just how many times does West say Kanye in "I Love Kanye"? You guys, prepare to have your minds blown.
Although I'm not gonna tell you just yet. Instead, I want to turn this into a teachable moment, Sesame Street style. Let's channel the Count for a moment and see just how many Kanyes West managed to cram into his new instant classic ode to, well, himself. The song cycles through every version of Kanye there has ever been and ever will be, including the ever elusive "sweet" Kanye. (That one seems to be in hiding most of the time.) By the end of the song (which, can I just reiterate is less than a minute long?), West has presented the world with a Kanye for every season, month, and almost every day of the year.
At least you will never have to worry about West's self-esteem. Let the Kanye countdown begin!
1. "I Miss The Old Kanye"
Ah, "Jesus Walks" Kanye was pretty great, wasn't he?
2. "Straight From The Gold Kanye"
Now I am imagining Kanye West as a straight out of the box Buzz Lightyear.
3. "Chop Up The Soul Kanye"
Well, that sounds painful.
4. "Set On His Goals Kanye"
This is the Kanye who did all of his homework.
5. "I Hate The New Kanye"
He said it first...
6. "The Bad Mood Kanye"
This is the Kanye who Tweets when he's hangry.
7. "The Always Rude Kanye"
I stand with Taylor Swift.
8. "Spaz In The News Kanye"
Or as I like to call him, "Everyday Kanye."
9. "I Miss The Sweet Kanye"
Wait, when was there a sweet Kanye?
10. "Chop Up The Beats Kanye"
Introducing the latest celebrity cooking show: In The Kitchen With Kanye.
11. "I Gotta Say At That Time I'd Like To Meet Kanye"
Aww, look, guys, it's nostalgic Kanye!
12. "See I Invented Kanye"
Is this a cry for help from Kanye? Because it feels like a cry for help.
13. "It Wasn't Any Kanyes"
That's not true, West. The name "Kanye" has African and Hawaiian origins, meaning there are many Kanyes in the world today. Bam. Fact-checked.
14. "And Now I Look And Look Around And There Are So Many Kanyes"
That's because the name "Kanye" increased in popularity once West became famous. Mystery solved.
15. "I Used To Love Kanye"
The use of past tense in this verse is suspect...
16. "I Used To Love Kanye"
But he said it twice, so I guess you have to believe him.
17. "I Thought I Was Kanye"
Wait...what? I don't know who this song is giving an existential breakdown, me or West.
18. "What If Kanye..."
How is this still going on?
19. "Made A Song About Kanye"
I always thought the world would implode, but thankfully, I was wrong.
20. "Called I Miss The Old Kanye"
Hey, I feel like I've been here before.
21. "Man That Would Be So Kanye"
No arguments here.
22. "That's All It Was Kanye"
This song would make Dr. Seuss weep.
23. "We Still Love Kanye"
Who is this "we" of which you speak?
24. "And I Love You Like Kanye..."
Please make it stop.
25. "Loves Kanye"
In conclusion, you can teach your child how to count to 25 by only using the song "I Love Kanye." But please don't do that to your child.
https://www.bustle.com/articles/141772- ... e-than-you
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Dec 15, 2016 12:33 pm
by Grizzly » Thu Dec 15, 2016 12:55 pm
the MUSIC PLAYS ON
by seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 16, 2016 1:02 am
Morty » Mon Dec 12, 2016 6:44 pm wrote:Harvey » Tue Dec 13, 2016 9:17 am wrote:Obama Loses His War on Whistleblowers
12 Dec, 2016 by Craig Murray
Obama has waged a vicious War on Whistleblowers, the details of which are insufficiently known to the public. High level security officials, true American patriots like Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou have been handcuffed, dragged through the courts and jailed. William Binney had guns pointed at himself and his wife in their home. Chelsea Manning endures constant persecution and humiliation which meets the bar of cruel and degrading punishment. Edward Snowden pines in exile. These are just the highest profile examples. Hillary Clinton was the driving force behind Obama’s hard line attacks on whistleblowers.
Under Obama, whistleblowers face a total of 751 months behind bars — compared to 24 months for all other whistleblowers combined since the American Revolution. The protection of free speech and truth-telling has been wrenched away under Obama.
I am proud to be a whistleblower myself, and like Drake, Kiriakou, Binney, Manning and Snowden a recipient of the annual Sam Adams award. We have another recipient – Julian Assange – who is a most useful ally indeed.
Whistleblowers seemed a soft target. Indeed seven years into his Presidency Obama seemed to be winning the War on Whistleblowers hands down, leaving them serving time or marginalised and cast out from society.
But Obama/Clinton miscalculated massively. If you set up the super surveillance state, hoovering up all the internet traffic of pretty well everybody, that is not just going to affect the ordinary people whom the elite despise. There is also going to be an awful lot of traffic intercepted from sleazy members of the elite connected to even the most senior politicians, revealing all their corruption and idiosyncracies. From people like John Podesta, to take an entirely random example. And once the super surveillance state has intercepted and stored all that highly incriminating material, you never know if some decent human being, some genuine patriot, from within the security services is going to feel compelled to turn whistleblower.
Then they might turn for help to, to take another entirely random example, Julian Assange.
Obama/Clinton have perished politically as an example of the ultimate in political hubris. Downed by their own surveillance super state. Obama/Clinton’s War on Whistleblowers resulted in the most humiliating of defeats, and now they are political history. This is karma for their persecution of some of the best people in their nation. Good riddance.
All nothing to do with any Russians.
Disclaimer – though I reference fellow holders of the Sam Adams award, this does not indicate a joint effort or that individual award holders or the Sam Adamas Associates necessarily agree with actions taken.
Maybe we need a new thread to unpack and discuss all the hints Craig Murray has been dropping lately, and so avoid derailing the important discussion about Russian hacking here on this thread?
Assange: Some leaks may have been Russian
BY JOE UCHILL - 12/15/16 05:25 PM EST 384
Assange: Some leaks may have been Russian
© Getty Images
On Sean Hannity’s radio show, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that hacked Democratic documents sent to reporters at Gawker and The Hill may have come from Russia. But, he said, he is confident the emails he received did not come from the same source.
The Hill and other outlets received documents from a hacker or hackers calling itself “Guccifer 2.0.” Guccifer 2.0 also posted separate documents on its own site. Assange denied knowing Guccifer 2.0 on Hannity's show Thursday.
“Our source is not the Russian government,” said Assange, later claiming WikiLeaks did not receive its material from any state actor, Russia or otherwise.
While the intelligence community agrees that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic National Campaign Committee, there is dissent over whether the Russians did so with an eye to promoting President-elect Donald Trump or just generally wanting to sow chaos.
Assange has been adamant that Russia did not send the files to his site. In fact, his confirmation that a state actor did not send the hacked emails violates a longstanding WikiLeaks policy of not making any comment about sources.
He did leave the possibility open that Guccifer 2.0’s leaks to the media were a Russian plot.
“Now, who is behind these, we don’t know,” he said. “These look very much like they’re from the Russians. But in some ways, they look very amateur, and almost look too much like the Russians.”
In the Hannity interview, Assange also claimed that WikiLeaks received three pages of information about Trump and the Republican National Convention. It chose not to reprint those documents because they had already been printed elsewhere.
The New York Times reported intelligence officials believe that Russia also hacked the Republican National Committee but chose not to leak those files to prop up the Trump candidacy.
Assange also declined to comment on a Daily Mail report that his confidant Craig Murray flew to the United States to retrieve the documents printed on the site. Murray told the Daily Mail that he met with an intermediary in a wooded area near American University in Washington, D.C., who was handing off the documents on behalf of someone with “legal access” to both the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta emails.
“Craig Murray is not authorized to talk on behalf of WikiLeaks,” Assange said sternly.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity ... en-russian
Sean Hannity had Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on his program to discuss the source of the Podesta leak
Conservative radio host Sean Hannity spoke with Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, about the hacked emails released by WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election.
Assange told Hannity explicitly on Thursday afternoon, “Our source is not the Russian government.”
Hannity asked him to clarify his remarks, which he did, and then asked Assange to confirm whether he has any hacked information from the Republican National Committee. “We received about three pages of information to do with the RNC and Trump, but it was already public somewhere else,” Assange told him.
When asked if the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta came from the United States, Assange cryptically told Hannity, “It has not come from a state party.” He did mention later in the interview that other leaks could have come from other places such as Russia.
Hannity asked Assange if he thinks that President Obama knows that the Russian government was not the source of the intel and is still purposefully spreading a false narrative in order to undermine President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. Assange confirmed that he did believe that.
There has still been no official report from any national intelligence agency confirming that the Russian government was behind the hacked emails.
The full interview can be found here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6qlc3lStM4
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/12/15 ... esta-leak/
by Elvis » Fri Dec 16, 2016 3:33 am
Here’s the Public Evidence Russia Hacked the DNC — It’s Not Enough
Sam Biddle
December 14 2016, 8:30 a.m.
There are some good reasons to believe Russians had something to do with the breaches into email accounts belonging to members of the Democratic party, which proved varyingly embarrassing or disruptive for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But “good” doesn’t necessarily mean good enough to indict Russia’s head of state for sabotaging our democracy.
There’s a lot of evidence from the attack on the table, mostly detailing how the hack was perpetrated, and possibly the language of the perpetrators. It certainly remains plausible that Russians hacked the DNC, and remains possible that Russia itself ordered it. But the refrain of Russian attribution has been repeated so regularly and so emphatically that it’s become easy to forget that no one has ever truly proven the claim. There is strong evidence indicating that Democratic email accounts were breached via phishing messages, and that specific malware was spread across DNC computers. There’s even evidence that the attackers are the same group that’s been spotted attacking other targets in the past. But again: No one has actually proven that group is the Russian government (or works for it). This remains the enormous inductive leap that’s not been reckoned with, and Americans deserve better.
We should also bear in mind that private security firm CrowdStrike’s frequently cited findings of Russian responsibility were essentially paid for by the DNC, which contracted its services in June. It’s highly unusual for evidence of a crime to be assembled on the victim’s dime. If we’re going to blame the Russian government for disrupting our presidential election — easily construed as an act of war — we need to be damn sure of every single shred of evidence. Guesswork and assumption could be disastrous.
The gist of the Case Against Russia goes like this: The person or people who infiltrated the DNC’s email system and the account of John Podesta left behind clues of varying technical specificity indicating they have some connection to Russia, or at least speak Russian. Guccifer 2.0, the entity that originally distributed hacked materials from the Democratic party, is a deeply suspicious figure who has made statements and decisions that indicate some Russian connection. The website DCLeaks, which began publishing a great number of DNC emails, has some apparent ties to Guccifer and possibly Russia. And then there’s WikiLeaks, which after a long, sad slide into paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, and general internet toxicity has made no attempt to mask its affection for Vladimir Putin and its crazed contempt for Hillary Clinton. (Julian Assange has been stuck indoors for a very, very long time.) If you look at all of this and sort of squint, it looks quite strong indeed, an insurmountable heap of circumstantial evidence too great in volume to dismiss as just circumstantial or mere coincidence.
But look more closely at the above and you can’t help but notice all of the qualifying words: Possibly, appears, connects, indicates. It’s impossible (or at least dishonest) to present the evidence for Russian responsibility for hacking the Democrats without using language like this. The question, then, is this: Do we want to make major foreign policy decisions with a belligerent nuclear power based on suggestions alone, no matter how strong?
What We Know
So far, all of the evidence pointing to Russia’s involvement in the Democratic hacks (DNC, DCCC, Podesta, et al.) comes from either private security firms (like CrowdStrike or FireEye) who sell cyber-defense services to other companies, or independent researchers, some with university affiliations and serious credentials, and some who are basically just Guys on Twitter. Although some of these private firms groups had proprietary access to DNC computers or files from them, much of the evidence has been drawn from publicly available data like the hacked emails and documents.
Some of the malware found on DNC computers is believed to be the same as that used by two hacking groups believed to be Russian intelligence units, codenamed APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 28/Fancy Bear and APT 29/Cozy Bear by industry researchers who track them.
The attacker or attackers registered a deliberately misspelled domain name used for email phishing attacks against DNC employees, connected to an IP address associated with APT 28/Fancy Bear.
Malware found on the DNC computers was programmed to communicate with an IP address associated with APT 28/Fancy Bear.
Metadata in a file leaked by “Guccifer 2.0″ shows it was modified by a user called, in cyrillic, “Felix Edmundovich,” a reference to the founder of a Soviet-era secret police force. Another document contained cyrillic metadata indicating it had been edited on a document with Russian language settings.
Peculiarities in a conversation with “Guccifer 2.0″ that Motherboard published in June suggests he is not Romanian, as he originally claimed.
The DCLeaks.com domain was registered by a person using the same email service as the person who registered a misspelled domain used to send phishing emails to DNC employees.
Some of the phishing emails were sent using Yandex, a Moscow-based webmail provider.
A bit.ly link believed to have been used by APT 28/Fancy Bear in the past was also used against Podesta.
Why That Isn’t Enough
Viewed as a whole, the above evidence looks strong, and maybe even damning. But view each piece on its own, and it’s hard to feel impressed.
For one, a lot of the so-called evidence above is no such thing. CrowdStrike, whose claims of Russian responsibility are perhaps most influential throughout the media, says APT 28/Fancy Bear “is known for its technique of registering domains that closely resemble domains of legitimate organizations they plan to target.” But this isn’t a Russian technique any more than using a computer is a Russian technique — misspelled domains are a cornerstone of phishing attacks all over the world. Is Yandex — the Russian equivalent of Google — some sort of giveaway? Anyone who claimed a hacker must be a CIA agent because they used a Gmail account would be laughed off the internet. We must also acknowledge that just because Guccifer 2.0 pretended to be Romanian, we can’t conclude he works for the Russian government — it just makes him a liar.
Next, consider the fact that CrowdStrike describes APT 28 and 29 like this:
Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of “living-off-the-land” techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and “access management” tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.
Compare that description to CrowdStrike’s claim it was able to finger APT 28 and 29, described above as digital spies par excellence, because they were so incredibly sloppy. Would a group whose “tradecraft is superb” with “operational security second to none” really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic comments on these documents? Would these groups that “constantly [go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels” get caught because they precisely didn’t make sure not to use IP addresses they’d been associated before? It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.
But how do we even know these oddly named groups are Russian? CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch himself describes APT 28 as a “Russian-based threat actor” whose modus operandi “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government” and “may indicate affiliation [Russia’s] Main Intelligence Department or GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service.” Security firm SecureWorks issued a report blaming Russia with “moderate confidence.” What constitutes moderate confidence? SecureWorks said it adopted the “grading system published by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to indicate confidence in their assessments. … Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.” All of this amounts to a very educated guess, at best.
Even the claim that APT 28/Fancy Bear itself is a group working for the Kremlin is speculative, a fact that’s been completely erased from this year’s discourse. In its 2014 reveal of the group, the high-profile security firm FireEye couldn’t even blame Russia without a question mark in the headline: “APT28: A Window into Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations?” The blog post itself is remarkably similar to arguments about the DNC hack: technical but still largely speculative, presenting evidence the company “[believes] indicate a government sponsor based in Moscow.” Believe! Indicate! We should know already this is no smoking gun. FireEye’s argument that the malware used by APT 28 is connected to the Russian government is based on the belief that its “developers are Russian language speakers operating during business hours that are consistent with the time zone of Russia’s major cities.”
As security researcher Jeffrey Carr pointed out in June, FireEye’s 2014 report on APT 28 is questionable from the start:To my surprise, the report’s authors declared that they deliberately excluded evidence that didn’t support their judgment that the Russian government was responsible for APT28’s activities:
“APT28 has targeted a variety of organizations that fall outside of the three themes we highlighted above. However, we are not profiling all of APT28’s targets with the same detail because they are not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests.” (emphasis added)
That is the very definition of confirmation bias. Had FireEye published a detailed picture of APT28’s activities including all of their known targets, other theories regarding this group could have emerged; for example, that the malware developers and the operators of that malware were not the same or even necessarily affiliated.
The notion that APT 28 has a narrow focus on American political targets is undermined in another SecureWorks paper, which shows that the hackers have a wide variety of interests: 10 percent of their targets are NGOs, 22 percent are journalists, 4 percent are aerospace researchers, and 8 percent are “government supply chain.” SecureWorks says that only 8 percent of APT 28/Fancy Bear’s targets are “government personnel” of any nationality — hardly the focused agenda described by CrowdStrike.
Truly, the argument that “Guccifer 2.0″ is a Kremlin agent or that GRU breached John Podesta’s email only works if you presume that APT 28/Fancy Bear is a unit of the Russian government, a fact that has never been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. According to Carr, “it’s an old assumption going back years to when any attack against a non-financial target was attributed to a state actor.” Without that premise, all we can truly conclude is that some email accounts at the DNC et al. appear to have been broken into by someone, and perhaps they speak Russian. Left ignored is the mammoth difference between Russians and Russia.
Security researcher Claudio Guarnieri put it this way:
[Private security firms] can’t produce anything conclusive. What they produce is speculative attribution that is pretty common to make in the threat research field. I do that same speculative attribution myself, but it is just circumstantial. At the very best it can only prove that the actor that perpetrated the attack is very likely located in Russia. As for government involvement, it can only speculate that it is plausible because of context and political motivations, as well as technical connections with previous (or following attacks) that appear to be perpetrated by the same group and that corroborate the analysis that it is a Russian state-sponsored actor (for example, hacking of institutions of other countries Russia has some geopolitical interests in).
Finally, one can’t be reminded enough that all of this evidence comes from private companies with a direct financial interest in making the internet seem as scary as possible, just as Lysol depends on making you believe your kitchen is crawling with E. Coli.
What Does the Government Know?
In October, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a joint statement blaming the Russian government for hacking the DNC. In it, they state their attribution plainly:
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.
What’s missing is any evidence at all. If this federal confidence is based on evidence that’s being withheld from the public for any reason, that’s one thing — secrecy is their game. But if the U.S. Intelligence Community is asking the American electorate to believe them, to accept as true their claim that our most important civic institution was compromised by a longtime geopolitical nemesis, we need them to show us why.
The same goes for the CIA, which is now squaring off directly against Trump, claiming (through leaks to the Washington Post and New York Times) that the Russian government conducted the hacks for the express purpose of helping defeat Clinton. Days later, Senator John McCain agreed with the assessment, deeming it “another form of warfare.” Again, it’s completely possible (and probable, really) that the CIA possesses hard evidence that could establish Russian attribution — it’s their job to have such evidence, and often to keep it secret.
But what we’re presented with isn’t just the idea that these hacks happened, and that someone is responsible, and, well, I guess it’s just a shame. Our lawmakers and intelligence agencies are asking us to react to an attack that is almost military in nature — this is, we’re being told, “warfare.” When a foreign government conducts (or supports) an act of warfare against another country, it’s entirely possible that there will be an equal response. What we’re looking at now is the distinct possibility that the United States will consider military retaliation (digital or otherwise) against Russia, based on nothing but private sector consultants and secret intelligence agency notes. If you care about the country enough to be angry at the prospect of election-meddling, you should be terrified of the prospect of military tensions with Russia based on hidden evidence. You need not look too far back in recent history to find an example of when wrongly blaming a foreign government for sponsoring an attack on the U.S. has tremendously backfired.
We Need the Real Evidence, Right Now
It must be stated plainly: The U.S. intelligence community must make its evidence against Russia public if they want us to believe their claims. The integrity of our presidential elections is vital to the country’s survival; blind trust in the CIA is not. A governmental disclosure like this is also not entirely without precedent: In 2014, the Department of Justice produced a 56-page indictment detailing their exact evidence against a team of Chinese hackers working for the People’s Liberation Army, accused of stealing American trade secrets; each member was accused by name. The 2014 trade secret theft was a crime of much lower magnitude than election meddling, but what the DOJ furnished is what we should demand today from our country’s spies.
If the CIA does show its hand, we should demand to see the evidence that matters (which, according to Edward Snowden, the government probably has, if it exists). I asked Jeffrey Carr what he would consider undeniable evidence of Russian governmental involvement: “Captured communications between a Russian government employee and the hackers,” adding that attribution “should solely be handled by government agencies because they have the legal authorization to do what it takes to get hard evidence.”
Claudio Guarnieri concurred:All in all, technical circumstantial attribution is acceptable only so far as it is to explain an attack. It most definitely isn’t for the political repercussions that we’re observing now. For that, only documental evidence that is verifiable or intercepts of Russian officials would be convincing enough, I suspect.
Given that the U.S. routinely attempts to intercept the communications of heads of state around the world, it’s not impossible that the CIA or the NSA has exactly this kind of proof. Granted, these intelligence agencies will be loath to reveal any evidence that could compromise the method they used to gather it. But in times of extraordinary risk, with two enormous military powers placed in direct conflict over national sovereignty, we need an extraordinary disclosure. The stakes are simply too high to take anyone’s word for it.
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/her ... ot-enough/
by Sounder » Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:09 am
We should also bear in mind that private security firm CrowdStrike’s frequently cited findings of Russian responsibility were essentially paid for by the DNC, which contracted its services in June. It’s highly unusual for evidence of a crime to be assembled on the victim’s dime. If we’re going to blame the Russian government for disrupting our presidential election — easily construed as an act of war — we need to be damn sure of every single shred of evidence. Guesswork and assumption could be disastrous.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:57 am
FBI being sued over role in Donald Trump US presidential election victory
Vice News files lawsuit over Bureau's refusal to disclose its role in Republican's victory
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 73846.html
VICE News sues FBI
• Allegations of the FBI violating the Hatch Act by allegedly using its authority to influence the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
• Internal discontent at the FBI regarding the bureau’s Hillary Clinton investigations
• All leaks of information by the FBI to the media and political operatives about FBI investigations of Clinton
• All FBI communications with Breitbart News; Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, who Trump named his chief strategist and White House counselor after Bannon served as his campaign CEO; former Trump campaign manager Corey R. Lewandowski, Fox News, and Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Sean Hannity; former New York City mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani; and Republican strategist and Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone
• White nationalist Richard Spencer, his National Policy Institute, and the “alt-right.”
https://news.vice.com/story/vice-news-s ... tbart-news
'Woman in Gold' Lawyer Seeks FBI Info Behind Comey’s Reopening of Clinton Emails
Randol Schoenberg once fought to reclaim Jewish owned art stolen by Nazis. Now he’s hoping to reclaim what he views as a stolen election, calling it the ‘crime of the century’ reminiscent of the Weiner sexting scandal.
On Tuesday Schoenberg’s New York lawyer Dave Rankin launched part two of his attack – filing a separate action in a Manhattan court to unseal the FBI affidavits seeking that search warrant. And the DOJ wasn’t happy about it.
“Something like 10 Department of Justice attorneys flew up from Washington D.C. to block our request,” Schoenberg told Haaretz. “They were trying to say it was the wrong type of action because of the Anthony Weiner investigation.”
But Judge P. Kevin Castel wasn’t buying it. For one, the Weiner case is no longer ongoing. Furthermore, Castel told Justice Department lawyer Jennie Kneedler that Weiner’s sexting scandal was unrelated to the Clinton email investigation and that she faced no further criminal charges. That’s “what makes this case different,” he said.
Castel ordered the Justice Department to hand over all documents related to the search warrant and any argument as to why any of them should be kept top secret to his chambers by Thursday at 5 P.M. He also asked that Weiner, senior staffer Huma Abedin and Clinton be notified so they can be heard if necessary.
“The judge is independent and not worried about his FBI reputation. He cares about the integrity of the courts,” Schoenberg said. “He gets that the public has a right to know what Comey’s motivation was. And he’s moving fast. It’s looking good.”
As to why the FBI never did reveal whether there was a letter vouching for probable cause, the LA lawyer, who’s also a genealogist, has some ideas.
“Either a lax judge didn’t bother to review the probable cause part or there’s something more nefarious at play,” he says. “Given what we now know about Russian hacking, anything is possible.”
Schoenberg said he filed his suit in New York because that’s where the FBI search warrant was issued – either because that’s the location of Weiner or Trump. Schoenberg suspects somebody in Trump’s inner circle – perhaps former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who boasted on television of having some sort of retaliation planned for Clinton on the eve of Comey’s October surprise – may have provided a false lead to the FBI to secure the warrant.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.759037
Why Are Democrats So Damn Timid About James Comey and the FBI?
KEVIN DRUMDEC. 16, 2016 1:14 AM
John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, is pissed:
The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets....I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.”
....Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI.
[FBI Director James] Comey justified his handling of the email case by citing “intense public interest.” He felt so strongly that he broke long-established precedent and disregarded strong guidance from the Justice Department with his infamous letter just 11 days before the election. Yet he refused to join the rest of the intelligence community in a statement about the Russian cyberattack because he reportedly didn’t want to appear “political.” And both before and after the election, the FBI has refused to say whether it is investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.
I'm surprised that Democrats have been so muted about the FBI's role in the election. If something like this had happened to Republicans, it would be flogged daily on Rush, Drudge, Fox News, Breitbart, the Wall Street Journal, and the Facebook pages of everyone from Sarah Palin to Alex Jones. But Democrats have been almost pathologically afraid to talk about it, apparently cowed by the possibility that Republicans will mock them for making excuses about their election loss.
That's crazy. Here's a quick review:
Goaded by rabid congressional Republicans, the FBI spent prodigious resources on Hillary Clinton's email server, even though there was never a shred of evidence that national security had been compromised in any way.
In July, Comey broke precedent by calling a press conference and delivering a self-righteous speech about Clinton's "carelessness." Why did he do this, when FBI protocol is to decline comment on cases after investigations are finished? The answer is almost certainly that he wanted to insulate himself from Republican criticism for not recommending charges against Clinton.
Weeks later, Comey finally released the investigation's interview notes. Only the most devoted reader of bureaucratic prose was likely to suss out their real meaning: there had never been much of a case in the first place, and contrary to Comey's accusation, Clinton had never been careless with classified material. Like everyone else, she and her staff worked hard to exchange only unclassified material on unclassified networks (state.gov, gmail, private servers, etc.). There was a difference of opinion between State and CIA about what counted as classified, but this squabbling had been going on forever, and had driven previous Secretaries of State nuts too.
As Podesta notes, the FBI took a preposterously lackadaisical attitude toward Russia's hacking of the DNC server. Outside of a badly-written novel, it's hard to believe that any law enforcement organization would do as little as the FBI did against a major assault from a hostile foreign power aimed at one of America's main political parties.
Even when plenty of evidence was amassed about Russia's actions, Comey downplayed it in private briefings. This gave Republicans the cover they needed to insist that Obama not mention anything about it during the campaign.
Two weeks before Election Day, Comey authorized a search of Anthony Weiner's laptop, even though there was no reason to think any of the emails it contained were new, or that any of them posed a threat to national security. Then he issued a public letter making sure that everyone knew about the new evidence, and carefully phrased the letter in the most damaging possible way.
Any one of these things could be just an accident. Put them all together, and you need to be pretty obtuse not to see the partisan pattern. In every single case, Comey and the FBI did what was best for Republicans and worst for Democrats. In. Every. Single. Case.
If you want to believe this is just a coincidence, go ahead. But nobody with a room temperature IQ credits that. The FBI has spent the entire past year doing everything it could to favor one party over the other in a presidential campaign. Democrats ought to be in a seething fury about this. Instead, they're arguing about a few thousand white rural voters in Wisconsin and whether Hillary Clinton should have visited Michigan a few more times in October.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2 ... ey-and-fbi
The Unfolding Chronicle of WTF
Matt Rourke
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedDECEMBER 15, 2016, 10:30 PM EDT
14248Views
This is just a small part of a sprawling story. But indulge me for a moment while I focus in on it. John Podesta has a piece out tonight in the Post which is a broad indictment of the FBI, for its obsession with Secretary Clinton's private email server and its lackadaisical indifference to Russian sabotage efforts against her party and then her campaign. In the beginning of that piece Podesta zeroes in on something that jumped out at me too when I read the big New York Times story on the history of the Clinton hacks.
Here's the passage.
As the former chair of the Clinton campaign and a direct target of Russian hacking, I understand just how serious this is. So I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.” As a former head of the FBI cyber division told the Times, this is a baffling decision: “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana.”
Here's the passage in the Times piece, which I need to quote at some length to capture the flavor of the passage (with a few sentences highlighted) ...
When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.
His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.
The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks.
Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.
“I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the F.B.I.
It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.
Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones.
An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack.
The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.
The low-key approach of the F.B.I. meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later.
I don't normally like to blockquote so much of another article. But I do so here for a specific reason: I want to capture not just the narrative of events but the editorial gloss. The impression is one of a Clinton campaign or DNC that couldn't keep its eye on the ball, missed the clues. "The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. "
Clearly, one wishes that Tamene would have escalated the calls to the right person in the organization. But even running the very small (under 25 people) organization I do, it's not surprising to me that it turned out the way that it did. Even at our small level, the volume of over-the-transom information is immense. Most times that information is handled by people who don't have all the information to judge whether a particular communication is critical or insubstantial or whether it's a hoax or not. Our team does a great job of it, as you can judge by how many leads and scoops we've found over the years in the torrent of email traffic we receive every day. Still, stuff gets missed. And we're a really small operation. The idea that an FBI investigation into foreign government espionage against one of the country's two major political party's would have been handled with a call to the computer help line is almost beyond belief.
It goes without saying that FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC has a very clear understanding of who runs the Democratic National Committee, starting - at the time - with the sitting Member of Congress who ran the organization. Then there's the executive director. The finance chair. Myriad executive, national committeepersons. If this was a serious business, which obviously it was, and the FBI thought it was important to get the attention of a decision-maker in the organization, it would have been very easy to do. But the way it was handled was something like the equivalent of seeing a problem at a major corporation and leaving messages with the receptionist.
As Podesta puts it ...
What takes this from baffling to downright infuriating is that at nearly the exact same time that no one at the FBI could be bothered to drive 10 minutes to raise the alarm at DNC headquarters, two agents accompanied by attorneys from the Justice Department were in Denver visiting a tech firm that had helped maintain Clinton’s email server.
Defeat is bitter, especially if you have reason to believe that you were cheated in some sense. It makes it vastly harder to let go. But I get why Podesta went apoplectic about this. I don't believe the right 'private server investigation' hand knew what the left 'counter-espionage' hand was doing. So much of history is written in the dead weight of bureaucratic inertia and confusion. In any case these are different beasts. They each needed to be handled on their own terms. But again, it is astonishing that the FBI knew this intrusion was afoot for the better part of a year before making any real attempt to contact the principals of the organization.
With the dirty play of the special agents in the New York field office, Comey's July tongue-lashing, his outrageous late October letter to Congress and then this, it's hard to have much of any trust that the FBI is a fair-minded custodian of the immense power it wields.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the ... cle-of-wtf
ELECTION 2016
What Did Donald Trump Know About Vladimir Putin's Attempt to Hack the Election—and When Did He Know It?
The plot thickens: Everything about Trump's oddly subservient attitude toward Putin suggests dark possibilities.
By Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 15, 2016
Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the South Point Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. February 22, 2016
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr CC
One of the most memorable moments of the 2016 presidential campaign was the GOP debate in which the man who would later become our president-elect felt the need to reassure the American people about the size of his penis:
It didn’t end there. After the debate there was this:
Trump could not laugh off the jibe and had no shame in openly discussing his manly attributes in the most public forum imaginable. It was clear in that moment that he was simultaneously insecure and shameless. That’s an odd combination.
Dominant masculinity was a central theme of Trump’s campaign and apparently intrinsic to his appeal. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo developed a thesis some time ago about what he called “dominance politics” and described Trump’s particular version of it as being “largely about getting inside other people’s heads with over-the-top aggression that knocks them on their heels and leaves them unprepared to fight back.” It’s as apt a description of Trump’s pugilistic style as I’ve seen.
The idea was well illustrated by Paul Waldman in this piece for the The Week:
When Trump decides to go after you, he considers carefully both your weak points and the audience for his attack. So when he decided to pummel Jeb Bush — apparently for his own amusement, as much as out of any real political concerns — he hit upon the idea that Bush was “low energy,” something Bush had a hard time countering without sounding like a whiny grade-schooler saying, “Am not!” More than anything else it was a dominance display, a way of showing voters he could push Jeb around and there was nothing Jeb could do about it. With a primary electorate primed by years of watching their candidates fetishize manliness and aggression, the attack touched a nerve.
Marshall pointed out that the Republican party has been practicing this form of politics for a long time, but that Trump is something of a savant:
Trump doesn’t apologize. He hurts people and they go away. He says things that would kill a political mortal (ban members of an entire religion from entering the country) and yet he doesn’t get hurt. Virtually everything Trump has done over the last six months, whether it’s a policy proposal or personal attack, has driven home this basic point: Trump is strong. He does things other people can’t.
For months he bragged, strutted and insulted every rival and when they finally conceded defeat he would welcome them back into his good graces as long as they publicly submitted to him. Who can forget the picture of Chris Christie standing behind Trump at a press conference as if he were Carson, the butler from “Downton Abbey.” Trump’s recent behavior toward his formerly harsh critic, Mitt Romney, in which he dangled the secretary of state job and demanded an apology, before ultimately giving the post to someone else, is another example.
And we know all too well what Trump did to Hillary Clinton. By the time the campaign came to an end he was snarling to her face that if he became president he planned to throw her in jail, something he later recanted but which hovers over her like a sword of Damocles if she ever steps out of line.
Foreign leaders came in for similar insults. When Time named German chancellor Angela Merkel person of the year for 2015, Trump tweeted “I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite. They picked person who is ruining Germany.” (Since he won it this year, he’s been complaining to his cheering crowds that TIME no longer calls it “Man of the Year,” apparently feeling that being a mere “person” is less impressive.)
Interestingly, we haven’t heard him complain about the latest Forbes rankings of the most powerful people in the world. Trump makes the list, but he’s in the No. 2 spot. No. 1 is Russian president Vladimir Putin. But then, for some reason, Trump has never seemed to feel the same sense of macho competitiveness with Putin that he’s shown toward other people. In fact, Trump has been defensive of him, almost submissive. Considering his usual aggressive, macho behavior, that is very much out of character.
Throughout this campaign and since the election, Trump has extolled the virtues of Putin, showing none of his usual bellicose bravado or nationalist fervor. He didn’t seem to know that Russia had invaded Ukraine and when corrected said that he believed it was a welcome invasion. When confronted with the fact that Putin stands accused of killing reporters and and political rivals he responded by saying, “Our country does plenty of killing also.” He later joked on the campaign trail about following Putin’s lead and killing journalists himself. He goes out of his way to call the Russian leader “strong,” Trump’s highest compliment.
Today Trump says that he and Putin have never met, but in this TV interview taped in Moscow in November 2013, Trump said he has a relationship with the Russian president and that he assumed Putin would be watching. Trump often compliments Putin for his “popularity”and throughout the campaign he has insisted, in spite of growing evidence to the contrary, that there is no reason to believe that the Russian government is responsible for the infiltration of Democratic Party and Clinton staffers’ computers. Indeed, Trump is so adamant about this that he’s pretty much accused his own government of lying about it. That is an extreme reaction and one that seems inexplicable for an incoming president.
Trump’s attitude toward Putin has always been at odds with his usual style and tone. Because of that and the strange circumstances surrounding Trump’s hiring of Paul Manafort, a man with deep connections to Russian allies, the strange behavior of “Trump surrogates” at the Republican platform committee drafting sanctions policy toward Russia and Trump’s dismissive and often cavalier attitude toward evidence that Russia tried to interfere in the presidential election, serious questions are now being raised.
Yesterday it was reported that United States intelligence officials now have a high level of confidence that Vladimir Putin himself was involved in the operation aimed at disrupting the election. Trump’s behavior toward the Russian president has been so out of character that it was only a matter of time before people began to ask, “What did the president-elect know, and when did he know it?”
Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/w ... hen-did-he
by seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 16, 2016 3:36 pm
by brekin » Fri Dec 16, 2016 10:49 pm
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