Chris Lehmann at The Baffler writes—Treacherous Waters—Does Trump want help from Russian spies?
All right, then—America’s own major-party-anointed oligarch has officially urged Russian cyberspies to hack State Department communications.
And his underlying political rationale is enough to give M.C. Escher a throbbing migraine: Hillary Clinton is guilty of grave, if unspecified, trespasses against American national security for conveying classified information on an unsecured private email server. So to nail down the case against her alleged crimes, the Republican party’s presidential nominee wants to . . . unleash the info-warriors of a rival power on classified email communications. It’s a bit like pledging to combat the spread of the West Nile virus by importing a robust new strain of Zika-infected mosquitoes.
At a manifestly deranged political moment like this one, it behooves us to pan back and ask a pair of interlocking questions: “What the fuck?” and “How the fuck did we get here?” A definitive reply to the former is probably best left to psychological professionals. But we can discern a key clue to the latter in the predicate vow Trump lofted eastward as he tried to seal this particular display of deal-artistry: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
It is by now a weary truism that the whole Trump insurgency was bred by the bottomless media-fed demand for titillation and shock-jock diversion. But the logic of Trump’s winking overture to Russian data breachers goes beyond anything we encounter in standard laments about the cable news cycle and the pseudo-outrage industry known as reality television.
No, Trump, who has long crafted campaign messages and policy pronouncements for maximum press exposure, is actually promoting foreign espionage on the grounds that it will yield rewarding press coverage. And hey, why not? The sensationalized mastery of the political press corps has gotten Trump this far. Maybe the next stage of media evolution will be a Bravo franchise called The Real Hackers of Moscow. Where, oh where, is Guy Debord when you need him?
Senior GOP quislings—er, sorry, thought leaders—such as Newt Gingrich stoked the lost-in-the-late-capitalist-sensorium vibe by insisting that their party’s standard bearer was joking, even though the pronouncement had precisely none of the spontaneity or humorous content that marks jokes as such.
For a rough but revealing contrast, consider Ronald Reagan’s off-the-cuff announcement that “we begin bombing in five minutes.” Reagan delivered that 1984 aside into a microphone he didn’t realize was live, and the comic effect (such as it was) stemmed from his own awareness that he was widely viewed as a rhetorical enthusiast of all-out nuclear confrontation. The setting and delivery of Trump’s comments show that the utterance conveyed zero such self-awareness—and far from inadvertently finding its audience via a mike that the speaker thought was dead, the appeal to Russian hackers came at a press conference organized and choreographed by the Trump campaign for maximum news-cycle attention.
For good measure—and to heighten the general ideological-derangement factor—Gingrich of course insisted that the media was yet again downplaying the national-security peril posed by the Team Democrat nominee (forgetting to note that news of Clinton’s private email server was actually broken by the lickspittle liberal elitists at The New York Times). [...]
HIGH IMPACT STORIES • THE WEEK’S HIGH IMPACT STORIES
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Pure idiocy:
Jack Kelly is a former undersecretary of the Air Force and a goddamn idiot. His idiocy must have been the key to his employment by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, which is the non-Richard Melon Scaife paper in Pittsburgh. How he missed his calling there is beyond me. Our readers corrected me and for that I am glad:
Vietnam is mostly jungle. I don't like jungles, but guerrillas do. There is plenty of cover and concealment. There is plenty of water. There are a lot of things to eat. Creepy crawly yucky things, but you can eat them if you have to. A large guerrilla force can live, relatively securely, in jungles for long periods. Iraq is mostly desert. Desert offers little cover or concealment, less food and water.
No. Iraq is one of the most urbanized countries on earth. Most Iraqis live in cities. Not that deserts have stopped rebellions. But then you would have to read history to know that. They have maps of this, you know.
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio.” |