Are Russian information operations against the US a war?

Molly McKew defines herself on her Twitter account @MollyMcKew as an "information warfare expert." She has a couple of articles I want to highlight here: Brett Kavanaugh and the Information Terrorists Treying to Reshape America Wired 10/03/2018, giving a summary of some important alt-right contemporary history, from Gamergate to QAnon; and, Putin’s Real Long Game Politico 01/01/2017, a piece from just after the 2016 election on Russian information operations.

McKew also advertises herself as a "Foreign Policy and Strategy Consultant." Wired's author bio notes, "She advised Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili's government from 2009 to 2013 and former Moldovan prime minister Vlad Filat in 2014–15." The Politico description of her includes, "She is a registered agent for Georgian President Saakachvili’s government, which she advised from 2009-2013, and for former Moldovan Prime Minister Filat, who has been in prison since 2015." She begins her Politico piece by recalling "sitting on my front porch with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter." So it's not surprising that she is sharply focused on Russian online propaganda messaging.

I try to be cautious with terms like "information warfare" or "information terrorism." Because what is being described is generally less immediately fatal than bullets and bombs, which are involved in actual war and terrorism. What is usually called information warfare is otherwise known as "propaganda." It deserves to be taken seriously. But it's effects play out in different ways than shooting people with guns. It's a distinction worth preserving.

Cyber-warfare is a broader concept, and some caution is appropriate in what to include in it, as well. Spying, espionage, sabotaging vital infrastructure, disrupting military operations, all those can be understood as part of warfare. Whether a foreign power monkeying with the computers at a power plant should be considered an act of war that justifies the guns-and-bombs kind of military response is another question.

The Wired article is a longread that explains a process that the alt-right currently uses to spread outlandish conspiracy theories. She talks about the online networks the alt-right has developed as a "runaway narrative architecture":

Gamergate became Pizzagate became QAnon became entrenched modern narrative architecture ripe for exploitation. The cadre mobilized a movement of misogyny and white nationalism and intimidation — of angry boys who reveled in the chaos god of Roger Stone — and cultivated the narrative to make it acceptable to a wider lane of conservatives. This is triggering violence and identifiable forms of extremism that we can no longer ignore.

Free speech discussions often bring up the famous line by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes from a case called U.S. v. Schenck (1919). “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

Trevor Timm explains in It's Time to Stop Using the 'Fire in a Crowded Theater' Quote The Atlantic 11/02/2012:

In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" (emphasis mine).

The text of the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision is available online. As it happens, that ruling overturned a conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader for advocating political violence in the abstract.

Freedom of speech in US law does not give immunity to criminal conspiracies, whether the crime involved is stealing money or a mob boss ordering a hit on someone.

And we need to keep in mind that distinction when it comes to "information terrorism". Being a verbal scumbag is disgusting. But it's not the same as directing someone to commit an act of violence. Responsible people should also keep in mind the likely consequences of spreading inflammatory and/or crazy conspiracy theories on some of the human loose cannons out there. That doesn't mean we should minimize the irresponsibitlity of people like some of the political actors McKee describes in Wired. It does mean that a term like "information terrorism" should be used narrowly for direct incitement to violence or direct threats of violence. Not everything that makes people uncomfortable should be called "terrorism."

Also, if you're going to brag very publicly about hanging out with a "Georgian freedom fighter" at your residence in Washington DC, it might be prudent to exercise caution about encouraging expansive definitions of terrorism.

When it comes to foreign policy and the issue of Russian interference in elections via propaganda, McKee's January 2017 article was already engaging in threat inflation, one of the most damaging characteristics of US foreign policy since the Second World War:

What both administrations [Obama and Trump] fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.

I've always maintained that Russian interference in the US Presidential election in 2016 was a serious issue that needed to be seriously invetigated and countered. Much more information about that Russian effort is now in the public record than was the case when her Politico article was published.

But we also need to be realistic about it. Is there any way to reliably measure the influence of those notorious Russian bots? Not that I've seen. Direct intervention in the physical election systems is a more serious problem, but there is still no real evidence in the public record of which I'm aware that Russian hackers changed or erased votes or otherwise directly affected the voter count. But hacking election systems is illegal in itself. So are foreign donations to American political campaigns, and it appears that the NRA still has to account for its conduct in the matter of Russian money in the 2016 Presidential election. And, of course, there are numerous cases established by convictions in the Special Council's probe of Russian interference that involve inappropriate involvement by US political actors with foreign money adn actors.

But whether Russian bots amplifying Republicans smears and campaign themes rise to the level of those more concrete crimes is dubious. One Russian political intervention that might reasonably be judged as effective came in early 2016 in Europe. On New Year's Eve at the end of December, there were a number of sexual harassment of women in the German city of Cologne during the outdoor celebrations there in the plaza in front of the cathedral, many of them perpetrated by foreigners (Arabs and North Africans), and many cited by the police were asylum seekers. Germany and Austria and several Balkan countries were then still struggling with how to manage the ongoing wave of refugees that coming into Europe at the time in extremely high numbers compared to the years before and after. Russian information operations in 2015 promoted the notion that Germany would accept all comers, an action consistent with Putin's goal of weakening the EU by promoting tensions bewteen EU countries, in this case greatly assisted by the Hungarian government's handling of refugees.

The critics of Merkel's immigration policy of the moment seized on the Köln incident as an example of the dangers posed by her policy, thier message facilitated by the clumsy police public information operations after the event. Then in January, Russian state media seized on a routine news story of a 13-year-old girl named Lisa who had gone missing in Berlin and then turned up the next day. They actively spread the story that she had been kinapped by foreigners and raped for 30 hours, after which the police were said to have forced her to claim the sex was consensual in order to protect the Evil Foreigners. (Alice Bota, Das missbrauchte Mädchen Zeit Online 21.01.2016; Christine Kensche, „Der Fall zeigt, Lisa ist ein Missbrauchsopfer“ Welt 20.06.2017)

The Russian government used that story to promote the Putinist narrative that Europe was allowing itself to be overrun by dangerous foreigners. (Lisa's family is Russian-German.) Alice Bota quotes a commentator on Russian Channel One saying, "Underage girls are being raped, the police do nothing, the perpetrators go free. That is the new order in Germany." Presumabley because of the age of the girl, the circumstances of her disappearance were not immediately publicly explained. But Bota reports that the Berlin police did specifically and publicly said at the time she the girl was not raped.

The story was it spread in Europe, but did it have an effect in Germany and Austria? Bota gives no indication that it was. Russian propaganda was happy to magnify the Trump-style agitation against foreigners as rapists. But how much effect the magnification of such messages promoted by domestic xenophobes in the EU had is, as in the American election, hard to measure. Still, Kensche's 2017 report adds of the aftermath in Germany:

Fünf Männer attackieren die Flüchtlingsunterkunft gegenüber Lisas Schule. Ihre Cousine spricht am Rand einer NPD-Demonstration, die Partei hält eine Kundgebung gegen „Überfremdung“ ab. Hunderte Russlanddeutsche ziehen vor das Kanzleramt, auch NPD und Pegida mischen mit. Propagandaforscher erklären, Russland mache gezielt Stimmung gegen die Bundesrepublik.

[Five men attack the refugee housing opposite Lisa's school. Her cousin speaks on the fringes of a {far-right} NPD demonstration, the Party {NPD} holds a rally against "over-foreignization". Hundreds of Russian-Germans appear in from the Chancellor's office, and the NPD and {the far-right anti-immigrant group} Pegida join them. Propaganda researchers declare that Russia is making a targeted effort to turn the mood against Germany.]

The case caused some notable diplomatic tension between Russia and Germany. So it clearly had a real-world effect on politics.

In 2017, a fuller story emerged in court. It did involve a defendent identified as Ismet S., who presumably has some kind of immigrant background. When he was 18 and Lisa 13, they carried on a romance that included sleeping together once. He was convicted for the statutory rape and for child pornography.

McKew's Wired article gives a good description of the use of rape in political and ehtnic propaganda:

Through each iteration of this [online rightwing] network, rape has been a constant theme. Rape and pedophilia are potent triggers that elicit an intense emotional response from an audience. Rape has been used to fling charges of hypocrisy—almost always involving accusations against Bill Clinton or other Democrats. It has been used to highlight examples of "fake news" by pointing to the few cases where the media has promoted unsubstantiated rape allegations. It has been used in attempts to prove elite corruption by insisting that there is a secret cabal of elites who are pedophiles and predators. It has been used to normalize racism—referring to blacks and Muslims as serial rapists and to migrants as rapists and killers. And it has been used to justify misogyny by arguing that rape is "misunderstood."

McKew in the 2017 article paints the Russian influence operations as strikingly effective. But, compared to the concrete practices of bribery and injecting funds into foreign political groups, it's hard to argue that their propaganda bots are nearly as effective.

With direct manipulation of vote results, the kinds of measures that are needed to guard against that are largelyh the same as those needed to guard against voter suppression efforts. And the efforts to counter Russian propaganda are also part of the effort to combat general misinformation and "fake news" from domestic sources.

But even beyond information operations, McKew's depiction of US-Russia relatioships as "a war ... to be won, decisively — not a thing to be negotiated or bargained," is very much threat inflation. It's not a realistic way to see US-Russian relations. She even seems to be arguing that diplomacy is useless in dealing with Russia. She writes, "As Obama did, Trump has already made the first mistake in negotiating with the Russians: telling them that there is anything to negotiate." Which strikes me as a pretty nihilistic take on the subject.

Russia's effect on the 2016 election, or is it on the "American mind," or what?

Wired posted a story about the effect of the Russian intervention on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, Did Russia Affect The 2016 Election? It's Now Undeniable 02/16/2018.

And the story fits with the headline. Referring to the Special Counsel's indictments announced Friday, it says, "this information makes it increasingly difficult to say that the Kremlin's effort to impact the American mind did not succeed."

The author is Molly McKew. Her author information at the bottom of the piece identifies her as "an expert on information warfare and the narrative architect at New Media Frontier. She advised Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government from 2009 to 2013 and former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat in 2014-15."

Wait. If she's an American citizen, she presumably had to register as a foreign agent to perform those advisory tasks. And aren't those countries over around Russia somewhere? Aren't we supposed to be suspicious of foreign agents talking about American politics? And doesn't that go for countries like Georgia and Moldovo that Americans can't find on the map? Or is it only Russia?

That's not just gratuitous snark, given the how she makes her argument. (Full disclosure: I'm married to an Austrian citizen.) McKew seems to think that Russia's 2016 mischief was ferociously effective in swaying American opinions. Of course there's nothing inherently sinister in itself about someone doing a legal consulting gig for a foreign government. Disclosure like the ones quoted above is important, because they can indicate a possible personal financial stake in taking certain positions. Which doesn't in itself imply corruption or bad faith. In this case, Mikheil Saakashvili was President of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukraine war of 2008. The Bush Administration and the following Obama Administration was sympathetic to Georgia in the conflict with Russia. But readers may be excused for assuming that if Saakashvilli was hiring an "information warfare" specialist in 2009, he wouldn't have looked for someone inclined to take a detached, scholarly position on Russia in international relations.

Vlad Filat was arrested in 2015 in connection with "the disappearance of $1bn (£646m) from three Moldovan banks. ... The missing money is equivalent to an eighth of the ex-Soviet republic's entire GDP. Moldova is one of Europe's poorest countries." (Moldova ex-PM Vlad Filat held over $1bn bank scam BBC News 11/19/2015)

It's worth noting here that the wording in the information warfare specialist's is careful throughout in strongly hinting that Russia's intervention in the 2016 election determined the result without making the explicit claim. Note in the first quote above, she argues that Russia made an effort "to impact the American mind."

The tweet at the top of McKew's Twitter page at this writing is this one:

The West is already at war whether it wants to be or not. Here's how to fight Putin's global imperialist insurgency. https://t.co/3ePvy8Wjbh

— Molly McKew (@MollyMcKew) January 2, 2017

Jeet Heer in The New Republic commented on the article of hers she links in that post (A “New Cold War” Against Russia Is a Terrible Idea 01/04/2017):

Molly K. McKew, who has been an advisor to the government of Georgian President Saakashvili and to former Moldovan Prime Minister Filat, argues in Politico Magazine that Russia is already at war with the U.S. According to McKew, Russia sees the U.S. as “the main enemy” and is working to undermine the American-dominated global order. Thus, McKew hopes Trump will come to his senses and treat Russia as the nation’s primary threat. In other words, McKew is calling for a return to the bipolar view of global politics that held sway during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, when Americans thought every issue was a question of the free world versus “godless communism.” McKew is admirably forthright in stating her desire ...

Tweeting about Russia's "global imperialist insurgency" does sound like something straight out of 1955.

The argument McKew tries to make in the Wired article has the same problem that arguments to date about Russia having affected the election results share. Which is that while Russian interference that violate American laws is something to be taken very seriously, democratic elections involve so many factors that determining exactly what factors were decisive is difficult to say with precision. And given that the election result depended on pretty tiny margins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, describing very precise effects i those three states would be necessary to make the argument. As McKew herself says near the end:

Persuasion and influence via social media cannot be estimated in linear terms; it requires looking at network effects. It is about the impact of a complex media environment with many layers, inputs, voices, amplifiers, and personalities. All of these elements change over time and interact with each other.

So anyone trying to tell you there was little impact on political views from the tools the Russians used doesn't know. Because none of us knows. No one has looked. Social media companies don't want us to know, and they obfuscate and drag their feet rather than disclosing information. The analytical tools to quantify the impact don’t readily exist. But we know what we see, and what we heard—and the narratives pushed by the Russian information operation made it to all of our ears and eyes. [my emphasis]

In this clip, Hillary Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden says that "we just don't know" if the Russian actions decisively affected the election outcome, though she clearly wants to imply very strongly that it did, Tanden: New Indictment Undercuts Legitimacy Of Trump's Election The Beat With Ari Melber/MSNBC:

Part of the reason that the Russia-Russia-Russia thread has been so central to Democratic criticism of Trump is that the Clinton campaign immediately after the election adopted it as an excuse. Ari Melmer starting around 1:00 in that clip asks her if she thinks the information in the public sphere so far affects "the legitimacy of Donald Trump as President." This is a different question than whether it decided the election or makes his election illegitimate. She responds, "It's hard to say, in my view, that didn't affect 70,000 votes" [referring presumably to the narrow margins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan] followed immediately by "we just don't know." I don't want to split the hairs too finely here. But that's what I meant by Tanden implying that the Russian actions decided the election without actually saying so. In fact, she immediately follows with, "And, in my view, that does call into question the legitimacy of this election."

She's saying something like, prove to me that they didn't, despite saying explicitly that "we just don't know" whether they did or not.

There is clearly a lot more to come to public light, and some of it might provide evidence that suggests more strongly than what we have now that Russian intervention affected the outcome of the election.

Undoubtedly, the Clinton campaign and establishment Democrats generally would like to be able that it was Russian tricks that decided the election rather than any defects in Electable Hillary's own campaign. Establishment Dems have gotten very good at making excuses to continue using approaches that lose.

But the facts of illegal Russian interference are important and need to be fully clarified. And that doesn't depend at all on whether it can be shown to have affected the outcome of the election. It may still very well turn out to be business dealings with Russian entities that are the most important source of criminality and vulnerability of the Trumps to Russian government pressures. And problems in Trump's business dealings, including while he has been President, won't necessarily be restricted to Russian entities.

Cautions on "Russia-gate"

Stephen Cohen is one left-leaning expert on Russia who has been cautioning about politicians, journalists, policy analysis and others jumping to conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump campaign collaboration before clear evidence is available in the public record.

In The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate Consortium News 12/15/2017, he gives us an update. Including this concern:

... the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion, have spread to “contacts with Russia” — political, financial, social, etc. — on the part of a growing number of people, often going back many years before anyone imagined Trump as a presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these “contacts” were criminal or potentially so.

This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even Joe McCarthy’s search for “Communist” connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise.

More to the point, advisers to U.S. policy-makers and even media commentators on Russia must have many and various contacts with Russia if they are to understand anything about the dynamics of Kremlin policy-making. I myself, to take an individual example, was an adviser to two (unsuccessful) presidential campaigns, which considered my wide-ranging and longstanding “contacts” with Russia to be an important credential, as did the one sitting president whom I advised.

To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal is to slur hundreds of reputations and to leave U.S. policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible, as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post, in an editorial. This is one reason why I have, in a previous commentary, argued that Russia-gate and its promoters have become the gravest threat to American national security. [my emphasis]

But Cohen, like some other skeptics who make important points, is also being a bit disingenuous when he argues that "no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced" for the "charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic National Committee e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this 'attack on American democracy.'"

This requires a very narrow concept of what constitutes "actual evidence." But the FBI, the CIA and the NSA all did conclude with high confidence that the Russian government was behind the hacks. And also (with somewhat less confidence on the part of the NSA) that Russia had them transmitted to Wikileaks. Russian officials, and Putin in particular, had rational reasons for trying to cause problems for Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, even if most Americans might think they were bad reasons. And, of course, that doesn't justify interference in American elections. Nor should any American government, including Trump's, take that interference less than extremely seriously.

The charges are credible. But it's true that no court or other independent official investigation has vetted the evidence for the hacking. And that no one from Trump's campaign has yet been convicted of or pleaded guilty to collusion with the Russians in the legal sense.

On the latter point, I would say that the circumstantial evidence that collusion took place looks pretty strong. On the other hand, a conviction on direct charges of actual collusion with the Russians by campaign officials has always been less likely than most Democrats would prefer to assume. We'll see what emerges from the special counsel's investigation. And it's entirely possible. But the actual charges related to collusion (or near-collusion) are more likely to have to do with efforts to cover up contacts with the Russians by lying to the FBI or under oath, or from failing to comply with legally required disclosures of financial connections with Russian entities. And there's also a strong possibility Mueller's investigation will uncover illegal business dealings with the Russians or others that aren't involved with collusion on illegal Russian operations around the 2016 election.

Background interviews in "The Putin Files" at Frontline

Frontline PBS recently ran a two-part documentary called Putin's Revenge, focused on the story of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. Part 1 focuses on Putin's experiences with and understanding of US foreign policy.

Part 2 deals more specifically with the events of 2016 in connection with Russian hacking and the US election.

Frontline has also made available hours of background interviews of the authorities quoted in the documentary. Since they largely deal with the same set of events and questions, they do begin to sound a bit repetitive after a while. But they do provide a wide range of views, all largely within a safely Establishment perspective. Which, of course, has its advantages and disadvantages.

My most interesting and informative of the ones I've listened to so far is this one, The Putin Files: Julia Ioffe, which is 1 3/4 hours long. Her columns the past year for The Atlantic on Russia have also been helpful. Unlike our typical Pod Pundits on TV, she tells stories like you would hope a journalist would. She's very good in relating a chronological narrative. And she's careful to include a lot of factual detail and meaningful context. And she gives the appearance of trying to stick with confirmed facts, or at a minimum to explain what sources on which she's relying. That emerges at the start of the interview, where she responds to the question on whether the highest levels of Russian government knew about the hacking of the Democratic Party and election system in 2016.

Her account is also notably useful in that she conveys an image of how Putin was likely to have understood events that affected him and his political career. Understanding how the "other side" sees itself is something our TV pundits aren't generally very good about doing. Understanding isn't defending, and explaining isn't defending. But it's easy for people in politics and especially international politics to forget about those two things.

Celeste Wallander's interview in interesting in that she recounts the Ukraine crisis of 2013 as though the US is a de facto military ally of the US, The Putin Files: Celeste Wallander 10/25/2017.

Although she also recognizes that the Russians had the ability and the intent to escalate with additional Russian troops if they judged it necessary.

Victoria Nuland strikes me as a particularly unsympathetic public figure, and this interview didn't do anything to disabuse me of that impression, The Putin Files: Victoria Nuland 10/25/2017:

She insists on starting off by making the dubious point that the Clinton Administration was serious in trying to make Russia a part of NATO in the early 1990s. Of the interviews in this series that I've heard, Nuland's seemed the most carefully worded to further a hawkish foreign policy narrative. She talks as though the US approach in everything she's talking about are obviously pure and noble. And manages to sound condescending and remarkably smug through most of it. Rightly or wrongly, I tend to think that someone who can keep an expression like this for most of a 1 1/4 hour interview is probably trying to con her listeners:

It's striking in her interview that she speaks as if Russia had no legitimate security concerns about NATO expansion. Which reinforces the perception that she's making a hawkish political pitch rather than speaking as a foreign policy expert in a more technical sense here.

Nuland is so immersed in Cold War hawkish thinking that she even rolls out the hoary old Domino Theory for Europe today. Just after 47:00, we hear this interchange:

Frontline: Of course, there's another argument that some people have come in here and said, which is, [if] you don't stop Putin there, y'know, where do you stop Putin, when do you stop Putin, that's the moment.

Nuland: Well, that was the argument that those of us favoring at least defense lethal systems made, was that, you know, if he really wanted it, he would be in Kiev, and the next thing you knew he would be in Warsaw if we weren't careful.

One difference: Poland is a member of the NATO mutual-defense alliance. Ukraine is not. Nuland's words would indicate that she doesn't understand even a basic distinction like that. (I'm guessing she's faking it on that point!)

From this interview, I would have to conclude that her only regret about the 2013 Ukraine crisis is that we didn't Americanize the conflict and expand the war even more.

This interview with a former Obama adviser gives us an idea of how it sounds for someone to take Putin's outlook seriously - whether it's right or wrong - as contrasted with the strict advocacy perspective of Victoria Nuland, The Putin Files: Antony Blinken 10/25/2017:

Just after 16:30, Blinken straightforwardly explains the basic fact that makes Nuland's point about Putin marching from Kiev to Warsaw is so silly, that Poland is a NATO member.

New York Times Reporter David Sanger's interview is also notable it his seemingly pragmatic and realistic take on the topics covered, The Putin Files: David Sanger 10/25/2017:

Much of screen time on the two-part documentary itself is composed of excerpts from the set of interviews that Frontline placed on YouTube and from which these five were taken.

Trump is not happy about former intelligence officials talking about the Russians and the 2016 election

Jake Tapper interviewed James Clapper and John Brennan on Trump's latest rejection of the USA intelligence agency findings on Russian hacking and interference in the 2016 Presidential eleciton, Ex-intelligence chiefs fire back at Trump criticism (Entire CNN interview) 11/12/2017:

Juan Cole evaluates this significance of this interview in Former CIA Dir.: Trump is afraid of Putin Kompromat Informed Comment 11/13/2017:

The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency openly alleged the real possibility that the sitting president of the United States is being successfully blackmailed and that policy is being made as a result of Trump’s fear of exposure.

Brennan was clear that he has no proof that Trump is compromised.

But Brennan would not make this allegation unless he had at least circumstantial evidence of “kompromat” or compromising materials in the hands of Putin, of the release of which Trump is deeply afraid.

I've never felt comfortable with Democrats or liberals puffing that they're shocked! shocked! I tell you shocked! that Republicans or anyone else would dare question our sacred intelligence agencies. That's a silly and even irresponsible position to take.

James Clapper was Director of National Intelligence (DNI) under Obama (2010-2017), Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Shrub Bush and then Obama (2007-2010), Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Old Man Bush and Bill Clinton (1991-1995). He is a hawkish Democrat affiliated now with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

John Brennan was Director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Shrub Bush (2004-2005), Homeland Security Adviser to Obama (2004-2005), and Director of the CIA under Obama (2013-2017).

I might look at those backgrounds and wish that President Obama had been more cautious about appointing people to senior positions who had been comfortable working in high positions from an irresponsible warmongering like George W. Bush.

But by the same token, it would be difficult to look at those backgrounds and honestly conclude that these were liberal Democratic ideological hacks.

It is also important to remember that some of the claims about the 2016 election interference that were accepted by the Democrats and the press didn't pan out exactly the way they were publicized. This MSNBC segment includes a reminder that the "17 intelligence agencies" trope that Hillary Clinton used in a debate with Trump was not actually true. The most relevant intelligence agencies - the CIA, the FBI and the NSA, endorsed by the Director of National Intelligence - did find that there was real Russian interference.
What Happened To America First? | Kasie DC | MSNBC 11/13/2017;

Dana Priest provides some useful perspective in this piece looking at whether we should fault the US intelligence agencies and the Obama Administration for failing to report publicly during the election campaign what they believed they knew with confidence on Russia interference, Russia’s Election Meddling Is Another American Intelligence Failure New Yorker 11/13/2017.

I found this observation particularly interesting:

Government analysts have always viewed open-source information, or OSINT, as it is called in the intelligence world, as a poor substitute for classified information. Intelligence officials often dismiss the importance of public pronouncements by foreign leaders, actions recorded by journalists, data collected by university professors, and discussions at open conferences. It is a decades-old problem. In 2002, the practice helped blind U.S. intelligence officials to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s evidence that Iraq did not actually possess weapons of mass destruction. In 2010, it blinded them again to the Arab Spring revolutions brewing across the Middle East. Devaluing OSINT has become a more significant problem as Russia and China use social media as an arena to wage disinformation operations.

Unless F.B.I. agents and American intelligence officers get over this bias, they will continue asking for special powers to snoop on Internet users in ways that should not be allowed. If they are denied their surveillance requests, they will likely throw up their hands and say that they then can’t help fix the problem. [my emphsis]

Stanley Greenberg on Hillary's messaging in 2016

Star pollster Stanley Greenberg gives his take on the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign in How She Lost The American Prospect 09/21/2017. The narrowness of the margins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that put Trump over the top in the Electoral College makes the effort to identify any one of them as decisive a nearly hopeless cause.

Greenberg focuses on what he sees as technical failings of the campaign itself:

The Trump presidency concentrates the mind on the malpractice that helped put him in office. For me, the most glaring examples include the Clinton campaign’s over-dependence on technical analytics; its failure to run campaigns to win the battleground states; the decision to focus on the rainbow base and identity politics at the expense of the working class; and the failure to address the candidate’s growing “trust problem” or to learn from events and reposition.

Greenberg's account seems to rely on the conventional understanding of "white working class" that has started to drive me up the wall, i.e., white people without a four-year college degree. Even carving out "white working class" as distinct target group is problematic. The academic word "intersectionality" has been creeping into the general political vocabulary recently, a concept which looks at the effects of the overlapping of socially significant identities. "White" and "working class" would be an example of the intersection of particular race and class identities. I just wish that such intersections were discussed in a more nuanced way in political analysis and commentary. In that example, a more meaningful treatment would need to come up with a more sociologically significant understanding of working class, e.g., people who are (or should be) eligible to join a union.

The current polemical posture of corporate Democratic moderates in intra-party disputes with progressives is to treat any kind of emphasis on focusing on class issues and emphasizing advocacy of working-class issues as being opposed to civil rights and feminist goals. That keeps the waters on such discussions muddled. Not least because of a real history of American left groups playing off one such set of issues by pandering to the conservative side on others. For instance, advocates for female suffrage sometimes argued that it would provide a more reliable block of votes to preserve white dominance or protection against immigrants. Labor unions have often not treated racial and gender discrimination seriously enough, or even taken conservative positions on them. Such examples are not hard to find in American history.

But I'm particularly impressed with Greenberg's evaluation of the complacency aspect of Hillary's campaign. One big part of it was relying on a kind of demographic determinism:

Clinton and the campaign acted as if “demographics is destiny” and a “rainbow coalition” was bound to govern. Yes, there is a growing “Rising American Electorate,” but as Page Gardner and I wrote at the outset of this election, you must give people a compelling reason to vote. I have demonstrated for my entire career that a candidate must target white working-class voters, too.

Not surprisingly, Clinton took her biggest hit in Michigan, where she failed to campaign in Macomb County, the archetypal white working-class county. That was the opposite of her husband’s approach. Bill Clinton visibly campaigned in Macomb, the black community in Detroit, and elsewhere.

The fatal conclusion the Clinton team made after the Michigan primary debacle was that she could not win white working-class voters, and that the “rising electorate” would make up the difference.

He describes how Hillary's message was complicated in a big way by the Obama Administration's insistence on presenting their accomplishments in the best light. Instead of, say, emphasizing how many important things had been blocked by obstructionist Republican majorities:

Obama’s America was not a country in pain, but one where those left behind were looking for a seasoned leader to make progress. Obama and Clinton lived in a cosmopolitan and professional America that wasn’t very angry about the state of the country, even if many of the groups in the Clinton coalition were struggling and angry. Clinton decided only reluctantly to qualify that narrative in favor of one more sensitive to those who were left behind.

Obama’s refrain was severely out of touch with what was happening to most Americans and the working class more broadly. In our research, “ladders of opportunity” fell far short of what real people were looking for. Incomes sagged after the financial crisis, pensions lost value, and many lost their housing wealth, while people faced dramatically rising costs for things that mattered—health care, education, housing, and child care. People faced vanishing geographic, economic, and social mobility, as Edward Luce writes so forcefully. At the same time, billionaires spent massively to influence politicians and parked their money in the big cities whose dynamism drew in the best talent from the smaller towns and rural areas.

Clinton’s default position was Obama’s refrain about America ... [my emphasis]

Greenberg draws on contemporary polling data to argue that when Hillary did strike a Sanders-like position on economic issues, it drew a positive response from voters.

Greenberg focuses on the horse race rather than the policy substance. So he doesn't really address how that complacent approach on the economy is also consistent with the corporate Democratic instinct that what is good for bank CEO's is good for America.

The wrath of Hillary?

Sophia McClennen of Pennsylvania State University has a thoughtful piece about The great Hillary Clinton paradox Salon 09/16/2017. McClennen sees the paradox as, on the one hand, Hillary claims that her prominent position as a woman in politics is a great strength and a reason to vote for her. And, on the other, she and her followers often seem to be trying to minimize or divert criticism by treating it as just a manifestation of sexism:

Unlike her run for the nomination in 2008, in 2016 the Clinton campaign specifically emphasized her role as a female candidate. She also had to contend with the aggressively hostile ways that Donald Trump and his supporters hurled sexist and misogynist epithets her way. From chants of “lock her up” to “nasty woman” to the various other ways that Trump displayed his disdain for women, the “woman card” was constantly in play.

But at times Clinton cast her role as a female candidate as a way to displace legitimate concerns that she was a Washington insider. Recall that in the first debate she responded to the question of being an insider by saying, “Well, I can’t think of anything more of an outsider than electing the first woman president, but I’m not just running because I would be the first woman president.”

And therein lies one key feature of the paradox: she both was and wasn’t running as a woman. That feature of the paradox was indisputable. Whether she highlighted her gender or not, it was certainly true that she had to contend with gender as a framing issue of her candidacy.

Rebecca Traister argues the case that Hillary suffered from a widespread prejudice against angry women in Hillary Clinton Is Finally Expressing Some Righteous Anger. Why Does That Make Everyone Else So Mad? The Cut 09/15/2017:

The question of whether Clinton could or should have found her own mad voice during the campaign hangs over What Happened. Should she have turned on Donald Trump as he paced behind her at the second debate, she wonders. Could she have found a way to communicate the anger many Americans were feeling? “I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous ... Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired,” she writes, describing the mental diagnostics she was performing as she listened to Trump’s wrathful inauguration, wondering if “maybe that’s why Trump was now delivering the inaugural address.”

But if her failure to win the Electoral College hinged on Clinton’s inability to traffic in rhetorical fury, then the question she raises goes beyond her own wiring. Because she never could have turned around and screamed at Trump, never could have slashed her finger through the air and called for revolution in the style of Bernie Sanders, at least not if she had any hope of winning the presidency. Hillary Clinton is a woman, and there is almost nothing that Americans view as more repellent in women than anger.

Recall that every time Clinton spoke too loudly into a microphone while debating her screamy opponents, Americans seemed to rear back; consider that the one deprecatory remark she threw out — calling those who responded enthusiastically to Trump’s open racism “deplorables” — is still regarded by many pundits as her fatal error. Never mind that she said it while running against a candidate who called Mexicans rapists. Censorious anger from women is a liability; from men, it is often, simply, speech. [my emphasis]

There's a long time piece of cynical wisdom that says that when a man shows anger, he's called forceful. But when a woman shows anger, she's called a bitch. This is often used in the context of how women have to avoid pitfalls in rising professionally in the hierarchy of corporations and other large organizations.

But this now standard piece of conventional wisdom was always flawed in that inappropriate or uncontrolled anger is usually seen as very much an undesirable trait in male corporate managers, as well. Flying off the handle is generally seen as risky, and the more risky the more responsibility and public exposure a manager has. CEO's may sometimes act like medieval tyrants in private. But showing a lack of control and focus in public - the way Donald Trump does - would make a corporate board worry whether their CEO was still up to the job.

It's true that a woman's competitors in an organization, maybe especially male competitors, are often willing to appeal to prejudice against women in unethical ways. It's also the case that women in work settings may try to portray annoyance coming from a male colleague as intimidating or bullying. And since there are many ways in which interactions between members of a corporate workforce interact with, compete with and cooperate with one another, it's exceptionally hard to claim that one factor stands out in a distinctive way.

Olga Kazan provides an important perspective on this in Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work? The Atlantic Sept 2017. She discusses findings that women in organization contexts often express an preference not to work for other women because of a perception that ambitious women will be especially likely to use aggressive tactics against them. This doesn't have to do with expressions of anger per se. But some of her examples show that successful women do express anger in office contexts and that it may benefit their careers.

In other words, it's important to avoid careless generalizations on this subject.

And I have to wonder what the basis is of Traister's claim, "Recall that every time Clinton spoke too loudly into a microphone while debating her screamy opponents, Americans seemed to rear back." Is there some basis for this other than Traister's own assertion?

It's also worth noting that Elizabeth Warren expresses various forms of outrage, annoyance and even anger in public. Maybe "Americans" also "rear back" whenever they hear that. And I'm sure that Republicans and corporate Democrats would like them to.

Hillary is a useful template for people to use to discuss issues of sexism and how men and women are often perceived. But when we're talking about whether any other one factor tipped the election, we are confronted with the same problem as with all the other factors. She won the popular vote by a clear margin. So only a minority of the voting population "reared back' from voting for her. And the Electoral College win was decided by less than 100,000 votes in three states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That's a tiny margin, and it's exceptionally hard to attribute that to any one factor. The chronic media prejudice against both Bill and Hillary is a more likely choice. So is James Comey's infamous pre-election statements on the emails, the latest in a long string of Clinton pseudoscandals irresponsibly hyped by the mainstream press.

Also, there were cases in which Hillary expressed anger publicly. Here is one of them, from Greenpeace USA, in which Hillary chides a Greenpeace activist pressing her on her energy industry donations, Hillary Clinton Loses Patience with Greenpeace Activist Over Fossil Fuel Donations 03/31/2016:

I remember seeing it during the primary campaign, in which my own perspective was that of a Sanders partisan, and I thought it came off as churlish. From the post-election perspective of a year and a half later, it still sounds churlish to me. But it also stands as a minor irritation in a primary campaign with much more substantial points of conflict. But did Democratic primary voters "rear back" form that incident? I would guess that Hillary voters were happy to hear it, Bernie voters took it a confirmation of what they thought anyway, and most everyone else never saw it.

In conclusion, I'd note that Trainer quotes Hillary herself in a statement that is telling not only for her personal style but her ideological perspective: “I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous ... Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired.”

I think it's fine for politicians to "stoke people’s rage and resentment" if there's a legitimate target on which to focus. Crooked bank CEO's come to mind, for example. But Hillary was running on a theme that embodied a certain kind of complacency, exemplified by her theme of "Stronger Together." Hillary didn't want to campaign on opposition and resentment against the power elite, the One Percent, the oligarchs, the super-rich - whatever term one prefers to describe the ruling stratum of the very wealthy in the United States. So we got lines from her like, "America is already great" in opposition to Trump's (pseudo-)populist theme of "Make America Great Again."

That Russia issue

The daily news in the US has been reading like a spy series lately. I can't pretend to be keeping up with it all.

But here a few recent articles and reports I've flagged.

Two weeks is a long time in the story at the pace it's currently unfolding. But Matt Taibbi makes a a warning to Democrats and to the legitimate press (corporate and alternative) to not get giddy with the Russia-Trump story in Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media Rolling Stone 03/08/2017 that is still not outdated.

Digby has a similar caution in Was Trump compromised by Russians? We don’t know — but we do know he adores authoritarian thugs Salon 03/09/2017.

Marcy Wheeler is consistently careful on this stuff. She's good at parsing what's being said and what's only being implied or assumed . She does that in The Feedback Loop In Christopher Steel's Dossier Emptywheel 03/06/2017.

And Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is obviously intensely interested in the story, but is also warning about getting ahead of the evidence on the very murky Russia angles. The Center for the National Interest recently shot down a minor flap on one direct encounter that Trump really did have with the Russian Ambassador, Statement Regarding President Trump’s April 27, 2016 Foreign Policy Speech at the Center for the National Interest 03/08/2017. I haven't noticed that claim popping up lately, so maybe everyone realized there was no scandal in that particular incident.

Rachel Maddow is one who seems to be erring on the giddy side in her reporting on this lately. Here's an example of one of her recent reports, in which she basically speculates in the absence of any actual evidence that the Delay in staffing senior positions in the State Department is being done to benefit Russia, Donald Trump Weakens State Dept As Vladimir Putin Would Want MSNBC 03/08/2017:

She hasn't dialed it back in the last couple of weeks. As in this 03/21/2017 report, Russia Continues Info-War Tactics In US:

Jordan Chariton and Michael Tracy mention Maddow's reporting in this discussion of the Russia issue in US politics, Jordan and Michael Working For Russia?! TYT Politics 03/13/2017.

The Young Turks' crew have taken a wide range of approaches on this. Nomi Konst and Ryan Grim have a good discussion in this 42 minute report, Trump/Russia Hearings a "Cloud" Over White House Swamp TYT Politics 03/20/2017:

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian harsh on Paul Manafort over this week's revelations in Russian Agent Ran Trump's Campaign The Young Turks 03/22/2017:

I would love to see a thorough and realistic investigation of this whole thing. But the Reps will do everything they can to cover it up. And the Dems have a big comparative disadvantage with this thing, even apart from not controlling either House of Congress. As we saw from Watergate to Benghazi! Benghazi! BENGHAZI!!!, the Republicans and their media network will flog a pseudoscandal without end. But the Democrats are so worried about upsetting those nice Republicans that they can barely rouse themselves to go after real scandals and make an adequate stink over them. For instance, Halliburton, Blackwater, the Cheney-Bush torture program. Maybe they can carry it out this time without running for cover if some sensational claim turns out to be a bust. (What's that saying, "hope dies last"?)

Their waffling on the Neil Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in their ability to persist in such confrontations.

One of the most bizarre moments in American politics to me was when Dick Durbin made a straightforward condemnation the Senate of torturing prisoners and made a Holocaust reference. The pro-torture Reps went ballistic, as always. And Durbin responded by making a near-tearful apology to Holocaust survivors. Only an American Democrat could manage to convince themselves that Holocaust survivors would be offended by ... someone condemning torture!

The Congressional investigation is grinding into motion. If the Democrats held one House, after being defeated by Trump and hurt badly down-ticket in 2016, even they might rouse themselves to do an aggressive investigation. But the Republicans will do their very best to cover up as much as they can. I don't see any "Howard Bakers" in today's Republican Congressional representation. The Dems also have the disadvantage that the Republican have a majority in both Houses of Congress and seem strikingly disinclined to do a serious investigation.

But the Republicans have been bumbling enough that the Democrats haven't had much a chance the last couple of weeks to help Trump and the Republicans get off the hook. Morning Joe, whose participants have been pretty appalled by Trump's Presidency so far, reports in Joe: Devin Nunes Blew Up Hopes Of Independent Russia Investigation 03/23/2017:

Marc Bennetts also makes an important point in What if Donald Trump played the Kremlin? 02/28/2017:

Consider the possibility that Trump misled the Kremlin with vaguely positive statements on issues crucial to Russia, such as lifting economic sanctions and recognizing Crimea, with no intention of following through. In the process, he would have gained, without overtly asking for it, assistance in his White House bid, in the form of cyberattacks and fake news.

Entirely speculative and without watertight proof? Definitely. But so is the oft-repeated trope that Trump is a Manchurian president, his every move controlled by coded messages from Moscow. And Trump’s recent reversal on previously Kremlin-friendly positions increases the probability that Putin was the pawn in this game all along.

A different example of speculation comes in Vladmir Putin’s battle of Berlin: No country in Western Europe is more vulnerable to Russian propaganda than Germany by James Kirchick Politico EU 03/10/2017.

John Kiriakou talks in this interview talks about how he has only slowly become convinced of the seriousness of the Trump-Russia scandal, Ex-CIA Analyst: I Was Wrong on Russia. FBI Director Comey's Testimony Is Game Changer A Trump Show 03/22/2017.

Need for a good investigation and clear thinking on the Trump-Russia scandal

George Beebe did a piece during the Presidential transition on Russia’s Role in the US Elections: The Case for Caution The National Interest 12/16/2017 that was a useful call for realism on the Trump-Russia story. It's still relevant even after all the development in the last two-and-a-half months.

The author bio at the end of the article reads, "George Beebe is the President of BehaviorMatrix LLC, a text analytics company. He formerly served as chief of Russia analysis at the CIA, and as special advisor to Vice President Cheney on Russia and the Former Soviet Union."

Obama during the transition called for "a bipartisan, independent, process" to investigate the story, which then we were still usually calling the Russia hacking story. When he said that, I couldn't help but wonder how those two qualities can fit together given the state of the Republican Party. But I do want to see a real independent investigation of it, if that's not a totally Utopian concept these days.

At the same time, I'm trying to keep the various implications of the story in view along with the various motives different players have. So it seems to me there are likely to be substantial reasons to think the Russian government tried to intervene in a the American election by hacking and/or other means in such a way that some substantive American response is required.

But it also seems to me that with Hillary's 3-million-or-so popular vote margin, it's difficult to conclude that Russian intervention was decisive to the outcome, unless evidence turns up of Russian sleeper agents running pro-Trump get-out-the-vote drives in Michigan and Wisconsin.

It's very clear to me that various rightwing groups here and in Europe admire Putin's authoritarian governing style, including our President. And that it's still the case that Russia and the US have common interests in some things and substantial conflicts on others, whether or not we like their governing practices.

I'm sure Trump's foreign policy will be a disaster and that all aspects of his Presidency will be mired in conflicts of interest and old-fashioned corruption.

But even for mega-billion deals for ExxonMobil, I'm not at all sure that the new administration will be able to have a cozy partnership with Russia; for instance, hardcore Islamophobes may see Putin as an ally against Islam, or "Radical Islamic Terrorism," but Putin's government is way more concerned about *Sunni* militants than Shi'a ones and therefore may not be so cooperative in starting a war with Iran. And in general, I'm really fond of the "don't do stupid stuff" rule for foreign policy.

Beebe's article is calling for careful public scrutiny of intelligence claims. And it's still good advice. This whole scandal is a reminder of how important it is for intelligence findings to have public credibility. Because by the nature of much of their work, they can't always make the full evidence public so that it could be independently verified. So while the basic claim that the Russian government was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee is widely accepted, it is still for most people based on the publicly expressed consensus of the "intelligence community." As well as on the general acceptance of it by Members of Congress who have access to more details of the intelligence findings than we do.

Much of the story now is being driven by anonymous leaks to major press outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post. And they have earned the skepticism of reality-based observers, especially since the Times ran their first Watergate story in 1992.

Scandals like this inevitably have political aspects since they involve elections and public officials. One particular political twist to this one is that Democratic interpretations of Hillary Clinton's Electoral College loss. To make my own perspective more clear, I was a Bernie supporter in the primary and a Clinton backer in the general. Many Clinton partisans have claimed that "the election was hacked," i.e., that Russian interference was decisive in Trump's win.

And as I mentioned above, Hillary clearly won the popular vote. And the decisive margins that threw the Electoral votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was less than 100,000 for all three together. That is a tiny margin of votes on a national scale. And almost any significant issue or facotr could have made such a difference: poor Rust Belt employment prospects, James Comey's late (and very sleazy) intervention, the type of ads the Clinton campaign ran there, inadequate planning for get-out-the-vote operations.

Hillary won the election in the popular vote. So it would be hard to make the case that her approach to the issues and campaign were fundamentally flawed. The magnitude of the Democratic losses in local elections does indicate some real problems for the Democratic Party general prospects, as even establishment Democrats have had to recognize.

But the temptation for more conservative Democrats and Hillary hardliners to blame "Russia, Russia, Russia" for the loss would be a destructive one for Democrats to adopt in practice.

This is a report from the Center for the National Interest (founded by Richard Nixon in 1994) on a 01/27/2017 discussion that also included Beebe, Russian and the U.S. Election: Assessing Moscow's Actions and America's Responses:

Center Executive Director Paul Saunders addressed U.S. policy responses to the hacking and the current political climate. Saunders stated that the U.S. must ask itself what it is responding to, what it is trying to accomplish with the response, and the cost/benefit of each particular response. According to Saunders, it is a fair conclusion that the hacking was perpetrated by Russia, though the intent behind the attack is not yet fully understood, as there is very little relevant information in the public domain. The first step before the U.S. reacts, according to Saunders, is a thorough investigation into the hacking incident. Mr. Saunders emphasized that this event must be placed in the context of 25 years of troubled and complex U.S.-Russia relations.

Regarding the United States’ objectives in responding to Russia, Saunders argued that the Obama administration’s puzzling response in December — expelling 35 Russian diplomats, sanctioning officials at Russian intelligence agencies, and closing two Russian recreation facilities in New York and Maryland — had a very limited impact on Moscow. If the Obama administration had compelling evidence of serious Russian interference, it should have done more. If not, he said, it should have waited until the facts were clearer.

Citing the importance of a thorough and impartial investigation, Saunders stated that there is as much a danger in responding before an investigation takes place as in failing to respond adequately. The response must be proportional, urged Saunders, stating that the Obama administration had acknowledged that hacking of actual election voting machines did not take place. While the leaked information from the hacks and coverage by Russian state-owned media channel RT may have influenced U.S. public opinion, Saunders pointed out, such efforts are not uncommon in international affairs. [my emphasis]

Paul Pillar describes why we badly we need a good investigation of the Russia-Trump scandal while he warns us that dodgy intelligence can cut in more than one direction (Leak-Shopping and the Politicization of Intelligence The National Interest 02/28/2017):

Amid the White House’s further fulmination about leaks, it has become apparent that what concerns Trump and his circle is not leaking but rather the public disclosure and dissemination of any information that contradicts administration assertions. In this respect, this administration’s sounding off about leaks stems from the same motives as the president’s attempts to discredit mainstream media as an “enemy of the people.” ...

This kind of effort by the White House is similar to leaking in that it involves people with an agenda endeavoring to tell a partial story of, or impart spin to, some subject that is more complicated than that, involves information gaps, and in which the available information is subject to differing interpretations. These characteristics certainly apply to the Russian connections of Trump associates, which is why a thorough and impartial investigation of the subject is necessary. In each case, something is divulged to the press not to inform, but to support a political or policy position.

Just five weeks in power, this administration already has gone even farther, and in an even more corrupting way, down this road, and not just regarding the issue of Russian connections. The White House is reported to have reached into the intelligence and security services, including the intelligence and analysis arm of the Department of Homeland Security, to try to extract interpretations of data about terrorism that would support the decisions the administration made, and subsequently were struck down in the courts, about limiting travel from specified Muslim-majority states. This is a classic case of politicization of intelligence: using intelligence not to inform a policy decision yet to be made, but instead to try to muster public support for a decision already made. This is the opposite of how a healthy intelligence-policy relationship ought to work. [my emphasis]

New material and/or perspective are cascading into the media in great volume right now. For another perspective, here are two segments from Democracy Now! featuring Scott Horton and Robert Perry, both taking a left-leaning perspective on the Trump-Russia scandal but with distinctions. Debate: Are Trump’s Ties to Russia a Dangerous Security Issue or Critics’ Fodder for New Red Scare? 03/06/2017 (Transcript):

Web Extra: Are Trump-Russia Ties a Dangerous Security Issue or Critics’ Fodder for New Red Scare? 03/07/2017 (Transcript):

Perry is particularly focused on how careless evaluations of the Russia situation could lead to foreign policy mistakes, and worse. A couple of his recent pieces at Consortium News: The Politics Behind ‘Russia-gate’ 03/04/2017; Official Washington Tips into Madness 03/06/2017. I worry that Perry is conflating the situation in which an investigative journalist pursues a story with the very explicit allegations made by the "intelligence community" about the Russian hacking. The public needs to know more specifics from an independent investigation about those. If they are true, we need confirmation and a good sense of what needs to be done about it. (Starting wars over Georgia or Ukraine would not be an appropriate response.) If they are really off-base, we need to know that, too.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is trying to parse what the evidence in the public record is really telling us, and what it's not yet telling us:

• Learning Eye-Popping Details About Mr Sater 02/19/2017
• "Says Who?" - Piecing Together the Michael Cohen Story 03/01/2017
• What The CIA and FBI Knew About Trump Before 2016 03/02/2017
• The Innocent Explanation, Part #1 03/03/2017
• The Innocent Explanation, Part #2: The Mailer Standard 03/05/2017
• Putting The Picture Together 03/06/2017
• Welp, That Was Interesting (on Felix Sater) 03/06/2017

Postmortems on the Clinton Era and Hillary 2016 Presidential loss

Kathleen Geier says her goodbyes to the Clinton Era in The Clintons’ Dominance of Democratic Politics Is Over—And They Will Not Be Remembered Fondly In These Times 11/28/2016. Her perspective is one that is familiar in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, pointing to how the neoliberalism in politics and economics that so heavily influenced both Bill and Hillary have left the Democratic Party at the unpleasant moment in which it now finds itself.

I think of the issues raised by the election outcome in three broad categories: the social context, strategic and tactical approaches, and organizational ones.

Geier's fifth point falls into the organizational area, the fallout from from the Obama/Hillary/Debbie Wasserman-Schultz policy of neglecting to build and support the Democratic Party organization in all parts of the country:

Theda Skocpol has cited another factor in Clinton’s loss: the Democrats' lack of organizational infrastructure in non-urban areas. The GOP has a strong organizational base in these regions, including get-out-the-vote efforts run by the Christian right, the NRA, the Koch organizations, and the Republican Party itself. But the Dems have let their own party organizations wither on the vine, and the unions which were once the Democrats’ stronghold in the critical Rust Belt region have declined dramatically. When it comes to getting voters to the polls in rural areas, the Democrats are now at a tremendous structural disadvantage. To be sure, this a party-wide, rather than a Clinton-only, failure. But Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama bear strong responsibility here. Each them served for two terms but showed little interest in building the party.

This observation touches both the strategic messaging of the Hillary Clinton campaign this year and the broader economic conditions:

In [a] stroke of bitter poetic justice, the fruits of Clintons' own long-ago policies came back to haunt them. NAFTA and other Clinton “free” trade deals devastated the Rust Belt and created the ravaged communities and the despair that compelled many working class voters in those areas pull the lever for the despicable Trump.

A post-election report by the pollster Stanley Greenberg confirms that Clinton's decision to shun a progressive economic appeal was a fatal error. Greenberg found that “polls showed fairly resilient support with white working class women, until the Clinton campaign stopped talking about economic change.” When the Greenberg team tested a Democratic message attacking Trump for his character vs. a message “demanding big economic changes” and attacking Trump for “supporting for trickle-down and protecting corporate special interests,” they found that the economic message “performed dramatically better,” particularly among key voter groups like millennials, white unmarried women and white working class women.

I'm not persuaded by the simple assertion that trade deals as such "devatated the Rust Belt," etc. Isolating the effects of trade on employment is complicated because so many factors are interacting. Even left-leaning economists who emphasize the problems of unemployment, underemployment and the growth of inequality like New Keynesian Paul Krugman and post-Keynesian Jamie Galbraith caution about blaming trade in physical goods as the main culprit in de-industrialization.

There are real problems with the so-called trade treaties like TTIP and TPP. But those problems mainly lie in their deregulation provisions, especially the destabilizing effects of removing restrictions of transfers of capital, which is a whole different animal from trade in goods. And even the clearest negative effects of international trade in goods in the United States are part of a larger context of neoliberal policies of privatization, restrictions and reductions on public services, severe neglect of public infrastructure and an economic ideology that drastically de-emphasizes or opposes public policies aimed at supporting employment. This is coupled with an unrealistic policy assumption that education will counteract the effects of declining industrial employment by equipping people for different kinds of jobs, at the same time that access to higher education is becoming more and more expensive and student debt itself has become not only a major burden for individuals but a significant drag on economic growth.

"Trade" treaties like NAFTA, TPP and TTIP have become a symbol of the much broader and very real problems caused by neoliberalism.

An accompanying article in In These Times by Susan Douglas reflects on how gender may have affected the Presidential election outcome, The Woman Who Might Have Been President 11/28/2016:

But can we please remember this: In 2015, Hillary Clinton was listed by Gallup, for a record 20th time, as the woman Americans admired most. So we must come to terms with this sad fact, as Penn State professor Terri Vescio put it, “The more female politicians are seen as striving for power, the less they’re trusted and the more moral outrage gets directed at them.” Not all Trump voters are misogynists, but sexism played a role in his victory, as evidenced, in part, by all the Trump regalia calling Hillary a “bitch.”

Did Russian propaganda operations decide the US Presidential election?

Several of my Facebook friends and Twitter users I follow are linking this short column from the Washington Post, Americans keep looking away from the election’s most alarming story 11/25/2016 by Eric Chenoweth of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe. He makes a case that Russian fake-news/disinformation/espionage operations were a decisive factor in the outcome of the Presidential election.

A First World War view of the Czarist Russian war dragon

Since much of the claim is based on assumptions about obscure cyberspace operations for which almost all of us not working for the NSA have to rely on secondary and tertiary expert sources or more distant ones, I'm feeling pretty modest about my own ability to make judgments about the story.

Chenoweth (or the editors) evidently found it necessary to put his own declaration of modesty near the end, "Part of the Russian operation’s success is that we cannot measure the effect." Which raises the obvious question: If we have no idea of the effect that even the more plausible examples of possible Russian disinformation operations had on the election, then just why should we be particularly worried about it? But that qualifier comes two paragraphs after he says, "From the Russian perspective, the success of this operation can hardly be overstated." Maybe he means it cannot be overstated because it can't even be measured. But I'm pretty sure that's not the impression the column is leaving.

There's also the problem that Hillary Clinton won significantly more votes than the presumed Electoral College winner and alleged Russian favorite Donald Trump received. So it would seem to be a more obvious conclusion that whatever disinformation mischief Putin's government was up to, it failed to have the desired effect. At least that's a more obvious conclusion than what Chenoweth literally argues, which is that the fact that we CAN'T TELL whether it had any effect at all means the alleged operations were a SUCCESS.

And you don't have to have an OCD streak to click on some of the links included. The link to the claim, "U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the Russian government actively interfered in our elections," is to the Homeland Security press release of October 7. That statement was certainly worded to heavily imply that the Russian government was behind the hacks on the Democratic Party. And that may be a perfectly reasonable assumption. But what the Homeland Security statement also says very explicitly is, "Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, WE ARE NOT NOW IN A POSITION TO ATTRIBUTE THIS ACTIVITY TO THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT." (my emphasis) Since it was created during the Cheney-Bush Administration, Homeland Security has never been known for excessive restraint in raising red flags about foreign threats.

Since Chenoweth is asking us to consider the source, it's worth noting that the Washington Post has also been known as Neocon Central for a while and is noted for its editorial enthusiasm for hawkish foreign policy. Chenoweth's Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe is the successor group to the Committee in Support of Solidarity, formed in 1981 to support the Solidarity opposition movement in Poland and for which Chenoweth was also a spokesperson. Such organizations are frequently funded by the US State Department and/or individuals and lobbies interested in promoting hawkish US foreign policies. But WE ARE NOT NOW IN A POSITION TO ATTRIBUTE THIS ACTIVITY TO THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT OR ARMS LOBBYISTS. So by Chenoweth's logic, we've determined that the State Department and war lobbyists ARE behind it. And the very fact that we have no proof at all that such is the case is a measure of the great success of these hidden funders!

There are lots of reasons to disapprove of Putin's government. Since we Americans are Exceptional, we generally don't feel we need any special reason to criticize other countries' governments where, for example, the winner of a Presidential election might not be allowed to take office! That's why all the other countries in the world want to be just like America. After all, as Hillary told the Veterans of Foreign Wars last August, the US is "the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history.” Also the most modest.

And I don't share the admiration that rightwing populist parties like Marine Le Pen's National Front in France show for Putin's brand of nationalist authoritarianism and promotion of Islamophobia.

But there are also substantial reasons for having recounts and audits of elections in a number of states that have voting procedures and equipment that do not measure up to "best practices," to use the long-since-stale management consultants' term. The possibility of direct interference by the Russian government doesn't strike me as one that needs to be high on the list.

Democrats don't need to worry, though. The way it's already unfolding, the Trump Family Business Administration will have plenty of dubious foreign intrigue going on for us to complain about.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm married to a foreign national, of the Austrian variety. Who knows what strange foreigner ideas she may be insinuating into my head by subliminal recordings or whatever? Also, Austria was OCCUPIED BY THE RUSSIANS for ten years after the Second World War!!!

Here is a useful discussion from Robert Fitrakis for the real reasons we need some recounts and audits, Did Trump Win Through Vote Flipping and Vote Stripping? The Real News 11/26/2016:

Gerald Sussman wrote about the side of "democracy promotion" efforts not typically highlighted in foreign affairs reporting by US corporate media, The Myths of ‘Democracy Assistance’: U.S. Political Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe Monthly Review 58:7 (Dec 2006)

U.S. interventionism, except perhaps in the Second World War, has shown little respect for democratic principles, yet its foreign policy rhetoric, a backhanded tribute to the sensibilities of ordinary people, is always cast in that light. Whereas the U.S. has relied extensively on providing aid to dictatorial regimes throughout the world (a policy it has yet to abandon), in a communication-intensive world environment, it is now considered more politically legitimate to accomplish its neoliberal ends through the discursive framing of “democracy assistance.” With respect to historic Anglo-American designs on Russia and eastern Europe, nothing much has changed since British foreign secretary Lord Balfour declared in 1918 (the year of the British-French-U.S. military intervention in Russia): “The only thing which interests me in the Caucasus is the railway line which delivers oil from Baku to Batumi. The natives can cut each other to pieces for all I care.”

Beyond the broad geopolitical strategy of controlling the oil reserves that beckon foreign intervention in the states configuring the region of the Caspian Sea to central Asia and asserting permanent military dominion over the area, there is the allure of new frontiers for transnational capitalist penetration. The need for political legitimacy and domination embodied in the benign expression “democracy assistance” is shared by a range of transnational corporate and state interests and their local compradores, which rely on public relations propagandists and electioneering mercenaries in hopes of establishing footholds in the region. Rick Ridder, a political consultant and former president of the International Association of Political Consultants, said in reference to the consulting gold rush in Mexico in preparation for the 2000 elections in that country: “If there’s one thing Americans can teach Mexicans it is this: Democracy is a booming business.” [my emphasis]

Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman wrote about this over a week ago, Did the GOP Strip & Flip the 2016 Selection? FreePress.org 11/18/2016. And they did a more recent one, Why the U.S. State Department would not certify Trump’s election as legitimate FreePress.org 11/20/2016.

And how is our Democratic President approaching this problem for the 2016 election results? As President Bipartisanship, of course! Bryan Logan, Obama administration throws cold water on vote recount effort Business Insider 11/25/2016; David Sanger, U.S. Officials Defend Integrity of Vote, Despite Hacking Fears New York Times 11/25/2016. From Sanger's report:

In its statement, the administration said, “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect.”

That was a reference to the breach of the Democratic National Committee’s email system, and the leak of emails from figures like John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

“Nevertheless, we stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” it added.

Supporters of Mrs. Clinton have enthusiastically backed the notion of challenging the results in the three states as a last-ditch effort to reverse Mr. Trump’s clear majority in the Electoral College. They have seized on suggestions by some computer scientists that the states, which were crucial to Mr. Trump’s victory, need to manually review paper ballots to ensure the election was not hacked. [my emphasis]

That's some technically admirable diplomatic hedging. "Compromises" could mean hacking. Or maybe not.

How many sides of his own coalition does Obama shaft in that statement? Those who worry about careless accusations about Russian subversion? Check. Clinton supporters both reluctant and hardcore who want to see recounts? Check. Advocates for greater integrity in the voting machine processes, transparency and accountability? Check.

The incoming Trump Family Business Administration? Uh, no. I'm sure they're happy to have the lame-duck Democratic President side with them on this one.

Election postmortems and reading the tea leaves on the Trump Administration

Serena Kutchinsky does an interview with the former Greek Finance Minister and one of the leaders of the DiEM, the left pro-EU activist gorup, Yanis Varoufakis: After Donald Trump’s awful victory, the left must be more ambitious New Statesman 11/13/2016

Varoufakis doesn't seem to be experiencing any trouble navigating the class vs. race/gender/identity dichotomy that is so vexing the left and center-left in the US in looking at what can be learned from the Trump election.

The narrative is already becoming that Trump managed to exploit a feeling of resentment among white working class men, to fuel his victory. Is this “whitelash” comparable to the anti-immigrant sentiment that helped swing the Brexit vote?

This is a prime example of how the left tends to over rationalise its defeats. Trump did mobilise blue collar voters but that was not enough on its own. What I am astounded by is the number of Latinos who voted for him, and the people who switched their political religion from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Anyone who voted for Obama last time can't be easily dismissed as a racist. The political scene is being shaken to its foundations in a way the world has not experienced since the Thirties.

Comparisons have been drawn between Trump and the fascist leaders of the Thirties such as Hitler. Is he a neo fascist?

Hitler was not a fascist, he was a Nazi. The best comparison with Trump, for me, is the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943. Mussolini and Trump have stylistic similarities in terms of their image and choice of rhetoric, but the connection between them runs much deeper. Mussolini was the man who introduced social security to Italy. He implemented welfare reforms that directly benefited the working class to harness their support to a divisive and ultra nationalist movement. There is nothing comforting about the thought of living under a new Mussolini, but we need to keep our historical comparisons as close to the truth as possible.

The comment, "Hitler was not a fascist, he was a Nazi," refers to the long-running analytic discussion about whether Hitler's regime and movement represented a form of fascism or whether it was different variety of dictatorship. Varoufakis obviously takes the latter view. (I should note that Varoufakis is taking at face value Trump's claims that he opposed the Iraq War, which he did not, at least not initially.)

Robert Kuttner, The Vulnerability of Trump’s Fake Populism The American Prospect 11/15/2016 makes a point that is relevant to early economic policies of the NSDAP (Nazi) regime in Germany:

... Trump could well produce an economic boom in the near term. The stock market certainly seems to think so.

He is very likely to cut a three-part deal with House Speaker Paul Ryan and company: Massive tax cuts. Reductions in social spending, perhaps by block granting food stamps and Medicaid. And increases in infrastructure spending. As guys like me have been writing for a long time, this is precisely the moment to increase outlays for deficit-financed infrastructure because interest rates are low and there is no sign of inflation.

His tax reductions will be advertised as supply-side cuts, but in reality their impact will be Keynesian. Larger deficits will stimulate demand, as will infrastructure spending.

Republican control of the Congressional Budget Office means that the deficit impact of tax cuts can be disguised with an old trick known as dynamic scoring. Supposedly, the cuts will produce so much growth that the revenue loss will be made up.

The deficit hawks will be thrown under the bus, but so what? A year from now, the unemployment rate could well be lower. This is a case of Trump selectively stealing the clothes of progressives on selected economic issues and it could work, at least for a year or two.

Laurie Penny punctures one of the favorite media and liberal-concern-troll narratives about the election (On the election of Donald J Trump New Statesman 11/09/2016):

When they told liberals and journalists and policymakers and anyone with the cheek to suggest that maybe immigrants weren’t the problem that we weren’t listening to “ordinary people”, they meant we weren’t listening to white people. When they told us we didn’t pay enough attention to “real Americans”, they meant to white Americans. When they told us that we didn’t take their concerns seriously, they meant that we didn’t agree with them. “White working class” voters have been given plenty of airtime in this election, just as they were in the EU Referendum, including in the mainstream press that they claim to despise, because sober facts don’t sell adverts like a mean-drunk playing with matches next to an arsenal of incoherent rage.

John Judis has paid close attention to the history of populism. He gives his take on the election in Why Trump Won - And Clinton Lost - And What It Could Mean for the Country and the Parties TPM 11/11/2016. "There is rarely one single reason why a presidential candidate wins an election. The results are 'overdetermined,' as Freud used to say of the content of dreams," he writes.

That's more than a rhetorical flourish. There are many elements that go into a Presidential vote. And there are several necessary perspectives to take into account in looking at such an event: the issues, the demographics, the messaging, the targeting of advertisements and get-out-the-vote operations, the performance of the news media.

Judis calls attention to this important aspect:

Presidential candidates from a party that has held the White House for the prior two terms have an uphill battle winning the White House. That was true of Richard Nixon in 1960, Al Gore in 2000, and John McCain in 2008. And that’s the case even when the incumbent president remains popular, as Eisenhower was in 1960 and Bill Clinton in 2000. The reason is that the candidate is burdened by many grievances against the regime in power that have accumulated over the last eight years and that allow the opposition candidate to run as the agent of change. Even though most Americans now recognize the Eisenhower years as a blessing, John Kennedy could still win on a promise to “get the country moving again.”

Trump was able to exploit that vulnerability with his promise to “make America great again.” And it showed up in the polls in the electorate’s desire for change. Nationally, 39 percent of the electorate –the first choice among four options – said “can bring change” was the quality that mattered most, and they went for Trump by 83 to 14 percent.

Clinton was hobbled by the third term curse. If she sought to distinguish herself clearly from President Obama by promising change, she risked aliening his followers; but if she didn’t distinguish herself from his administration, she appeared merely to offer “more of the same.”

Masha Gessen has a grim initial evaluation, its general perspective represented in the title, Autocracy: Rules for Survival NYR Daily 11/10/2016.

Mike Lux tries to separate out some of the factors in the overdetermined election result, The Years of Living Dangerously Huffington Post 11/14/2016. This is also a very important caution for his fellow Democrats, "I fear that the conventional wisdom gurus in our party think we will be able to just keep doing business as usual, never changing their tactics in the face of a radically dangerous president and Republican party." And also this: "We have to accept the fact as a party that the partisanship in this country has become so deeply ingrained that no matter how horrible the Republican candidate is, we are just never going to pick up very many Republican votes. "

Josh Marshall reminds us of how much Trump Administration will enthusiastically embrace the concept Jamie Galbraith describes as the Predator State. Including old-fashioned graft, legal and possibly otherwise, The Corruption Will Be Endless TPM 11/13/2016.

In a related point, Trump biographer David Cay Johnston in this October interview talks about Trump's shady connections to organized crime figures, Getting to Grips with the Trump Phenomenon New Economic Thinking 10/04/2016:

R.W. Johnson reflects a bit on the demographics and sociology of the Trump voters, Trump: Some Numbers London Review of Books Online 11/14/2016.

The process of staffing the Trump Administration is understandably attracting a great deal of attention and speculation. David Dayen analyzes what a scary picture that presents, Donald Trump Dredged Up His Cabinet From the Bottom of the Conservative Swamp The Nation 11/14/2016.