Useful Idiots
by Steve
The biggest story of this post-election period isn’t the various moves Trump makes in assembling his cabinet, no matter what the internal strife demonstrates behind a Romney-versus-Giuliani potential Secretary of State selection. And it isn’t the detachment of his cabinet picks from the everyday voter he courted during the campaign. The biggest story is the emerging reality that Vladimir Putin just selected the next president of the United States.
We already knew that the American intelligence services had proof that their Russian counterparts actively hacked and undermined the Democratic Party and its campaign. We already knew that those same Russian intelligence services had the capability to affect the actual outcome in various areas of the country, where the GOP is in control of the election machinery and using hackable systems. What we suspected and didn’t know until today was that the Russian government ran a years-long disinformation campaign through GOP-allied websites to inject outright lies about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party into our social media platforms. Their task was made easier after Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber spent decades undermining the integrity of our mainstream media and government institutions. As a result, millions of low-information voters, who should be directing their rage at GOP elites, instead turned out in large numbers to vote against the one person feared by both Putin and the Koch Brothers.
The whole campaign has the makings of a classic KGB effort, which worked right under the noses of the Beltway, who were too busy chasing the latest anti-Hillary meme or absurdity from Trump.
Yet neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times can be bothered to front-page this latest news on their websites today, even though the work was produced by a Washington Post reporter buried in their Business section. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. The same Washington Post buried the work of Walter Pincus challenging the Bush administration lies in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and the same New York Times gave us five years of the Whitewater “scandal”.
Enough said. Both are now eagerly covering the Trump transition moves while virtually ignoring the fact that our national election was just rigged by a hostile power, with assistance from a real right-wing conspiracy involving the FBI, all because they hate one person.