New You Can't Trust

The headlines on March 21 told about how President Trump's security advisors had written "DO NOT CONGRATULATE PUTIN" across the top of his briefing but that the President congratulated Putin anyway. He was also instructed to admonish Putin about the poisoning of a Russian living in England.

The fact that Trump ignored this advice was painted as more evidence that Trump is soft on Putin and possibly owes his position to the Russian. When Trump fired his national security advisor a few days later, it was speculated that it was because the NSA had condemned Russia.

Things look very different a week later. While it is seldom mentioned, Trump's new pick for NSA, John Bolton, takes a harder line on Russia and it's clients (particularly Iran).

Trump also shut down a Russian embassy and expelled 60 diplomats.

What's more, we now know that the phone call between Trump and Putin was more than a simple congratulations. During the election campaign Putin had shown footage of a new missile system that can evade US anti-missile technology. The footage showed the missile striking Florida, about where Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort is. Trump pushed back against this cautioning, "If you want a new arms race, I'll give you one. And I'll win."

None of this sounds like the actions of someone who is soft on Putin or who Putin can blackmail.

We don't know if the original leak included the nature of the entire phone call or only the factoid that Trump ignored the "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" with the implication that Trump was encouraging Putin. Certainly the person who did the original leak knew the full contents of the call. So either important details were withheld by the leaker or by the press. Either way it was fake news - news that put an entirely different spin on the call than what actually occurred.

There are also reports that the only reason that Trump refuses to take a harder line on Putin is that he doesn't want to give the press the satisfaction of seeing him reverse a stance.

Regardless, this is just one more example of news that you can't trust.

Analytics and the Russians

Hard on the heals of the revelation that the Trump campaign used an analytics company to target ads on Facebook, Hillary Clinton suggested that the Trump campaign shared that information with the Russians.

The real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania – that is really the nub of the question. 

"So if they were getting advice from say Cambridge Analytica, or someone else, about 'OK here are the 12 voters in this town in Wisconsin – that's whose Facebook pages you need to be on to send these messages' that indeed would be very disturbing.

Let's ignore the findings of the Congressional investigation that showed that the Russian ad buys that were geographically targeted were mainly bought in 2015, well before the general election. That still leaves some big questions:

1) How is it that the Russians can spend a couple million and swing the election? Between them, the two campaigns spent over two billion dollars. How could the Russian ads possibly be so much more effective than the ones the campaigns were saturating the airwaves with?

2) The Obama campaign was a pioneer in the use of social media analytics and the Trump campaign made good use of it. Are we seriously supposed to believe that the Clinton campaign didn't use these tools, too? Come on! Hillary is asking us to believe that her campaign passed on using a major new tool.

Hillary needs to accept that she lost the election after running a bad campaign. And the press needs to stop feeding her fantasies.

Hillary's Excuses

While in India, Hillary Clinton explained her 2016 loss to Donald Trump as coming from the backward, sexist, racist part of the country.

If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn't show you is that I won the places that own two thirds of America's Gross Domestic product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don't like black people getting rights, you don't like women getting jobs, you don't want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.

She also said that she lost white women because of men.

We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.

What to make of this, besides too much chardonnay?

First, it's likely that Hillary has been saying this in private for some time and it became so natural to her that she slipped and said it in public. It's happened before. When she made her Basked of Deplorables speech in 2016, sources admitted that she'd been saying that for some time but only in private fund-raisers, not in public.

Does Hillary actually believe that the majority of white women in this country are so cowed that they vote, in private, as they've been instructed by bosses and sons? This seems a little delusional but, yes, she probably believes this.

This is really part of a trend among the Democrats that goes back to the 2004 book, What's the Matter With Kansas? This book held that the Democrats' policies were best for the people of Kansas but, because of Republican distractions, they were enticed to vote against their own best interests. In other words, Democrats didn't need to change their policies, they just needed to package them better.

Hillary's take of that in 2016 was that half (or more) of Trump's supporters were never going to vote for her because they were terrible, terrible people. Now she's refined that. She was obviously the best candidate and it was the duty of women to vote for her but all of those men wouldn't let them. This lets Hillary off the hook. She doesn't have to face that she was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign with no real message. It wasn't her fault, it was those deplorables.

The only real question is how much of the Democratic party shares that viewpoint?