Obama’s preëlection reticence to point out Russian interference for fear of politicizing the intelligence and his comfortable certainty of a Clinton victory will be regarded as two of the most significant errors of his Presidency.
.. President-elect Donald Trump’s obsequious fanboying of Putin recalls another element of that time. His errant admiration of Putin’s style of leadership, his naïve inability to recognize danger beneath a veneer of amity, his curt dismissal of charges of foreign espionage attempting to undermine the United States—these are a replay of the worst failings of the American left in the forties and fifties.
.. Trump appears to be incapable of recognizing the ways in which the legacy of the Cold War animates contemporary relations between the United States and Russia.
.. In much the same way that Northerners scarcely recall the privations of the Civil War, which remain charged currents, present as the weather, for Southerners, Trump (and many Americans) cannot see that Putin has not forgotten that Russia lost the Cold War or what that loss means to the people of his country.
.. He all but told the world, “When Obama goes low, we go high.”
.. In light of the current conflict between the two leaders, Putin’s plea “directly to the American people,” as he wrote, now looks not only like a masterstroke of cynicism but like a harbinger of the way in which he would turn the institutions of democracy against themselves.
.. In arguing against American intervention, Putin wrote, “No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.” Consider that statement in the context of Amnesty International’s report earlier this month that eighty-two civilians in Aleppo were shot by Assad’s Russian-backed forces in the course of a few hours.
.. point to the cynicism of Putin’s earlier argument but to the way in which the Obama Administration appeared ill-prepared to counter it. If Obama appears to have been outmaneuvered by Putin, this only increases, not diminishes, the fear that Trump will be completely outclassed.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people
Widely attributed to American author and social critic H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) but not found in his published works, so the source and original form of this expression are not known with certainty.[1]
Onion: Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning
Now, let’s get back to why we put the story in the most coveted spot on our website, thereby saying, essentially, that Miley Cyrus’ suggestive dancing is the most important thing going on in the world right now. If you clicked on the story, and all the slideshows, and all the other VMA coverage, that means you’ve probably been on CNN.com for more than seven minutes, which lowers our overall bounce rate. Do you know what that is? Sorry for getting a little technical here. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. If we can keep that bounce rate low, and show companies that people don’t just go to CNN.com but stay there, then we can go to Ford or McDonald’s or Samsonite or whatever big company you can think of and ask for the big bucks.