But this dangerous man is incapable of bottling up his dark self for a full 90 minutes. And in the end, he finally crosses the one political barrier he had yet to fully cross — trashing democracy itself, we the people.
.. The remaining enablers — Reince Priebus, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence — had to know that things were bad when the Republican presidential nominee was tougher on the sainted Ronald Reagan than on the Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin.
.. And they had to know the game was over when another 3 a.m. tweet was blasted out by Trump, with his conclusion that he won, because of online polls that could not pass the vetting of Baghdad Bob.
.. He’s become a very tired and confused 70-year-old man feeding nuts to squirrels in the park of his delusions.
.. Steve Bannon, the former head of a fabulist, far-right website — Breitbart. Bannon is not much of a Republican.
.. “I’m a Leninist,” he said in a conversation recounted by Ronald Radosh in The Daily Beast. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
.. His debate-night threat, holding the validity of the election itself hostage, is no surprise. Trump is bereft of patriotism, and seems to hate the country he wants to lead. He’s been talking down this nation and its most cherished institutions throughout his campaign. Time and again, he would rather defend Russia than the United States.
.. He’s gone after free speech — that would be the right granted in the amendment just before the only one he knows — threatening his enemies in the press. That same first amendment ensures that a religious test will not be used to judge us — another thing he has thrown to the side.
.. But in the final debate, his true persona was there for all to see — a self-hating American.
Putin, Syria, and Why Moscow has Gone War-Crazy
If nothing else, the spectre of a conflict with Washington served as retroactive justification for the Kremlin’s policies, and a ready-made excuse for why the Russian economy had sunk into recession. At home, Russia’s ostracization was spun as a sign of its righteousness.
.. According to a deeply informed new book on Putin and his court, “All the Kremlin’s Men,” by the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, the idea, as Putin and his speechwriters had imagined it, was to “brand isis as the new Third Reich.” Putin envisioned a grand coalition, Zygar writes—just like in the good old days of the Second World War—that would bring Russia out of its isolation; what’s more, Putin seemed to hope that, by “defeating Islamic terrorism, the Russians and Americans would finally succeed in creating a new world order.”
.. The ceasefire agreement fell apart after U.S. forces killed dozens of Syrian troops in a bombing raid—a mistaken strike, U.S. officials said—and a U.N. humanitarian-aid convoy was hit in an air attack outside Aleppo, leaving twenty people dead.
.. The collapse of the Kerry-Lavrov deal appears to have convinced Putin once and for all of the pointlessness of dealing with the United States, and prompted him to indulge the more maximalist of his anti-American urges.
.. The program had been functionally dormant for some time, but Putin got rid of it with a flourish, producing a fantasy list of demands—which included the U.S. reducing its military presence in nato member states, lifting the sanctions imposed over Ukraine, and paying compensation for lost revenue it caused—that would need to be met before the program could be renewed. The absurdity and impossibility was the very point, an unsubtle message to Obama: don’t even bother trying to mend this relationship—it’s hopeless. There was a message embedded here for Obama’s successor, too: this is the hole you’ll have to dig out of if you want anything constructive from me.
.. Even so, these moves might have garnered relatively little attention if not for the fact that the Russian state also appeared to be preparing its citizens for doomsday. On Monday, it was reported that the governor of St. Petersburg signed an order that guaranteed residents of the city three hundred grams of bread per day in the case of war. Then a Russian news site published a report saying that state officials had been advised to bring their relatives—in particular, children studying abroad or parents living elsewhere—back to Russia. It was around then that a friend sent me a link to a Facebook thread in which some friends in Moscow were discussing how to respond to air-raid sirens and where the closet bomb shelters were in their neighborhoods.
.. “But what does Russia have? It has nuclear weapons. So it must constantly convince the United States, and the West as a whole, that it is a little crazy.” In other words, a measured dose of faux insanity is being used to make up for a gaping disparity in conventional military and economic strength.
.. a cover operation: a way to make a lot of noise while the Kremlin goes about creating a lot of new facts on the ground, whether in Syria or the Baltics. Putin likely believes—perhaps correctly—that, for reasons of both character and political reality, Obama is unlikely to risk a potentially dangerous escalation with Russia during his final months of office
.. That gives Putin three months to work through his geopolitical wish list, trying to set in place a number of faits accomplis that will be hard for the next U.S. President to overturn.
.. Russia recently moved its advanced S-300 anti-aircraft system to Syria.
.. The goal, instead, is to confuse and discredit the American election process, in an attempt to weaken the country’s institutions and the likely future Clinton Presidency.
.. Although the Russian self-image of a scorned and offended partner is, in part, a cynical pose, it belies a very real sense of injury and betrayal. “Everything that Russia has done is a reaction—and an answer—to the United States’ unwillingness to speak to Russia as an equal,”
.. He was nearly hysterical, but his answer was truthful: Putin’s foreign policy at this moment is, in large part, about avenging the wrongs inflicted on Russia over the past decades, the insults and grievances borne by a generation. It may be a tall order to achieve by January 20th of next year. But Putin may certainly try.
Stone ‘happy to cooperate’ with FBI on WikiLeaks, Russian hacking probes
Several months ago, Stone predicted an October surprise that would disrupt Clinton’s campaign and his recent Twitter posts suggested Podesta would soon be facing scandal, including an August update stating, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary”
Speaking to reporters earlier this week on Clinton’s airplane, Podesta confirmed he’d spoken to the FBI on Sunday as it probed the criminal hack into his email and he leveled a charge that Stone had “advance knowledge” of the document leaks.
.. former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell said during a conference call organized by the Clinton campaign that several of the GOP nominee’s former staffers “may be in this more deeply and may have relationships with Russia, perhaps financial relationships or other relationships and they’re working on behalf of the Russians to get this material out and spread this around.”
.. last Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and director of national intelligence James Clapper issued an unprecedented statement signaling with high confidence that the Russian government was trying to meddle in the U.S. presidential election via cyber espionage.
.. “The way that DOJ works, once they start looking at something they don’t look at very narrow discrete questions when there are other related questions swirling around. They try to get the rest of the picture,” said Matthew Miller, a former Obama administration Justice Department spokesman. “It stands to reason,” he added, “they’d already be investigating the Trump campaign.”
.. “There’s no way they’d do that before the election,”
.. Stone said what’s out so far is just “small potatoes compared to what I’m told is coming.”
What the WikiLeaks Emails Say About Clinton
Conservatives will see corruption and liberals will see corporatism and expedience, but the exchanges simply expose the candidate who’s been there all along.
They capture a candidate, and a campaign, that seems in private exactly as cautious, calculating, and politically flexible as they appeared to be in public. The Clinton campaign underestimated and then fretted about rival candidate Bernie Sanders, worried about Joe Biden entering the primary race and Elizabeth Warren endorsing her opponent, plotted endlessly about managing Clinton’s image in the press, took advantage of its close ties to the Obama administration and the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, and took public positions to the left of comments Clinton herself made during private paid speeches to Wall Street firms.
.. These were hacked from the accounts of John Podesta, her campaign chairman, and very few of them are from Clinton herself.
.. Those who view Clinton as hopelessly liberal, craven, and corrupt will seize, as the Trump campaign has, on her stated “dream” of “a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.
.. The most common thread in the Podesta emails, however, is that they show a political candidate being political.
.. Take the example of the Keystone pipeline. It was painfully obvious that for months, Clinton avoided taking a position on the hotly-debated energy project, perhaps in the hopes that the Obama administration would decide to kill it first. The emails bolster this theory. Once she decided to publicly oppose it, her aides wavered on how to announce it and ultimately timed it so that it would take the focus off revelations about her email server.
.. Ultimately, Clinton did not back Glass Steagall and instead argued that her more targeted Wall Street plan was more workable than Sanders’—a position that, according to another email from Schwerin, represented her actual policy belief.
.. For the significant number of people who are fed up with typical politicians, these emails won’t do Clinton any good. But at least in the batches released so far, they don’t really contradict the campaign she’s run.
.. Many of them might be discouraged to see, as Clinton herself acknowledged in a paid speech, “the sausage being made.”
.. Though anti-Clintonites on the right and left may find their suspicions about Clinton confirmed, there’s nothing in the emails that would provide them new lines of criticism—or provide new sources of worry to her allies.