Not at all surprising. 12/16/16 Slate:
But Trump didn’t lose. Despite spending a year of the world’s time preening and pouting, blubbering when things didn’t go his way or filling screens with his bulbous shit-eating smirk whenever they did, Trump won. And for liberals, who had assumed along with Hillary Clinton that the world was theirs to inherit, this needed an explanation—one that had nothing to do with their own failures, one that could be safely localized somewhere distant, malevolent, and unknowable. Russia, perhaps. Enter Eric Garland.
On Dec. 11, fueled by prescription amphetamines and craft beer, Eric Garland disgorged a sprawling 127-tweet thread explaining to America and the world exactly what was going on, how Russia put Trump in power, and what they could do about it. And the thing was a sensation. Every so often, a text comes along that perfectly captures the mood of a certain section of society at a certain time, something that screams their pain for them in ways they can’t quite manage to do themselves. Garland’s tweet thread is that common roar of establishment liberalism in the age of Trump. It’s been retweeted thousands of times, gaining fawning praise from much of the liberal intelligentsia.
Clearly something horrifying has happened to America’s great liberal intellects. One moment they were yapping along in the train of a historic political movement; now, ragged and destitute, they wander with lolling tongues in search of anything that might explain their new world to them. This is, after all, how cults get started. Cultists will venerate any messianic mediocrity and any set of half-baked spiritual dogmas; it’s not the overt content that matters but the security of knowing. If Trump’s devoted hype squad of pustulent, oleaginous neo-Nazis can now be euphemized as the “alt-right,” the Eichenwalds and Jefferys of the world might have turned themselves into something similar: an alt-center, pushing its own failed political doctrine with all the same vehemence, idiocy, and spleen. So it’s strange, but not surprising, that so many people would sing the praises of Garland’s masterpiece, because it is absolutely the worst piece of political writing ever inflicted on any public in human history.
This guy wants the fascist wing of the Democratic Party to face reality as to why they lost. I would prefer that they keep living in their little bubble, wasting Soros' money.
It’s possible that the Democratic National Committee leaks were caused by Russian hackers—but given that the hack took place thanks to John Podesta clicking on a link in a phishing email, displaying all the technological savvy of someone’s aunt extremely excited by the new iPhone she thinks she’s won, it could have been anyone. The “leaked” CIA concerns over Russian meddling were quite clearly leaked deliberately by the CIA itself, an organization not exactly famed for its commitment to the truth; they’re the conclusions of an investigation that hasn’t even happened yet and on which there’s no consensus even among the gang of petty Caligulas that calls itself the intelligence community. Still, it’s possible. Countries sometimes try to exert influence in each other’s internal affairs; it’s part of great-power politics, and it’s been happening for a very long time. When Americans meddled in Russia’s elections, it was by securing victory for Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s very own Donald Trump, a man who had sent in tanks to shell his own parliament. Leaked cables suggest that Hillary Clinton’s own State Department interfered with the political process in Haiti by suppressing a rise in the minimum wage. And American involvement in the politics of Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran was mostly through military coups, sponsored by none other than the CIA. There was no question of these countries repeating their elections; anyone the generals didn’t like was tortured to death. Next to the mountain of corpses produced by America’s history of fixing foreign elections, a few hacked emails are entirely insignificant.
No comments:
Post a Comment