Various public figures came up with some real whoppers.
Related to this point, my biggest disappointments of the year are these:
(1) Russia’s disinformation agencies don’t even make the slightest attempt to construct plausible scenarios. It’s not like a Ludlum novel where one must strip away multiple levels of brilliantly constructed propaganda to discover the truth. The Russians simply assume that we have not even the slightest bit of brainpower.
(2) Worse yet, they are right.
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The ultimate example of this is the Crowdstrike theory. The entire alleged conspiracy obviously follows Moscow’s narrative. Perhaps the two things that annoy Putin the most are Ukraine, with which Russia is at war, and Crowdstrike, a company whose specialty is frustrating Russian and other foreign hackers, and who exposed Russian hacking of the DNC. The ridiculous conspiracy theory that Crowdstrike was simply covering up Ukrainian hacking, as cut from whole cloth by Russian intelligence, kills both birds with one stone.
First of all, the entire concept makes no sense. Even if there was one specific server filled with some kind of incriminating data, nobody who wanted to hide that fact would ship the server intact to Ukraine, or anywhere else, thus taking the risk that it could be intercepted en route or found later. They would simply destroy the boards, or they could even incinerate the entire server, because servers are not very expensive, and they are not difficult to destroy.
Second, the details are all false statements that can be refuted with a simple search. Crowdstrike is not a company owned by a rich Ukrainian. In fact it has absolutely nothing to do with Ukraine or Ukrainians. It is a respected American corporation. It is located in Sunnyvale and is publicly traded on NASDAQ, so any of you can own a chunk of it if you care to. The company is so highly regarded that the Republican party contracts them for cybersecurity. Three men founded the company. None of them are Ukrainian. In fact, one of them is Russian, sort of. (He was born in Moscow to Russian parents, but is completely American.)
Not one detail of the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory is true, and not one detail of it even could be true. It’s not only an obvious lie, but it’s also a nonsensical one.
Which brings me back to my original point. If I were consulting to Russia, and had come across this theory in reviewing Russian intelligence, I would have told them to scrap it, on the assumption that nobody but a total idiot could possibly believe it. I would have given Americans credit for seeing through something so obviously false and so obviously ridiculous. I would have been wrong. Oh, my hypothetical advice to them would have been completely correct, in the sense that only a total idiot would believe it, but they already knew that …
and that is exactly what they were counting on.
The Russians obviously know America better than I do. That makes me sad. And it makes me fearful.
Perhaps Americans have too much of a tendency to believe what we wish were true about the people and the United States, and the Russians are more objective. Certainly I did not really grasp how much support Trump had in 2016, nor would I have believed how much of it he would retain after three jaw-dropping years of corruption, incompetence, and childish behavior.
I also would not have thought the Republicans would have abandoned every principle they ever had or pretended to have in order to simply hang on to power. It seems to me they are destroying their future in order to enhance their present.
But my misconceptions, of course, say far more about me than about reality. This should be an alarm bell for any decent person.
He’s our 70-year-old toddler, permanently running around with a pantload. That’s why everyone either loves or hates him and won’t budge.
“To simply hang on to power” is the only Republican principle, expect no different.