Somewhat laid-back
I’m still wondering why the official reaction to Putin’s role in the recent US election is so…mellow. The Guardian reports that so is former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The former CIA director and defense secretary Robert Gates has criticised the Obama administration and congressional leaders of both parties for a “somewhat laid-back” response to the discovery of Russian interference in the US presidential election.
Not a thing to be laid-back about, wouldn’t you think?
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Gates said a “thinly disguised” operation by Russia had aimed to undermine the credibility of the American election and was to weaken Hillary Clinton.
“Given the unprecedented nature of it and the magnitude of the effort, I think people seem to have been somewhat laid-back about it,” he said.
…
Gates said he was unsure if the aim was to swing the election to Trump.
“Whether it was intended to help one or other candidate, I don’t know,” he said. “But I think it clearly was aimed at discrediting our elections and I think it was aimed certainly at weakening Mrs Clinton.”
If it aimed to weaken Clinton then it necessarily aimed to swing the election to Trump. You can’t do the first without doing the second. You can’t throw a lighted match onto a gasoline-soaked pile of junk without aiming to start a fire.
Gates worked for Republican and Democratic presidents, as CIA director under George HW Bush and secretary of defense under George W Bush and Obama. Asked by NBC host Chuck Todd if the White House, leaders of both parties and Trump had shown enough urgency, he answered flatly: “No.”
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On Friday, Obama told a press conference his administration had not acted during the election because it did not want to appear partisan. It has been reported that the White House expected Hillary Clinton to win.
Because it what?
He’s a Democrat! He’s not a Republican! He campaigned for Clinton! Not appearing “partisan” is not an option in that situation.
Gates said Russia had carried out “a thinly disguised, covert operation intended to discredit the American election and to basically allow the Russians to communicate to the rest of the world that our elections are corrupt, incompetent, rigged, whatever, and therefore no more honest than anybody else’s in the world, including theirs”.
And to make us look like pathetic bumbling idiots, and by god he succeeded.
I grew up in a Russian family, Russian was my first language, and I’ve lived in the US since forever, but post-Joe McCarthy. I’ve always thought the “better dead than Red” testerical nonsense in this country to be evidence of softening of the brain.
I mean, the Russians idea of a national sport is watching a chess match. Weird, yes. Dangerous, no.
And now this. This, take it from one who knows, is different. There’s a guy who made his bones running the KGB. The KGB, godammit! Americans seem to have no concept what that means. You’ve got to be some kind of intelligent extraterrestrial fungus without a shred of human feeling to rise to the top of that heap. That’s Putin.
And that’s the guy who’s messing with democracies all over the Western world, not just the US, although that’s bad enough.
That’s an existential threat on the order of climate change to the US way of life. The only appropriate reaction is to charge at the danger with your hair on fire.
Instead we have Obama letting us know that he did tell Putin to “cut it out.” Oh, and time for vacay now. Not his problem. So long, suckers.
This is beyond bizarre.
[…] a comment by quixote on Somewhat […]
I wonder if the “laid-back” reaction isn’t driven by practical considerations.
What is there to be gained from a “strong” reaction? There’s not much to be gained from, say, threatening sanctions that Congress won’t approve and the next administration won’t carry out. Or from making a bunch of tough talk that Trump is going to undermine.
It may be that a strong public reaction only succeeds in (1) announcing to the world how badly Putin fucked us, allowing him to look good; and (2) convincing Trump that all these warnings he’s getting about how Putin ain’t his friend are just a bunch of sour grapes from pissed-off Democrats trying to undermine his election.
Which sucks, of course. It absolutely sucks that Obama has to play this game of making nice-nice with Trump in the hopes that it will allow him to get a small amount of influence.
(There could, of course, be a strong reprisal in the works already, of the kind that will hurt Putin, that he’ll know came from the U.S., but that the U.S. won’t publicly acknowledge. Like a nice hack showing how some of Putin’s plutocrat buddies have been screwing over the Russian people. That would be a nice going-away present from Obama, and still send the “don’t fuck with us” message.)