What to do with that horrifying knowledge
Paul Krugman on what an illegitimate election this was.
The C.I.A., according to The Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump. This has actually been obvious for months, but the agency was reluctant to state that conclusion before the election out of fear that it would be seen as taking a political role.
Meanwhile, the F.B.I. went public 10 days before the election, dominating headlines and TV coverage across the country with a letter strongly implying that it might be about to find damning new evidence against Hillary Clinton — when it turned out, literally, to have found nothing at all.
Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?
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So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.
The question now is what to do with that horrifying knowledge in the months and years ahead.
It is. Most of the people I know are trying desperately to figure out an answer, with little success.
Krugman notes that the response of many in the news media is to try to normalize it.
This might — might — be justified if there were any prospect of responsible, restrained behavior on the part of the next president. In reality, however, it’s clear that Mr. Trump — whose personal conflicts of interest are unprecedented, and quite possibly unconstitutional — intends to move U.S. policy radically away from the preferences of most Americans, including a pronounced pro-Russian shift in foreign policy.
In other words, nothing that happened on Election Day or is happening now is normal. Democratic norms have been and continue to be violated, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this reality is, in effect, complicit in the degradation of our republic. This president will have a lot of legal authority, which must be respected. But beyond that, nothing: he doesn’t deserve deference, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Not normalizing it is one thing to do with the horrifying knowledge. Trump makes that unpleasantly easy by acting like such a terrible human being at all times.
How long will it take to investigate his profoundly unconstitutional conflicts of interest? Too bad the Founders did not think to add a terrible human being clause.
I’d like to know more about Wikileaks’s involvement, too. For one thing, who the fuck appointed them to be the Guardians Of Truth?
I have a couple of Bernie Bros feeding into my Twitter timeline. It was interesting how, after Sanders dropped out, the Clinton hatred got ramped up to 11. These people (and all those they retweeted) had no interest whatsoever in Trump’s excesses; to them, he was a sideshow, not worthy of comment. Clinton was evil incarnate and had to be stopped, no matter the consequences.
These people leapt on to the release of emails like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Leave aside for the moment whether any of their claims were actually justified by the contents of those emails, not one of them asked whether ALL emails had been released that Wikileaks had in their possession. In other words, noone wondered whether or not Wikileaks themselves had an agenda, and were maybe not the paragons of impartiality that far too many people seem to assume they are.
One possible weapon in this new cyberwar might be to mobilize some of our IT talent to create a forum for tracking meme sources. This information could be widely shared and demands made on the media when the source is either found to be malicious or can’t be determined. Indeterminate sources need to identified as such. Democracy will from now on live or die by the ad buy. Go after it and understand that politics is now and has always been a marketing project and the bad guys have known that for a long time.
It is realistic to think that Trump supporters, most of them, voted for him despite knowing that he is a terrible human being. The victors do not mind being victims. Too bad, because we are all getting eaten.