Overconfidence Goes Both Ways | #Russiagate @ggreenwald

The non-stop, self-serving gloating of people I generally agree with: Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Michael Tracey, et al. is unprofessional and distasteful. They are wallowing in Maddow and FoxNews territory now.

Russiagate is a grey area, not black and white, and I do not believe we have the full story. Just recall all the redactions. By focusing on other people’s “conspiracy theories” the self-imposed limits of these journalists are not centered on what actually happened, but merely on gamesmanship: proving somebody else’s claim wrong. That is always distracting and a dead end, perhaps a complete waste of time for all concerned.

Greenwald’s latest makes this bold claim, its headline:

“Robert Mueller Did Not Merely Reject the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theories. He Obliterated Them.”

But, by the article’s conclusion Greenwald equivocates a bit:

One can debate whether it’s unethical for a presidential campaign to have dirt about its opponent released by a foreign government, [YES: LET’S DEBATE THAT] though anyone who wants to argue that has to reconcile that with the fact that the DNC had a contractor working with the Ukrainian government to help Hillary Clinton win by feeding them dirt on Trump and Manafort, as well as a paid operative named Christopher Steele (remember him?) working with Russian officials to get dirt on Trump.

Yeah. It’s ALL unethical. Lock them all up. How did Democratic Party crimes make Republican Party crimes suddenly legitimate? That is the slippy slope to hell.

Greenwald also makes a few sloppy assumptions. He accepts as Gospel:

1. “Russia” hacked the DNC server. Our own NSA whistleblowers determined that impossible based on the forensic evidence. Mueller continues to push this discredited claim undermining his own credibility.

2. That Robert Mueller was objective and had no interest in protecting Trump despite being a “conservative Republican,” as well as helping to cover up the 9/11 attacks.

Greenwald et al. should know full well that only cover-up artists get appointed to “investigate” the crimes of high officials in this country. It is a 100% certainty, going back at least to the Warren Commission. Also see: Iran/Contra. The full truth is seldom revealed about anything that could undermine confidence in the American system.

There may have been a Russian “hack” of John Podesta’s email account, a phishing scam, but then again I have seen zero evidence to date that “Russia” means the GOVERNMENT of Russia, with any evidence linking that government to the crime which would stand up in an actual court. That’s the problem with this trial by media: the “facts” are never established, challenged, buttressed; they just languish in a sea of half-truths and drivel. Whether any given set of Russian hackers are loyal to Vladimir Putin or to the almighty dollar is an open question.

We still swim in a swirling grey area.

We do know that the super-genius Second Son of Trump, Eric, admitted in 2014:

“We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Do you?

Donald Trump Jr. himself famously said in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Would this Russian money appear on Trump’s secret tax returns? Did Robert Mueller ever get a look at those returns? Did he ever follow up on this money trail at all?

Just yesterday, in Greenwald’s own publication, I read quite a bit about Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his own set of Russian connections.

During the campaign, Manafort stayed in touch with these contacts through Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime employee who previously ran Manafort’s office in Kiev. The FBI assessed that Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence, the report says.

…

Manafort also met with Kilmnik in the United States twice during the campaign and gave him campaign-related information. [Why?] And Kilmnnik passed on a message from Yanukovych, who was in exile in Russia, about a peace plan that would have allowed Russia to control eastern Ukraine.

After Trump won the election, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort that the plan would need U.S. support and that it could use a “very minor wink” from Trump.

That’s a quid pro quo.

If that doesn’t constitute some greyness, Glenn, then I don’t know what to tell you. Things are not so cut and dry as some would like to pretend.

McCarthy Lives: ThinkProgress (sic) Attacks | #Propaganda

 

The Young Turks Still Lying | @TYT

 

The implosion of #Russiagate

 

US media, at least those fed content from deep state sources like CIA and NSA, has collapsed in a smoldering heap. This is a great summation of how Russiagate never really had any verification…

More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences.

This is a major structural flaw of the new fully-divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.

 

It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD

 

We’re at that next devolution: first and wrong. The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.

 

This section on DAVID CORN is kind of priceless:

In the program, however, the subject of getting facts right came up and Corn said this was not a time for reporters to be picking nits:

So Democrats getting overeager, overenthusiastic, stating things that may not be [unintelligible] true…? Well, tell me a political issue where that doesn’t happen. I think that’s looking at the wrong end of the telescope.

I wrote him later and suggested that since we’re in the press, and not really about anything except avoiding “things that may not be true,” maybe we had different responsibilities than “Democrats”? He wrote back:

Feel free to police the Trump opposition. But on the list of shit that needs to be covered these days, that’s just not high on my personal list.

 

#FireDavidCorn
#FireMaddow

 

ps

 

Mainstream media is grieving the results of the Mueller investigation.

We get it: It’s hard to swallow the fact that you spent literally years freaking out about something that never happened @RaniaKhalek #MuellerReport pic.twitter.com/6Z9JGWF38R

— In the NOW (@IntheNow_tweet) March 26, 2019

#FireMaddow #Meme

Maddow Special Report #Meme #Viral

Jimmy Dore: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is the ‘new Alex Jones’ @Maddow