As recently as February 15, the House Oversight Committee described as one piece of “key evidence” in its impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden an “FBI Form 1023 alleging then-Vice President Joe Biden engaged in a bribery and extortion scheme and ultimately received $5 million from a Burisma executive.” About a week later, that item was scrubbed from the evidence list without comment.
Stating the obvious, but it would be great if Democrats could do a better job of making the Russia-love more of a political liability for the GOP. As Matt points out, Russia sucks as a place to live in many ways, not least of which is that if Putin doesn’t like you, he can just have you murdered. They’re classic movie villains, their soldiers commit war crimes routinely, and so on. Maybe I’m naive but it really seems like Democrats could make them pay a political price for this guilty association.
I’ve been banging my head against the wall for now 3-4 years but there’s an Occam’s razor explanation for why certain Republicans and certain members of right wing media (like Tucker) seem to be actively helping Putin; they are being paid.
I know, I know, it’s now cringe to say this. What are you full blown devotee of Rachel Maddow? Ha ha ha. But one of the unfortunate by products of Bill Barr misrepresenting the contents of the Mueller report is shift the goal posts on the “Russia stuff” from “a lot of left of center punditry about Trump and Russia is exaggerating or misrepresenting the extent of hard evidence” to “there is absolutely nothing to Trump and GOP and Russia.”
But I’m sorry there really is a lot “there”. I’ve repeated this before but a huge chunk of GOP congressmen and senators spent July 4th 2017 in Moscow (it drives me crazy Democrats don’t bring this up), NRA is in serious legal jeopardy due to financial ties, go look Madison Cawthorn and honeypot.
And in regards to Tucker. Honestly, what is a better explanation for why he’s doing what he’s doing? Did any of you watch his videos? Matt is understating how insane they are. At one point Tucker goes into a Russian McDonalds and decides to have a full meal of McDonalds in his SUV. The video is (I guess) to show how cheap McDonalds in Russia but it’s basically just him going crazy about how tasty McDonalds is and how tastes like American McDonalds. Like dude, this is actually showing the extent of American cultural and economic power. And yet it’s framed as this way Russia is so great. Like honestly, the best explanation I can think of is Russians behind Putin propaganda told him to do this. It’s basically an informercial.
Sorry, more ranty than usual. But it drives me nuts that too many Democrats and centrist pundits seem reticent or pull their punches when talking about GOP and Russia.
>Putin is already indebted to Iran for helping him out with lots of missiles and to China for being by far his country’s most important ally.<
This is the part that's the real head-scratcher for me, and pushes the GOP's embrace of Putin's Russia firmly into the realm of cognitive dissonance. It just doesn't make sense. Sure, for some reactionary Republicans of the Bannonite-Miller faction, there's the blood and soil appeal of Putin's rule. But these weirdos are hardly the whole GOP, and, more importantly, the Republican Party in its entirety is deeply hostile to Communism, and Communist China. But Russia is China's (by far!) staunchest and most important ally, providing Xi and the CCP with huge quantities of grain, hydrocarbons, minerals—and also a lethally nuked up military ally.
The GOP has become ardently pro Putin because of the personal preferences of their God-Emperor Donald Trump. But it makes no *strategic* sense whatsoever in terms of national interest (or even in terms of the narrower ideological goals of movement conservatism). The Republican Party is simply barking mad on the topic of Russia.
I've some recent first hand experience with the pro-Russia stance from some of the members of my extended family.
And while I don't think they've really thought it through much at all, the only explanation that 'connects the dots' among their disparate views is that they've basically gone isolationist and are overwhelming focused on the culture wars and making sure that 'our country isn't lost'. Justified or not, it is causing a lot of real despair.
The fact that Putin nominally touts traditional social values makes him an ally. Or at least an enemy of an enemy.
Though 10 years ago they were firmly anti-Russian and mad that Romney was being jeered at by Obama and liberals for saying that Russia was our main geopolitical adversary. So maybe there really is nothing rational connecting the dots. Maybe it's just Trump.
I have to wonder how far along things have to get before Very Serious Conservatives like Douthat, Stephens et. al. cut the crap and actively start campaigning against the KG-I mean GOP and actively campaigning FOR Democrats to utterly defeat them. The GOP is clearly in need of a reckoning and the only way the reckoning can occur is once Trump is utterly defeated and thoroughly discredited.
The analogy I like to use is that of a neighborhood. The GOP family allowed Cousin MAGA to move in. Problem is Cousin MAGA is an arsonist and burned the house down. For some strange reason Cousin MAGA now just parties in the burned out shell of the old GOP house and is probably gonna start burning the rest of the neighborhood soon. The responsible members of family GOP are standing outside talking to family Democrat about how terrible this all is. Democrat offers them a place to stay and help rebuilding their old house once Cousin MAGA is handled, but GOP just finding things to complain about like wall colors and shrubbery and making snide remarks about how really it's the poor landscaping in Democrat house that let Cousin MAGA do all this.
Anyways. Fable over. It's maddening. Kudos to the FSB for the most successful psyop ever.
First and foremost: the primary reason for Russia sympathy among the MAGA base is isolationism. “But they’re not isolationist!” Exactly, their isolationist instincts are usually not worth shit because the Republicans that actually know where the furriners’ countries are located can short-circuit them by appeals to bigotry against Muslims and China paranoia. Those don’t apply to Russia. Instead what do they hear? “TRUMP RUSSIA TRUMP RUSSIA TRUMP RUSSIA!” But Trump is good, therefore…! (Yes, they are stupid.) The other things going on are:
1: The Hunter Biden stuff is a lazy attempt to tar Joe Biden with a Trump-style embarrassment. It doesn’t seem to have worked as well as Republicans hoped, but the potential benefit of “look, their guy is a scandal-prone buffoon too!” is probably too much for them to ignore, Putin be damned.
1.5: The actual yokels/ignoramuses in national politics, such as MTG, Boebert and so on, couldn’t point Ukraine out on a map if you promised them a hundred grand to do so. Trump probably couldn’t have prior to becoming President, either. These people actually don’t have a very good idea what the US government line on foreign countries is, other than the idiot-populist-compatible “China and Muslims = bad.” They are highly suggestible due to their ignorance and petty bigotry, which is part of the same mechanism by which Trump was goaded towards interventionism by his coterie of jingoistic advisors.
2: Dem-coded media did the usual thing of crying wolf and then having a real wolf show up. Accusations of “Russian disinformation” were used so profligately since 2016 that it’s hard to get much mileage out of that stuff aside from preaching to the choir. I saw some particularly unhinged NPR-tote-bag types claiming that Putin helped orchestrate 10/7, which is asinine. This in turn acts as fodder for the negative polarization machine.
3: Don’t miss the point of the Moscow subway stuff, which is “look, it’s possible to have a subway system without smackheads and psychos.” The trains also come every minute or so during rush hour. Of course, this is the case in a lot of other countries as well, so using this as a pro-Russia talking point is equally stupid. Funny enough, the bourgeois, bicoastal Tucker is probably motivated by honest appreciation of a nice subway system, unlike his fat pickup-truck-driving Middle American viewers.
4: Pretty much all Western-aligned prestige media sources report dishonestly on Ukraine. The “well-informed American” picture of the situation in Ukraine is mostly bullshit. This makes it very easy to spin a counter-narrative of equal dishonesty. Zelensky stated recently that the Ukrainian armed forces have suffered a total of 31,000 KIA over the course of the conflict, which must have been a real howler in the Pentagon but got reported on relatively uncritically. This is also an example of why widespread total (sometimes proud) ignorance of military affairs on the part of the educated American populace is terrible for the foreign policy debate.
Tucker Carlson’s Russia peons are truly mind-bogglingly stupid. Not just in the sense that talking up an oppressive revanchist dictatorship is totally oppositional to the values he claims to espouse (and which America stands for), but also in the sense that the arguments he is making are extremely dumb. Pouting to Potemkin villages as proof of quality of life or suggesting a fortnight’s groceries for $100USD are a good deal (in a country where that represents 10% of monthly income) are asinine.
Can confirm after a trip to Poland a couple weeks ago, they are scared shitless that they are next, and firmly believe that Trump winning will make this far more likely.
A lot of Russian misinfo has legs because it’s convenient for the US right’s overall worldview as well as its political priorities. “Joe Biden is corrupt” and “this foreign country is a utopia because it’s anti-woke” validate their core beliefs in the same way that the utopian Cuba narrative validated Marxist-Leninist beliefs. Misinformation is a demand-driven phenomenon, and the FSB has gotten better at identifying what sort of narratives Americans are hungry to buy.
We’re making it too complicated; it’s the Republican version of “but her emails”. Think about what happened right before the 2020 election, and the fact that the key aspects of that Hunter Biden story turned out to be true.
Imagine: right before the election, the entire “normal” media and a bunch of guys from intelligence services deemed a negative story about Donald Trump Jr to be Russian misinformation, social media companies wouldn’t even let you link the story, then Trump won the election and the story turned out to be true. At what point would Democrats believe a story about Donald Trump Jr ACTUALLY IS Russian misinformation? At what point would a Congressional Democrat tell their voters “actually, this time . . .”?
Not to mention maybe one or two other “huge if true” Russian stories that didn’t pan out. Also, after the FISA issue and the Nunes memo mess, you have to wonder if there isn’t a very deep and real mistrust between Congressional Republicans and the FBI.
Chuck Grassley in particular disgusts me. Far from being an elder statesman, he laundered false Russia propaganda after the FBI very publicly told him not to trust it, and has yet to issue even the slightest mea culpa. It’s borderline treasonous.
"There’s a school of thought in Eastern Europe which holds that if Ukraine falls, Lithuania and Poland are inevitably next. That seems a little bit overblown to me."
Russia has all the time in the world to move to the next target - the US is not confidence inspiring in their commitment to alliance right now.
A personal anecdote: back in the early 70s, when I was a young adult, my best friend got a scholarship to study in the USSR for a semester. He was also a photographer and when he came home he showed us pictures of Moscow and in particular many of the subway stations that he'd seen. (Given the paranoia of that country, I've always wondered about this American kid taking pictures, but I suspect his handlers were making sure he was taking the "right" pictures.) After, at that point, a lifetime of anti-USSR propaganda, it was a shock to see how incredibly beautiful the city and those stations were. He didn't become an apologist for the USSR, since as a poli sci major he was quite aware of the history which it seems Tucker isn't, but he definitely had a respect for the culture that built those things.
"There’s a school of thought in Eastern Europe which holds that if Ukraine falls, Lithuania and Poland are inevitably next. That seems a little bit overblown to me." That seems entirely reasonable to me -especially if Trump has the ability to hamstring NATO, we'll have a major land war in Eastern Europe in a decade. And you don't have to take my "right-wing by the standards of Slow Boring readers" word on it, Poland and the Baltics seem to be actively preparing for that possibility.
Stating the obvious, but it would be great if Democrats could do a better job of making the Russia-love more of a political liability for the GOP. As Matt points out, Russia sucks as a place to live in many ways, not least of which is that if Putin doesn’t like you, he can just have you murdered. They’re classic movie villains, their soldiers commit war crimes routinely, and so on. Maybe I’m naive but it really seems like Democrats could make them pay a political price for this guilty association.
I’ve been banging my head against the wall for now 3-4 years but there’s an Occam’s razor explanation for why certain Republicans and certain members of right wing media (like Tucker) seem to be actively helping Putin; they are being paid.
I know, I know, it’s now cringe to say this. What are you full blown devotee of Rachel Maddow? Ha ha ha. But one of the unfortunate by products of Bill Barr misrepresenting the contents of the Mueller report is shift the goal posts on the “Russia stuff” from “a lot of left of center punditry about Trump and Russia is exaggerating or misrepresenting the extent of hard evidence” to “there is absolutely nothing to Trump and GOP and Russia.”
But I’m sorry there really is a lot “there”. I’ve repeated this before but a huge chunk of GOP congressmen and senators spent July 4th 2017 in Moscow (it drives me crazy Democrats don’t bring this up), NRA is in serious legal jeopardy due to financial ties, go look Madison Cawthorn and honeypot.
And in regards to Tucker. Honestly, what is a better explanation for why he’s doing what he’s doing? Did any of you watch his videos? Matt is understating how insane they are. At one point Tucker goes into a Russian McDonalds and decides to have a full meal of McDonalds in his SUV. The video is (I guess) to show how cheap McDonalds in Russia but it’s basically just him going crazy about how tasty McDonalds is and how tastes like American McDonalds. Like dude, this is actually showing the extent of American cultural and economic power. And yet it’s framed as this way Russia is so great. Like honestly, the best explanation I can think of is Russians behind Putin propaganda told him to do this. It’s basically an informercial.
Sorry, more ranty than usual. But it drives me nuts that too many Democrats and centrist pundits seem reticent or pull their punches when talking about GOP and Russia.
>Putin is already indebted to Iran for helping him out with lots of missiles and to China for being by far his country’s most important ally.<
This is the part that's the real head-scratcher for me, and pushes the GOP's embrace of Putin's Russia firmly into the realm of cognitive dissonance. It just doesn't make sense. Sure, for some reactionary Republicans of the Bannonite-Miller faction, there's the blood and soil appeal of Putin's rule. But these weirdos are hardly the whole GOP, and, more importantly, the Republican Party in its entirety is deeply hostile to Communism, and Communist China. But Russia is China's (by far!) staunchest and most important ally, providing Xi and the CCP with huge quantities of grain, hydrocarbons, minerals—and also a lethally nuked up military ally.
The GOP has become ardently pro Putin because of the personal preferences of their God-Emperor Donald Trump. But it makes no *strategic* sense whatsoever in terms of national interest (or even in terms of the narrower ideological goals of movement conservatism). The Republican Party is simply barking mad on the topic of Russia.
I've some recent first hand experience with the pro-Russia stance from some of the members of my extended family.
And while I don't think they've really thought it through much at all, the only explanation that 'connects the dots' among their disparate views is that they've basically gone isolationist and are overwhelming focused on the culture wars and making sure that 'our country isn't lost'. Justified or not, it is causing a lot of real despair.
The fact that Putin nominally touts traditional social values makes him an ally. Or at least an enemy of an enemy.
Though 10 years ago they were firmly anti-Russian and mad that Romney was being jeered at by Obama and liberals for saying that Russia was our main geopolitical adversary. So maybe there really is nothing rational connecting the dots. Maybe it's just Trump.
I have to wonder how far along things have to get before Very Serious Conservatives like Douthat, Stephens et. al. cut the crap and actively start campaigning against the KG-I mean GOP and actively campaigning FOR Democrats to utterly defeat them. The GOP is clearly in need of a reckoning and the only way the reckoning can occur is once Trump is utterly defeated and thoroughly discredited.
The analogy I like to use is that of a neighborhood. The GOP family allowed Cousin MAGA to move in. Problem is Cousin MAGA is an arsonist and burned the house down. For some strange reason Cousin MAGA now just parties in the burned out shell of the old GOP house and is probably gonna start burning the rest of the neighborhood soon. The responsible members of family GOP are standing outside talking to family Democrat about how terrible this all is. Democrat offers them a place to stay and help rebuilding their old house once Cousin MAGA is handled, but GOP just finding things to complain about like wall colors and shrubbery and making snide remarks about how really it's the poor landscaping in Democrat house that let Cousin MAGA do all this.
Anyways. Fable over. It's maddening. Kudos to the FSB for the most successful psyop ever.
I feel like this is an example of where left-of-center discomfort of singing America's praises has come back to bite us.
It shouldn't be uncomfortable to describe Russia as a shithole country. Because it is.
This is just the "flood the zone with shit" strategy at work.
These haters just need something new to talk about every day, and it doesn't need to hold up. The fact checks don't make it into their bubble.
Instead, low-information voters are left with the impression "Every day I hear details of Biden committing more crimes. Most corrupt president ever."
First and foremost: the primary reason for Russia sympathy among the MAGA base is isolationism. “But they’re not isolationist!” Exactly, their isolationist instincts are usually not worth shit because the Republicans that actually know where the furriners’ countries are located can short-circuit them by appeals to bigotry against Muslims and China paranoia. Those don’t apply to Russia. Instead what do they hear? “TRUMP RUSSIA TRUMP RUSSIA TRUMP RUSSIA!” But Trump is good, therefore…! (Yes, they are stupid.) The other things going on are:
1: The Hunter Biden stuff is a lazy attempt to tar Joe Biden with a Trump-style embarrassment. It doesn’t seem to have worked as well as Republicans hoped, but the potential benefit of “look, their guy is a scandal-prone buffoon too!” is probably too much for them to ignore, Putin be damned.
1.5: The actual yokels/ignoramuses in national politics, such as MTG, Boebert and so on, couldn’t point Ukraine out on a map if you promised them a hundred grand to do so. Trump probably couldn’t have prior to becoming President, either. These people actually don’t have a very good idea what the US government line on foreign countries is, other than the idiot-populist-compatible “China and Muslims = bad.” They are highly suggestible due to their ignorance and petty bigotry, which is part of the same mechanism by which Trump was goaded towards interventionism by his coterie of jingoistic advisors.
2: Dem-coded media did the usual thing of crying wolf and then having a real wolf show up. Accusations of “Russian disinformation” were used so profligately since 2016 that it’s hard to get much mileage out of that stuff aside from preaching to the choir. I saw some particularly unhinged NPR-tote-bag types claiming that Putin helped orchestrate 10/7, which is asinine. This in turn acts as fodder for the negative polarization machine.
3: Don’t miss the point of the Moscow subway stuff, which is “look, it’s possible to have a subway system without smackheads and psychos.” The trains also come every minute or so during rush hour. Of course, this is the case in a lot of other countries as well, so using this as a pro-Russia talking point is equally stupid. Funny enough, the bourgeois, bicoastal Tucker is probably motivated by honest appreciation of a nice subway system, unlike his fat pickup-truck-driving Middle American viewers.
4: Pretty much all Western-aligned prestige media sources report dishonestly on Ukraine. The “well-informed American” picture of the situation in Ukraine is mostly bullshit. This makes it very easy to spin a counter-narrative of equal dishonesty. Zelensky stated recently that the Ukrainian armed forces have suffered a total of 31,000 KIA over the course of the conflict, which must have been a real howler in the Pentagon but got reported on relatively uncritically. This is also an example of why widespread total (sometimes proud) ignorance of military affairs on the part of the educated American populace is terrible for the foreign policy debate.
Tucker Carlson’s Russia peons are truly mind-bogglingly stupid. Not just in the sense that talking up an oppressive revanchist dictatorship is totally oppositional to the values he claims to espouse (and which America stands for), but also in the sense that the arguments he is making are extremely dumb. Pouting to Potemkin villages as proof of quality of life or suggesting a fortnight’s groceries for $100USD are a good deal (in a country where that represents 10% of monthly income) are asinine.
Can confirm after a trip to Poland a couple weeks ago, they are scared shitless that they are next, and firmly believe that Trump winning will make this far more likely.
A lot of Russian misinfo has legs because it’s convenient for the US right’s overall worldview as well as its political priorities. “Joe Biden is corrupt” and “this foreign country is a utopia because it’s anti-woke” validate their core beliefs in the same way that the utopian Cuba narrative validated Marxist-Leninist beliefs. Misinformation is a demand-driven phenomenon, and the FSB has gotten better at identifying what sort of narratives Americans are hungry to buy.
We’re making it too complicated; it’s the Republican version of “but her emails”. Think about what happened right before the 2020 election, and the fact that the key aspects of that Hunter Biden story turned out to be true.
Imagine: right before the election, the entire “normal” media and a bunch of guys from intelligence services deemed a negative story about Donald Trump Jr to be Russian misinformation, social media companies wouldn’t even let you link the story, then Trump won the election and the story turned out to be true. At what point would Democrats believe a story about Donald Trump Jr ACTUALLY IS Russian misinformation? At what point would a Congressional Democrat tell their voters “actually, this time . . .”?
Not to mention maybe one or two other “huge if true” Russian stories that didn’t pan out. Also, after the FISA issue and the Nunes memo mess, you have to wonder if there isn’t a very deep and real mistrust between Congressional Republicans and the FBI.
Chuck Grassley in particular disgusts me. Far from being an elder statesman, he laundered false Russia propaganda after the FBI very publicly told him not to trust it, and has yet to issue even the slightest mea culpa. It’s borderline treasonous.
"There’s a school of thought in Eastern Europe which holds that if Ukraine falls, Lithuania and Poland are inevitably next. That seems a little bit overblown to me."
Russia has all the time in the world to move to the next target - the US is not confidence inspiring in their commitment to alliance right now.
A personal anecdote: back in the early 70s, when I was a young adult, my best friend got a scholarship to study in the USSR for a semester. He was also a photographer and when he came home he showed us pictures of Moscow and in particular many of the subway stations that he'd seen. (Given the paranoia of that country, I've always wondered about this American kid taking pictures, but I suspect his handlers were making sure he was taking the "right" pictures.) After, at that point, a lifetime of anti-USSR propaganda, it was a shock to see how incredibly beautiful the city and those stations were. He didn't become an apologist for the USSR, since as a poli sci major he was quite aware of the history which it seems Tucker isn't, but he definitely had a respect for the culture that built those things.
"There’s a school of thought in Eastern Europe which holds that if Ukraine falls, Lithuania and Poland are inevitably next. That seems a little bit overblown to me." That seems entirely reasonable to me -especially if Trump has the ability to hamstring NATO, we'll have a major land war in Eastern Europe in a decade. And you don't have to take my "right-wing by the standards of Slow Boring readers" word on it, Poland and the Baltics seem to be actively preparing for that possibility.