The news that a former campaign manager of a sitting president has been indicted would seem like a pretty big deal.
Paul Manafort has finally been charged with exactly the sorts of crimes one would expect for a self-declared “influence peddler” and corrupt political hack: Money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent, general political scumbaggery, etc. It’s hard to dismiss a crime allegedly involving $75 million as small potatoes, but interestingly that has been the tone of the media coverage. The only interest the press and Democratic partisans appear to have in Manafort’s crimes is whether special counsel Robert Mueller can use them flip him and finally uncover the real crime:
Donald Trump’s presidency!
Fox News is the exception, sort of. They’ve relegated the story of Manafort’s indictment to the “and in other news” segment, just after “Elderly veteran trains dogs to bark national anthem during NFL broadcasts.” But that’s only to make time for more of their obsessive coverage of the Uranium One deal, and revelations that Russia-linked Fusion GPS was paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC for the now-infamous dossier dirt-dump on Donald Trump.
The burning question on the Right: “What did Hillary know, and who did she have killed to keep it a secret?”
Meanwhile there’s a villain staring us all in the face, and laughing: Vladimir Putin.
A foreign power dropped the equivalent of a digital Pearl Harbor on our democracy, spending money, deploying intel assets, hacking computers—and it’s nearly impossible to get anyone to focus on that fact. The best you can get from partisans on either side is a “Yes, Russia’s bad” before they turn the issue back to an attack on Donald Trump, or the Democrats, depending on their priors.
In early October the GOP chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the ranking Democrat held a rare joint press conference declaring that the evidence of a Russian assault on our 2016 election is undeniable. And worse! Since there’s every reason to believe that these attacks will continue into 2018.
“You can’t walk away from this [investigation] and believe that Russia’s not currently active,” Senator Richard Burr said. “The Russian intelligence service is determined—clever—and I recommend that every campaign and every election official take this very seriously.”
We can hope that the professionals inside the intelligence community are taking this threat seriously, but we know for a fact our political leaders and the press aren’t. Read the media coverage of that joint press conference, for example. The focus wasn’t on Russia’s push to get false information into the American news cycle, but rather whether or not those attempts were helpful to the Trump campaign.
The key sentence in the ICA (“intelligence community assessment) the Senate committee confirmed is this:
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.”
There’s your scandal. No, really. There’s your major scandal, right there.
But the ensuing conversation has been almost entirely about the intelligence community’s conclusion that “Russia’s goals were to . . . denigrate Secretary Clinton. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
And that sends the members of our political/media complex to their partisan corners to prep for battle against each other: Russia stole the election vs. Putin didn’t stop Hillary from campaigning in Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, Putin all but confessed his assault on our electoral system in an interview over the summer with Megyn Kelly.
“Put your finger anywhere on a map of the world, and everywhere you will hear complaints that American officials are interfering in internal electoral processes,” Putin claimed.
“That sounds like a justification,” Kelly replied. Not justification, Putin said, then he added:
“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
The guy’s practically confessing to it; like a Bond villain monologuing while the sharks with lasers on their heads circle 007.
Shouldn’t somebody be battling Putin? Shouldn’t someone be leading the political and policy assault against his regime, punishing them for past behavior and raising the price for future interference?
“Ah,” you ask, “but how would that get Trump impeached?”
Or, if you’re a good Republican, “How would that get Hillary a recurring cameo on Orange Is The New Black?’”
Our partisan spirits have truly overcome our patriotism. There is no “America First, At Least When It Comes To Protecting Our Democracy” caucus in politics today. Leonid Bershidsky, a Russian journalist writing for Bloomberg View said recently that “Rarely have two political candidates been so worthy of each other in terms of cynicism as Clinton and Donald Trump. No wonder Russian President Vladimir Putin, another world-class cynic, dealt himself in.”
If we have the most cynical candidates ever, then perhaps our democracy is still working. All too well.
