mister d wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 11:21 am
degenerasian wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 11:20 amYes Trump got played and the Russians wanted anyone but Hillary.
I don't think that's right at all; the Russians wanted Trump or who cares. Why would they have any preference between Cruz and Hillary?
First, they were going to fuck with our elections regardless of who was in the race on either side. Laying aside that Putin has a personal hatred for Hillary, Putin/Russia wants anti-immigration, populism, racism and homophobia injected into western politics as much as possible. Look at his statement this week, pointing to Jews and Tatars(?!) as being behind our political unrest. Beyond the fact that those are his personal prejudices, he knows that this kind of talk roils the populace.
The Russians are interested in promoting candidates and parties that are "populist" in nature and that would overall disrupt NATO and other western alliances. They'd likely put their thumb on the scale of whatever candidate they thought would at least be amenable and that's going to be a GOP candidate more often than not.
They have a rationale for what they are doing, and the bottom line priority is to disrupt the West as much as possible. It's not overly complicated in terms of broad strokes
And where I really get annoyed with people that think there's NOTHING to all of this (call it whatever the fuck you want - collusion, sympathizing, passive cooperation): The fact that Trump hasn't moved the intelligence community forward to do any kind of meaningful work to counter act what Russia is doing is borderline treasonous. It is unconscionable and is possibly the biggest dereliction of duty of any sitting president in modern history. This is the rough equivalent of watching the Russian navy take up posts in most of our key harbors without any kind of response.
You can lead a horse to fish, but you can't fish out a horse.