'Useful idiot' at best

 You may be too young to remember the once famous magazine advertisements by the Philadelphia Bulletin of happy memory. The ads showed a crowd.  In the background an airplane was crashing or a tall  building was burning. One little guy in a black suit was jumping up and down, shouting and pointing at the unfolding disaster, but everyone else had his nose in the newspaper. The caption was: “In Philadelphia, nearly everyone reads the Bulletin.”

 That’s how it looks to me now, with Lt. Gen. James Clapper, the former National Intelligence Director in the role of the guy in the black suit. Russia is disrupting the country with propaganda, and the all eyes are on Twitter.  Clapper’s successor, Dan Coats, testified this week that Russia deemed its efforts during the 2016 presidential campaign “successful.” That would be news if the media covered it instead of taking Donald J. Trump on his own terms and covering the circus.

 But if it is true, the President of the United States is an unwitting or witting stooge of Vladimir Putin. If he is unwitting, he is what Vladimir Lenin termed a “useful idiot.” If he is witting, there is not a whole helluva lot we can do about it.

 The Russian goal in 2016, and in their ongoing (yes) hacking and bots, was not to elect a president. That was gravy. The goal was to weaken the United States in the world by spreading disregard and disdain for its government and democracy and by pitting Americans against each other. Thus, for example, when #Black Lives Matter became a social media event, the Russians supported it with email and tweets that made the black folks look like they wanted white scalps and encouraged the white folks to arm themselves to fight back. The idea wasn’t to help one side win.  It was to make the United States into Nixon's “a pitiful, helpless giant."

 So the Russians spread doubts about the honesty of news media. Trump is aboard with that. It encouraged suspicion of the intelligence agencies. Trump is a cheerleader for that. It sought to cripple  government agencies. Trump spun revolving doors. The Russian oligarchs, who have occasional trouble themselves with our courts, want our courts to be seen as tools of the rich. Trump dutifully has attacked the courts when he isn’t staffing them with law school graduates who never set foot in a courtroom. And he is undoing everything Obama did, proving, as the Russians wanted to prove, that the United States has no principles, just swindles.

The Russian bot-makers' latest contribution was to support the #Release the Memo campaign; they may even have thought it up. The “memo” is the fatally flawed Re. Devin Nunes memo about how Trump haters in the FBI misused the secret intelligence court. True to form, Trump released it.

 In other words, he is the president Putin could only dream of in 2016. Plus, he takes Putin’s word for it.

 Oh, yeah, but as Mike Pence, that font of sound government thinking, said, our intelligence agencies found the Russians did not succeed in 2016. Isn’t that what you heard? On NPR’s Morning Edition today, Gen. Clapper gently corrected Pence. The agencies did not find evidence that the Russians interfered with the vote tallies. But they couldn’t prove they didn’t. And didn’t even try – because it’s way outside their competence – to determine if and how hundreds of thousands of fake emails and tweets on social media influenced how individual people voted.

Coats said: "We expect Russia to continue using propaganda social media, false flag personas, sympathetic spokesmen and other means to influence to try to build on its wide range of operations and exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States. There should be no doubt that Russia perceives that its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 US midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations."

 There is plenty of doubt.being generated by, among other sources, the president and all the president’s men.