To me it is an obvious question and a fun one. While it is obviously naughty to try to influence the election of another country so that your favored candidate ends up winning it is not exactly unheard of. The US has a history of meddling in foreign elections and even overthrowing governments that it did not approve of and sometimes, maybe even most of the time, a lot of us would probably agree it was a good idea. I mean that it could benefit US.
So the whole thing about Russia trying to meddle with the US election that saw Donald Trump become President is not a real bell ringer. I mean, aren’t we as individuals voting with our secret ballots in ways that we believe are right and are best for our country? How much do political ads affect your vote? I really don’t think that I was affected one way or the other in the last election. By the time the actual two candidates were known I had already made up my mind that neither of them should be President.
While the final two were still not known I was kind of hoping for more from Bernie Sanders. Not that I am a Socialist, I’m not, and I don’t think that is what most Americans want to be either. We are in a phase of society where we have been sold on the idea that everyone can live the life of the rich and famous and are generally pretty narcissistic as a result. Or maybe that everyone SHOULD be able to attain this lifestyle if they just TRY and so those who can’t measure up are scorned quietly. At any rate, this mindset is not condusive to giving more than what one does now to the less fortunate. It was just that both Hillary and Trump were so bad that a Socialist looked good in comparison.
I guess what I mean is that the majority of Americans really do not give a shit about the Russian government running some political ads. The email stealing maybe a bit more but if it was just from the DNC or Hillary’s unsecured email server (not the government) then again, not so much. This is especially true if such stealing has shed some light on behind the scenes wheeling and dealing like the Hillary campaign rigging the Primaries against Bernie Sanders, To me that is much bigger news than Russia spending some money in America on political ads.
Washington seems to be totally out of touch with the American people. It is like they use what appears in the media as a reflection of the opinions of the majority. However the media is so polarized that all you really learn there is the political/social philosophy of the political party that is supported by the writer or the publication.
As a result, for most of us, government has become a spectator sport. Every day the Left has some new outrage over something that President Trump has said or tweeted or some really over the top antic of one of the members of his administration. Every day the Right is equally fervent in returning a volley of accusations of their own (although a few climbers like Sen Flake swing both ways in that fight).
The whole thing reminds me of the days when Clinton and Reagan were Presidents. There was so much “sky is falling” going on in both Presidencies that it was hard to know whether anything else was getting done but life was good for us in both of those presidencies so I guess you have to learn to see past all of the smoke and mirrors that both parties seem to feel it is so necessary and try to judge by what is actually going on and the influence it has on your life.
It is kind of funny that the Russian Presidential election was held this week in the midst of the whole Russiagate probe. It was a great counterpoint to the investigation. Then, to make it even more interesting, the British claimed that the Russians had tried to eliminate a former double agent (spy/traitor) by dosing him with nerve gas right in London, where he now lives. His (the spy’s) daughter was also affected.
This case seems to have more questions than answers although British Prime Minister Theresa May was quick to blame Russia and throw out 23 Russian diplomats. To date though the British have not really provided much in the way of proof that it was Russia who did the poisoning,
I mean it isn’t 1970 and Russia is no longer a Communist country or the “great enemy” of the United States and the rest of the free world. Russia is just not that scary anymore to Americans and holding them up as the “great enemy” as Hillary Clinton did during the election and as has been done with Russiagate and the election tampering ever since is just not striking a chord with average Americans.
As far as poisoning a traitor goes, well, the US does have to option of executing people for the crime of Treason too. So I think people can understand why it might have happened if it was the Russians who did it. Certainly it is not as shady as North Korea’s recent (alleged) assassination of the half brother of Kim Jung Un which was also done by using a WMD on foreign soil (Malaysia).
In the case of the British incident though there is just so much in terms of political “junk” floating around that the case seems far from clear cut and even the British press has been calling the claims of their government into question. There are a bunch of scenarios that one could develop that would lead up to the outcome of the Spy and his daughter being poisoned. According to the linked story above in this paragraph, the daughter had just arrived from Russia to visit her father soon before the poisoning. So maybe she had smuggled the weapon into the country for her father and something went wrong?
At any rate, it is hard to hear Britain make accusations related to WMD’s without remembering that it was their baseless WMD accusations against Iraq that had a big part in giving the green light for the unwarranted Gulf War and led to the death of half a million innocent people in Iraq. Years later it came out that British MI6 and the CIA knew a year in advance of the war that Iraq had no WMD and so it was not a mistake based on a real belief and therefore perhaps excusable.
Of course the British want to avoid responsibility for those 500,000 needless deaths and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently said that it was the United States who withheld crucial information, not Britain. Source:
Mr Brown said: “When I consider the rush to war in March, 2003 — especially in light of what we now know about the absence of weapons of mass destruction — I ask myself over and over whether I could have made more of a difference before that fateful decision was taken.
“We now know from classified American documents, that in the first days of September 2002 a report prepared by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s director for intelligence landed on the desk of the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
So, did the Russians poison their Traitor and his daughter? Or did someone else poison him to frame the Russians in public opinion (hey we are in the world of James Bond here where nothing is impossible)? Or did the daughter accidentally poison herself and her father while bringing the nerve agent into the country (once a spy, always a spy). Or was the whole thing done in an effort to influence the Russian election by casting a negative light on Putin in a tit for tat maneuver by US intelligence?
In the end I doubt that we will ever really know the answer. The incident will be used for political advantage by a variety of people and each will draw and promote their own conclusion based on their political objectives. For most of us, the average people, the answer does not even matter as it doesn’t affect our day to day lives any more than the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi civilians for no real reason or Russia running political ads did. No one is personally responsible for anything on that grand global stage and the rest of us just keep our heads down and hope that we and those we love stay safe and happy in our first world countries.!