Blaming Russia Fails to Persuade the Masses

Here is a gem from Lambert Strether's Water Cooler:

“Just one-third of Americans say they believe Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll” [Politico].. Good proxy for the size of Clinton’s base. Not enough.

After a solid week, possibly more, of incessant haranguing about the evil genius of Putin-directed Russian hackers stealing the presidential election from poor victim Hillary, the mainstream media has largely gone silent on the topic. (The big story now is whether Congress will create a special select committee to investigate the hack or whether existing committees will handle the chore.)

By now New York Times editors, let alone Deep State power brokers, should be able to connect the dots and realize that the "Russians ate poor, poor Hillary's lunch" is a colossal dud. This isn't 1950. Joseph Stalin is long dead. The Democratic Party fosters a tiny fraction of the allegiance it did in the Truman era. Instead Dem stalwarts should get to work on the 2018 midterms -- which as Nate Silver argues in "Democrats Need To Win Elections, Not Flip Electors" could see a change in control of the House -- rather than moaning about Russian bogeymen.

But as I have opined before, blaming the Russians keeps the Bernistas at bay and forestalls any reckoning for the money bags who run the show; it also splits Trump from his own party, as John McCain's almost daily Strangelovian pronouncements make clear. So even if the "Russians did it" is a dud, it is a song that will likely be in steady rotation, both for the internal political ambiance it creates as well as its dulcet neocon tone for U.S. clients among the Gulf emirates.

There is some self-congratulation from the Gray Lady today. "How We Identified the D.N.C. Hack’s ‘Patient Zero’ , " according to a blurb, "[D]etails how [Eric Lipton] and his Times colleagues David E. Sanger and Scott Shane constructed a chronological narrative of one of the most famous hacks in history."

Marcy Wheeler pokes holes in this timeline in "THE DNC’S EVOLVING STORY ABOUT WHEN THEY KNEW THEY WERE TARGETED BY RUSSIA."

Maybe the sudden disappearance of the Russian hack story from the front page is due to a preponderance of evidence pointing to a leak, whether from someone within the Clinton/Democrat organization or the NSA, rather than a hack.