The press played straight into Trump's hands, all but providing him with his best lines. "Well, I guess one of the reasons I'm here today is to tell you the whole Russian thing, that's a ruse," he responded at one point. "That's a ruse. And by the way, it would be great if we could get along with Russia, just so you understand that. Now tomorrow, you'll say, 'Donald Trump wants to get along with Russia, this is terrible.' It's not terrible. It's good."
The prose may not be very polished, but the sentiments are unassailable. Ditto Trump's statement a few minutes later that "false reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake reporting makes it much harder to make a deal with Russia. ... And that's a shame because if we could get along with Russia -- and by the way, China and Japan and everyone -- if we could get along, it would be a positive thing, not a negative thing."
If the Washington Post and the Times do not agree that bogus assertions about unauthorized contacts with Russia are not poisoning the atmosphere, they should explain very clearly why not. They should also explain what they hope to accomplish with a showdown with Russia and why it will not be a step toward World War III.
But they won't, of course. The media (with encouragement from parts of the U.S. government) are working themselves into a fit of outrage against Vladimir Putin just as, in past years, they did against Daniel Ortega, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein (again), Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych. In each instance, the outcome has been war, and so far the present episode shows all signs of heading in the same direction as well.
Reporters may be clueless, but working-class Americans aren't. They don't want a war because they're the ones who would have to fight it. So they're not unsympathetic to Trump and all the more inclined to give the yapping media short shrift.
This is a classic pattern in which strongmen advance on the basis of a liberal opposition that proves to be weak and feckless. Today's liberal media are obliging Trump by behaving in a way that is even sillier than usual and well ahead of schedule to boot.
A Fragile Meme
The anti-Russia meme, meanwhile, rests on the thinnest of foundations. The argument that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and thereby tipped the election to Trump is based on a single report by CrowdStrike, the California-based cyber-security firm hired by the DNC to look into the mass email leak. The document is festooned with head-spinning techno-jargon.
It says of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, the hackers who allegedly penetrated the DNC in behalf of Russian intelligence: "Their trade-craft is superb, operational security second to none, and the extensive usage of 'living-off-the-land' techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and 'access management' tradecraft -- both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels, and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government's powerful and highly capable intelligence services."
Impressive? Not to independent tech experts who have already begun taking potshots. Sam Biddle, The Intercept's extremely smart tech writer, notes that CrowdStrike claims to have proved that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are Russian because they left behind Cyrillic comments in their "metadata" along with the name "Felix Edmundovich," also in Cyrillic, an obvious reference to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, as the Soviet political police were originally known.
But, Biddle observes, there's an obvious contradiction: "Would a group whose 'tradecraft is superb' with 'operational security second to none' really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave Cyrillic comments on these documents? ... It's very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again."
Indeed, John McAfee, founder of McAfee Associates and developer of the first commercial anti-virus software, casts doubt on the entire enterprise, wondering whether it is possible to identify a hacker at all. "If I were the Chinese," he told TV interviewer Larry King in late December, "and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it, I would use Russian language within the code, I would use Russian techniques of breaking into organizations. ... If it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you: it was not the Russians." (Quote starts at 4:30.)
This may be too sweeping. Nonetheless, if the press really wanted to get to the bottom of what the Russians are doing, they would not begin with the question of what Trump knew and when he knew it. They would begin, rather, with the question of what we know and how we can be sure. It's the question that the press should have asked during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but failed to. But it's the question that reporters should be asking now before the conflict with Russia spins out of control, with consequences that are potentially even more horrendous.
It's not easy making Donald Trump seem like a peacenik, but that's what the billionaire's press has done.
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