Don’t think his point was to lead, but to influence the shape of the Party and its policies. Get a seat at the table, so to speak. I’ve got any number of Bernie people telling me that, but of course, also have a few telling me he was all about eat your veggies and smash the state.
It is disappointing how many people are completely missing the point of all this, and missing the point in so many different ways.
Anyone who challenges the importance of a hostile foreign nation (and if you are so deluded that you don’t realize that Putin is immensely hostile to the US, you have hidden your mind so very deep in either propaganda or fairy tales, that you are irredeemable) using our own technology against us, not only to sow doubts amongst us, but to actually manipulate us into giving them victories of various kinds over us, is worse than a fool.
This is not a fantasy. Almost every nation in Europe has ALSO caught Russia trying to manipulate their elections and their foreign policy, and to disrupt their societies. It is not “fake news.”
How successful each part of the Russian attack has been , beside the point. The fact that they have attacked, and continue to do so, is the point. These same people appear to have no doubts at all, that despite the fact that terrorists have been entirely ineffective in dissuading the United States and it’s people, that THEY are still dangerous, and that THEIR friends and supporters within our borders are traitors and terrorists themselves.
It’s the same thing.
The GOAL of the Russian attacks, has been precisely to gain allies such as these people. Again, just like the terrorists, who want people to take their side. Putin wants to have his ongoing invasion and conquest of the Ukraine to be supported by the United States, and he is making headway with that, via this scandalous messy intrigue.
Say what? Do you even have a vague idea what you are on about here? Jean-Marie Le Pen has been in the EU Parliament for decades. Marine Le Pen is far from a little-known new-comer. And her “meteoric” rise got her up to about a third of the vote. Quite a lot, yes, but not enough. Based the lack of insight in that much of that assertion, I am going to guess that the last bit is utter nonsense, and hold to that position unless you have really good quality cites.
As tempting as it is to reply with “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years”, I agreed with Romney on this point and thought Obama was irredeemably deluded.
What are you referring to here? Electing Trump? That was what (basically) half the country wanted, and it’s what (basically) half the country would have wanted even if Russia had never even made a peep about the election.
I agree that it’s not “fake news”, but it’s more like the standard practice. Do you think any country has ever caught the USA trying to “manipulate their election and their foreign policy”? Or do you imagine this is a sin unique to Russia? It’s sort of like when one country gets caught spying on another. It’s hard to take the bombast too seriously, when everyone knows that everyone does it.
Huh? Our concerns with terrorism are due to their lethality, not their persuasiveness. No one’s worried they are going to persuade us to join their caliphate, we’re worried they are going to kill us.
As I understand it, while she comes from known stock, the party that she is part of didn’t exist in any meaningful sense before a few years ago. (I’m going by memory here, so it is possible that I’m wrong.)
Gary Johnson, for example, had a strong history as a popular governor. As part of a fringe party with almost no following, though, that basically counted for nothing.
As I understand it, Le Pen’s party was just such a thing until recently.
Well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
French elections transpire rather differently than do US elections. Jean-Marie Le Pen actually made it to the final round about fifteen years ago, but was brutalized by Jacques Chirac in the final tally. Marine Le Pen made it to the final round this year with 21% in the first round – compared to Emmanuel Macron’s 24%. Once you get to the final, it is a binary vote, so obviously each candidate’s tally would go up.
Clearly she did not come out of nowhere. She has been leading the FN party for most of this decade. And FN has been around for four and a half decades.
I did not know most of this myself, but I have heard of Marine Le Pen for a few years already. And I am not all that informed in the politics of France, or most other countries. Just bits and pieces.
The FN may be nearly half a century old, but the winners, EM ‘En Marche’ initials named after the little chap himself, didn’t exist in any sense, meaningful or other, before April 2016.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, on the other hand, is old enough to have volunteered ( unsuccessfully ) for the Resistance; and fought in Indochina and Algeria as a Legionnaire. He’s been around the block.
The astounding rise to power of a party a year old under a leader studiously without definite ideas might actually suggest foreign interference was more likely to have installed Macron than his opponents — rather like the CIA in Italian elections post-war. However, just like the American election: the winner got in because the final opponent was so, so, ghastly.
On 10 April 2016, a few days after the movement’s launch, Emmanuel Macron claimed 13,000 adherents. Le Canard enchaîné accused him of inflating the figure and claimed that 13,000 was in reality the number of clicks that Macron had received on his website.
Now, that’s comedy…
How many threads have we had about this over the past six months? How many public hearings have been held? How is it possible that these are the only two things you’ve heard of Russia doing?
The answer is that there’s no actual evidence that they did.
That they attempted to influence the election, or that they were successful in the mission? On the first front, there’s no doubt. On the latter, it depends on whether you believe that advertising and propaganda are effective at making people do stupid things where otherwise they would not.
I’m betting that there are any number of studies by academia, industry, and the military all of which demonstrate that advertising and propaganda are effective. If you want to argue otherwise, I suspect that you are not going to fare well in your search for counter-evidence.
The Russians didn’t influence the election.
The Russians helped get their patsy elected.
Do they communicate with him via Morse Code through the antenna he installed in the Trump Towers roof ?
Of course the Russians try to influence elections. They’ve been trying that since 1923, when the GPU (precursor to the KGB) created the directorate of disinformation. In the past, however, the primary vector in the west was through the left.
Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times, was a stooge of the Soviets and a Stalin apologist who in 1933 wrote in the New York Times that the widespread forced famine in the Ukraine that killed millions of people was, “an exaggeration or malignant propaganda”. Private correspondence that has been unearthed since shows that he knew exactly the scale of the suffering, so reporting otherwise was disinformation. THAT kind of ‘fake news’ apparently got you a Pulitzer Prize back then.
The ‘Red Scare’ in the 1950’s was very similar to what’s going on now - then, a kernel of truth existed in that the Soviets really were recruiting ‘useful idiots’ in the media, academia, and in the government. They constantly spread disinformation (now called ‘fake news’), and used kompromat to gain control of powerful voices in the west. Assholes like Sen. McCarthy used that kernel of truth to grossly violate the rights of others, but in the end, it turned out that he was partially correct about what was going on.
In the 1960’s, the Soviets funnelled money to anti-war protest groups and radical groups wherever they could. They set up ‘Potemkin Villages’ to show susceptible stooges from the west how great the Soviet Union was, and those ‘useful idiots’ went home and essentially became voices of Soviet policy. They went even further than that - they found left-wing stooges in governments and universities and fed them disinformation to be distributed as if it originated from within the west.
For example, in 1961 a pamphlet titled, “A Study of a Master Spy (Allen Dulles)” was a hit job on the U.S. CIA director that was supposed to have been written by Labour Party member Bob Edwards and reporter Kenneth Dunne, but was actually written by KGB disinformation officer Vassily Sitnikov. The attribution to a journalist and a sitting member of Parliament pretty much ensured that it would be taken seriously and would hurt the U.S. government. That’s pretty much classic ‘fake news’.
In the 1980’s, they funnelled money into the nuclear freeze movements round the globe and pushed money and resources into groups like International A.N.S.W.E.R and the Worker’s World, who adopted party lines that dovetailed perfectly with Moscow.
There is even an allegation and some evidence that the ‘nuclear winter’ scenario, which was first proposed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was a KGB disinformation operation. It came along just as the Soviets were pressing the Reagan Administration hard to remove medium-range missiles in Europe.
Remember the paranoid belief among some radical leftists that AIDS was created by the U.S. government as a biological weapons program, and that the Reagan administration was ignoring it because it was only killing gay people and other undesirables? That would be Operation INFEKTION. That information was spread through left-wing media sources who would gullibly swallow whatever the Kremlin told them if it made the Reagan administration look bad.
The collapse of the Soviet union shut down the propaganda and disintel for a while, but once an old KGB hand was firmly back in power, that all started up again. It’s the Russian way, and it has been for a long, long time.
That said, in the age of global networking and social media, this stuff has gotten a lot more dangerous, and we need to take it very seriously. Given that Russia employs thousands of people whose only job is to take to social media and act as regular users who post messages in comment sections and on message boards, issue tweets and facebook likes to help spread disinformation, I assume that every major social media platform (including the SDMB) has its share of such people. I predict this will become a growing problem, and the issue of ‘user trust’ will grow more important over time.
But yes, the Russians tried to interfere in this election, just as they have tried to interfere in every other American election. I guess it’s only a problem when the left is the victim, but whatever it takes to wake people up to the threat, I suppose.
For people like me who have been complaining about it since the 1970’s I’d just like to say, “welcome to the party”.
The key difference, at least to all of the witnesses before the Senate Intelligence Committee, is that the Russians have finally had some success. While we probably couldn’t say how much of an effect they had, we can say that they reached a number of people that is countably noteworthy.
But yes, it’s not a new thing.
How do you know they didn’t have success before? And for that matter, we don’t know if they had success this time. It’s not been proven that the Russians got Trump elected.
For that matter, how do you know they aren’t still doing it? What if they didn’t give a rat’s ass about Trump, but were simply seeking to destabilize the U.S? Perhaps some of the anonymous leaks and strange goings-on are still part of a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at the current administration?
ISTR some bearded dude named bin Laden trying to influence the '04 election.
I would imagine getting the secret recipe to make the A-Bomb was a greater success than any putative influencing of a random election. I know which Uncle Joe would prefer.
And the first is history, whereas the second is fantasy.