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Charles Pierce on the fall Putin-Trump show
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22497579/trump-putin-visit-to-white-house/I've had the same horrible thought as Charles Pierce. Actually, I think it's a given:
(I just had another horrible thought. The president* is supposed to have his idiotic parade this fall, too. I am conjuring up the vision of Donnie and Vlad, together on the reviewing stand, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff sneak out and apply en masse for citizenship on Fiji.)
More:
It was going to be an eventful autumn anyway. The future of the Supreme Court for the next 30-odd years is going to be hanging fire as the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh comes before the Senate. Robert Mueller is due to produce his report. And we will be winding into the homestretch of one of the most crucial midterm elections most of us have ever experienced. Now, with all of that going on, the president* has presumed to invite his favorite thuggish kleptocrat to town. There will be bands and bunting. There will be a state dinner to which many influential Republicans, and members of Congress, many of whom will be running for re-election at the time, will be invited. I predict a staggering number of unbreakable tonsorial appointments. The announcement caught the Director of National Intelligence flatfooted on live television. This would be delicious if the whole thing weren’t so poisonous.
They have something on him. Almost everyone is convinced of that now. And, at least in the fog of the president*’s head, what they have on him is sufficiently lethal for him to act like an autocrat’s apprentice all over the world. On Thursday night, a former CIA Moscow station chief, one of the spookiest of the spooks, told Anderson Cooper,
. . .
The rest of us have to come to grips with the fact that there is no real mystery any more. The president* of the United States is a reckless vandal who is in thrall to a man whose only real goal in life is to loot his own failing country and hobble this one. Putin is a brutal con-man who has found a transparently bad one that he can play like a cheap violin. How the president* got into this situation almost seems irrelevant at this point; there well may be a video of some icky water-sports in a Moscow hotel, but I still think it’s all about money that Russians needed to clean, and that the president* needed to keep his Potemkin empire afloat. In that context, this latest, scarcely believable plot twist has a certain mad logic to it. In for a dime, in for a ruble.
They have something on him. Almost everyone is convinced of that now. And, at least in the fog of the president*’s head, what they have on him is sufficiently lethal for him to act like an autocrat’s apprentice all over the world. On Thursday night, a former CIA Moscow station chief, one of the spookiest of the spooks, told Anderson Cooper,
"Before the Helsinki summit, I was not prepared to go to the darkest corner in the room and say there is kompromat—there is compromising information—on Donald Trump," Hall said. "After ... I saw Donald Trump treat (Putin) in a fashion that is just inexplicable, the only conclusion that I can come to is ... I think there is information and data out there that implies there is indeed compromising information that Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump. Why else would he treat him that way?"
. . .
The rest of us have to come to grips with the fact that there is no real mystery any more. The president* of the United States is a reckless vandal who is in thrall to a man whose only real goal in life is to loot his own failing country and hobble this one. Putin is a brutal con-man who has found a transparently bad one that he can play like a cheap violin. How the president* got into this situation almost seems irrelevant at this point; there well may be a video of some icky water-sports in a Moscow hotel, but I still think it’s all about money that Russians needed to clean, and that the president* needed to keep his Potemkin empire afloat. In that context, this latest, scarcely believable plot twist has a certain mad logic to it. In for a dime, in for a ruble.
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