Wednesday, July 05, 2017

Chait: We Now Have A Road Map To The Trump Campaign's Collusion With Russia

I remain skeptical, but obviously this is sounds pretty damn bad.

posted by Winston Smith at 7:51 AM

1 Comments:

Blogger The Mystic said...

I remain non-skeptical, even though the risk of that position is looking like a conspiracy kook.

I continue to think, however, that "collusion" makes it sound a lot more sophisticated than it likely was.

This description here, however, sounds about right to me; the Russians presented an opportunity to trump and his acolytes to gain an upper hand against Clinton, and they took it.

I seriously doubt that they would've rejected such an opportunity, and I further doubt they would've considered (perhaps at all) the fact that this would be assisting the Russians in attacking the American Democracy. If they justified their behavior beyond a practical effort to win an election, they probably thought more like: "Well, Clinton's a disaster, and it's in the American public's interest that we take every opportunity to prove it."

We've got a group of people whom there is no doubt in my mind lack the ethical wherewithal to prevent themselves from doing something like this and a group of people whom there is no doubt in my mind had the intent to enable the former group to do something like this.

So, if I were a betting man and the opportunity were there to know with certainty what occurred, I would place large sums of money on the assertion that collusion of this sort did occur.

I'm open to being wrong, but it's pretty hard to prove a negative in this sort of scenario. This leads me to wonder: to what extent can the sort of circumstantial evidence (of which there is even more) outlined above give us cause to believe a proposition even if the investigation should turn up no smoking gun?

In my estimation, the only way for the investigation to disprove these allegations to me would be to discredit or show fallacious the reporting that's gone on thus far. And there's a significant chance, in my mind, that this could happen. I keep meaning to create a map of the evidence that's been released publicly so I can get a better handle on which pieces of evidence are critical and what likelihood there is that these pieces are not credible, but I haven't done it yet.

Any leads on anyone who has put together such a thing? You'd think it'd be a common effort of journalists, but then again, journalism today is basically a clickbait factory.

11:40 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home