This WaPo piece is.. not great. It's not great. Basically, a Russian aligned member of the Ukrainian Parliament has released phone calls that Biden made to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. In these tapes, Biden can be heard asking for the firing of a corrupt prosecutor. This was a publicly stated policy goal of the US and EU at the time.
The Usual Idiots - Giuliani, the Trump Failsons - are trying to turn this into a scandal. The Post story has this paragraph half way through the article:
The tapes released in Kyiv offered no evidence to back Giuliani’s long-standing accusation that Biden pushed for the prosecutor general’s ouster to help his son. At the time, Hunter Biden was earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a month on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, whose owner, a former government minister, was under investigation in Ukraine. Still, the tapes gave Trump’s allies a chance to recycle that allegation closer to the 2020 election.
This is "her emails" all over again. In 2016, we more or less knew the facts about the email server. She had one, it was investigated, it wasn't a crime. But when the Comey letter was released the week before the election, Clinton was leading by 5-6% in the polls. That support collapsed to 2-3%, which was her final margin in the popular vote.
The press was guilty of manifest malpractice, but then again, Trump, Steve Bannon and Russian operative Paul Manafort had a strong media strategy that Bannon called "flooding the zone with shit." By constantly levelling attacks and flooding the media with allegations, it was impossible to tell what was true and what was false. Before a change could properly be investigated, another one was made. The idea was to unleash a farrago of bullshit that the press and your opponent couldn't manage.
This was helped by Trump's long standing embrace of Roy Cohn's smear tactic of accusing your accusers of the thing you are accused of. If you are - say - hanging out with an accused pedophile, accuse your opponent of being a pedophile. Then, the accurate accusation that you are hanging out with a pedophile becomes a petty tit-for-tat. The true accusation gets lost in the back and forth.
Trump's campaign was actively soliciting help from Russia. This is a truth revealed in the Mueller report. The obstruction of the investigation made it impossible for Mueller to determine how much help they got directly, but we know they got some. The degree of coordination was difficult to pin down. So, Trump's strategy for dealing with this - and his subsequent impeachment over the Ukraine Affair is to accuse Biden of being corrupt in his dealings with Ukraine.
If the media falls for this shit again, then we are basically doomed as a nation. Not because Biden won't win, he probably still will. But because you lay bare the playbook for the NEXT Trump. The slicker operator who maybe doesn't outrage the Suburban voters that will likely bounce Trump from office.
The media - and usually it's the Times, not the Post that's guilty of this - HAS to find a way to navigate this "flooding the zone with bullshit" tactic or a free and functioning society can't exist with a faction that is willing to lie in bulk to attain power.
No comments:
Post a Comment