Category Archives: GOP

As the world looks at U.S. elections it holds its breath, and its nose

Yesterday, Christopher Dickey sought observations about the U.S. elections from Daily Beast correspondents, friends, and colleagues around the globe: No part of the world is watching the American elections with more misgivings and despair than North Africa and the Middle East.

A former Moroccan cabinet minister told Michael Kirtley on Monday, he felt deep “sadness” that America was giving such a poor example of the democratic process, and that it would lessen the ability of the U.S. to preach our bedrock values elsewhere. “It doesn’t make me believe in democracy less,” he said. “But it makes me wonder if America can regain the high ground in representing democratic principles.”

Some in the Middle East are watching with cynical amusement. As one senior Saudi royal wrote to me, “Elections in America are a spectacle, very much like a Bollywood film on steroids, with tragedy and comedy, action and drama, dancing and music, treachery and romance.”

Another friend in Saudi Arabia, a humanist and a stubborn optimist, writes, “We cannot help but feel that the forces of openness and calm judgment that are embodied by Mrs. Clinton offer a more promising future both for the United States and for the world.”
But that sentiment is far from universal.

“There is no damage to the brand [of American democracy], because we never bought into it in the first place,” writes Amal Ghandour in Beirut. “The more serious harm is to your heft as a super power, one that dictates and lectures and cajoles the rest of us, not because of its democracy but because of the seriousness and strength of its system.

“That the U.S., with every possible contraption that democracy affords, would produce a presidential contender in the mold of our own ++Michel Aoun [just named president of Lebanon] is nothing short of astounding. We know — or we think we do — why we have idiots presiding over our dysfunctional states. What’s your excuse?” asks Ghandour.

“Believe it or not, quite a few among the Lebanese elite want Trump to win,” says Ghandour. “There’s a group that is relishing the humiliation to you and yours; another which thinks a Trump presidency will effectively translate to an even lighter footprint in the area; another which, like many Americans voting for him, thinks that the man has chutzpah, that he’s the real deal.”

What’s seen widely as President Barack Obama’s bungling of the Syrian war has damaged American credibility throughout the region, and those who have hopes for a Trump presidency see it as a chance to make, at least, a break with Obama’s policies — although what turns that break might take are far from clear.

“In Egypt we are optimistic that with your change, we’ll begin a new chapter in our relationship, which has witnessed a kind of Siberian storm for some time now,” writes a very well-connected friend in Cairo. “The question is: would Hillary be continuity rather than change, and will Trump be reaching out or confrontational? Our region has suffered much from the policy which led to the burning Arab spring that polluted the area and created an epidemic [of violence].” But nothing about these elections inspires confidence. “They seem in part like a heated comedy, and it reflects how far apart our thinking patterns are. We are all about traditions, respect, and discretion, and this election reveals your DNA, which we like to watch, but not follow or emulate.”

Egyptian politician and activist, Gameela Ismail, went to the United States over the summer to watch democracy in action and came away bitterly disappointed. “I felt like I came to witness the last few days or weeks of democracy,” she writes. “I never thought I would hear terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘treason.’”

Mona Makram Ebeid, a veteran Egyptian academic and politician, was even more blunt. “This whole campaign is debasing America,” she writes. [Continue reading…]

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Republicans attempt to rig the vote by suppressing it

In an editorial, the Washington Post says: More than a third of American voters may have cast their ballots before Election Day under early-voting procedures, a heartening development in the face of aggressive Republican vote-suppression efforts in a number of states with GOP-controlled legislatures. While black turnout slipped by nearly 9 percent during the 17-day early-voting window in the critical swing state of North Carolina — a drop probably caused partly by Republican attempts to dampen turnout in areas with large black populations — an apparent surge in early voting elsewhere by Hispanics and other groups contributed to what is likely to be a record number of early voters: well over 40 million.

Notwithstanding the overall success of early voting, the peril of obstruction, intimidation and even violence at the polls remains, thanks mainly to Donald Trump’s explicit rhetoric and barely veiled messaging to his supporters. In repeatedly urging his partisans to intervene at polling places to thwart a “rigged” outcome, the Republican presidential nominee has invited confrontation and the possibility of chaos. By instructing nearly all-white crowds to scrutinize voting in “certain areas,” he has encouraged racial rancor.

Election monitors, including from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, are key to ensuring that voting proceeds smoothly and that those who seek to impede it are held to account after the elections. If vigilantes from either party obstruct or discourage Americans from exercising their most basic democratic right, they should face legal consequences, on top of the punishment that will surely be meted out by voters with long memories for years to come.

What these voters may remember is that Republican legislatures in some states adopted a strategy intended to win by suppressing votes rather than attracting them, often targeting minorities, youths and other Democratic-leaning blocs. Measures have included new voting ID laws, shuttering some polling places and reducing hours for early voting. Other GOP shenanigans to reduce voting have been underway in the final days of the campaign. Twitter removed bogus ads using Clinton campaign imagery that urged her supporters to cast their vote by text.

The rise of voter ID laws and other laws intended to impede minority voting was enabled by the Supreme Court, which three years ago gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court’s ruling stripped the Justice Department of its power to screen voting laws in nine states, mostly in the South, with a history of racial discrimination. The result was a field day for GOP lawmakers, in North Carolina and elsewhere, bent on throwing up barriers to black turnout. While federal courts have disallowed some of the resulting laws, they have permitted others to stand.

It is critical to American democracy, and to the health of the two-party system, that one party’s efforts to gain electoral advantage by erecting obstacles to voting do not succeed. The alternative — two big-tent parties competing to expand their appeal to new constituencies — is the only way to restore some semblance of comity to a nation deeply riven by factionalism. [Continue reading…]

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A ‘rigged’ vote? Four U.S. presidential elections with contested results

By Robert Speel, Pennsylvania State University

In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that this year’s election is rigged and has predicted rampant voter fraud.

While it’s unprecedented to call an election “rigged” before voting has even taken place, there is a history of candidates and the media crying foul after suspicious results.

The most recent presidential election that had rumblings of rigging was 2004. Two years later, Robert Kennedy Jr. published an article in Rolling Stone claiming that Ohio election officials had made decisions that stole the election from Democratic candidate John Kerry. (If Kerry had won Ohio’s electoral votes, he would have defeated Republican president George W. Bush that year.) But while some Democrats parroted Kennedy’s allegations, Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio – over 100,000 votes – led many to dismiss them.

However, the most plausible claims of a rigged presidential election were made in 1876, 1888, 1960 and 2000. In each case, the losing candidate and party dealt with the disputed results differently.

If there’s a close or contested vote this year, perhaps the candidates could take a cue from the past.

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Here are the races to watch if you care about global warming

Mother Jones reports: The climate didn’t get much attention in this year’s debates, but Tuesday’s election will still have major consequences for the fight against global warming. Donald Trump thinks climate change is a hoax; he’s pledged to withdraw from the historic Paris climate accord and to repeal President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants. Hillary Clinton has said she will continue Obama’s climate legacy and has called for installing half a billion solar panels by the end of her first term.

The debate isn’t restricted to the top of the ticket; there are a number of state races that will play a key role in determining US climate policy, along with a handful of ballot initiatives covering everything from rooftop solar to a proposed carbon tax. The situation in each state is unique. Some races — New Hampshire’s Senate contest, for instance — feature two candidates who want to act on climate change. Others, such as West Virginia’s gubernatorial election, feature two candidates who are champions of the coal industry. The impacts of climate change also vary from state to state: Alaska faces wildfires and melting permafrost; Florida is confronting rising seas; Iowa could be hit with falling corn yields. And of course, the voters in each state are different, too. Coloradans overwhelmingly acknowledge that humans are warming the planet. Their neighbors in Utah: not so much. [Continue reading…]

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Why did the FBI drag out its email investigation on Hillary Clinton for so long?

Michael T Flynn, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a 33-year career military intelligence officer and currently a close adviser to Donald Trump, tweeted this following the FBI’s notification that its review of emails has been completed and its July conclusion remains unchanged:


This is the level of dismay one might expect from someone who is completely ignorant about information technology.

Perhaps this is how Flynn pictures the FBI’s email review process:

 

Or maybe not.

Flynn followed up with an indication he is aware some highfalutin “smart machines” could have been at work, but he remains skeptical about the lightning speed of the analysis:


Let’s see… If it takes one year to review 60,000 emails it should take a decade to review 650,000 — is that what you’re thinking, general?

It turns out, the FBI has a whole division devoted to Operational Technology with stacks and stacks of smart machines at its headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. The bureau acknowledges, “While OTD’s work doesn’t typically make the news, the fruits of its labor are evident in the busted child pornography ring, the exposed computer hacker, the prevented bombing, the averted terrorist plot, and the prosecuted corrupt official.”

The Washington Post drills deep into the information retrieval technicalities of the latest investigation and confirms that it did indeed involve the use of “special software.” (Lead investigator to Comey: “How can we go through 650,000 emails fast enough?!” Comey: “You’ll need to use the special software.”)

We live in an era where roughly two billion people have access to Google. The content of about 50 billion web pages is continuously being indexed by the search giant and information from that index can be retrieved in a fraction of a second. Most people haven’t the faintest idea how search technology works, but everyone knows this: it’s super fast.

So Flynn is right: something doesn’t jive.

If 650,000 emails could be reviewed in 8 days, why did the FBI dawdle for a year over its analysis of 60,000 emails?

It turned out that the recent review was mostly an exercise in matching duplicate documents, i.e. it was highly suited to automated data processing.

The first sweep was much more analytical and interpretative and clearly required more eyeballs and deliberation, considering both content and intent.

Nevertheless, what has become evident over the last ten days is that the FBI is a highly politicized government agency. It appears that among its ranks there are a significant number of individuals who believe they are entitled to use their considerable power to influence the outcome of a presidential election.

For that reason, it’s fair to ask now whether the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was dragged out for as long as possible precisely so that it could yield the greatest damage to her campaign — irrespective of the investigation’s findings.

If that was the intention, it seems likely this effort will ultimately fail. Instead, the FBI has profoundly damaged its own credibility as a politically impartial institution serving the interests of the American people.

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How to rig an election

Paul Krugman writes: It’s almost over. Will we heave a sigh of relief, or shriek in horror? Nobody knows for sure, although early indications clearly lean Clinton. Whatever happens, however, let’s be clear: this was, in fact, a rigged election.

The election was rigged by state governments that did all they could to prevent nonwhite Americans from voting: The spirit of Jim Crow is very much alive — or maybe translate that to Diego Cuervo, now that Latinos have joined African-Americans as targets. Voter ID laws, rationalized by demonstrably fake concerns about election fraud, were used to disenfranchise thousands; others were discouraged by a systematic effort to make voting hard, by closing polling places in areas with large minority populations.

The election was rigged by Russian intelligence, which was almost surely behind the hacking of Democratic emails, which WikiLeaks then released with great fanfare. Nothing truly scandalous emerged, but the Russians judged, correctly, that the news media would hype the revelation that major party figures are human beings, and that politicians engage in politics, as somehow damning.

The election was rigged by James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. His job is to police crime — but instead he used his position to spread innuendo and influence the election. Was he deliberately putting a thumb on the electoral scales, or was he simply bullied by Republican operatives? It doesn’t matter: He abused his office, shamefully.

The election was also rigged by people within the F.B.I. — people who clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their political preferences. In the final days of the campaign, pro-Trump agents have clearly been talking nonstop to Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and right-wing media, putting claims and allegations that may or may not have anything to do with reality into the air. The agency clearly needs a major housecleaning: Having an important part of our national security apparatus trying to subvert an election is deeply scary. Unfortunately, Mr. Comey is just the man not to do it. [Continue reading…]

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FBI Director James Comey is unfit for public service

Kurt Eichenwald writes: James Comey should not simply be fired as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He must be barred forever from any form of public service.

In the last 10 days, Comey has whipsawed the election for president of the United States. Now we know he did it for no reason. When his agents found information that suggested there were emails on a laptop that might have relevance to the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her email servers, Comey did not wait until he knew even a scintilla of information before announcing it to the world. Reasonably, lots of voters assumed there must be a there there — who could imagine a person with the power of the FBI director would turn the election on its head for no particular reason, on the basis of nothing?

Then, Sunday, Comey handed down another missive from on high: Never mind. His agents had looked through the emails and decided they were piffle. His majesty, the FBI director, has not yet deigned to officially inform his subjects — the American people — whether the emails related to the Clinton case or what they were. (However, people involved in the case tell Newsweek that almost all of them were duplicates of what the bureau already had or were personal.) He just said “nothing to see here” and waived us on our way. [Continue reading…]

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On election eve, a Brexistential dread

Simon Critchley writes: The mood of nausea at the world, a disgust at the entirety of existence, is familiar to those of us who cut our teeth reading existentialist fiction. Novels like Sartre’s 1938 “Nausea” captured a feeling of disgust with the world and disgust with ourselves for going along with a world so seemingly blissfully happy with itself for so long. For Sartre, the dreadful had already happened, with the rise of National Socialism in the early 1930s, and it was a question of learning to face up to our fate. This is the mood that I want to bring into focus by exploring the concept of Brexistentialism.

For I must admit that I’ve become a Brexistentialist of late, thinking back to that evening on June 23 when I watched the entirety — eight hours or more — of the BBC’s live coverage of the referendum on whether Britain would leave the European Union or choose to remain.

I was home in New York. As the coverage began, the pollsters, the experts and the markets seemed confident that the good people of Britain would act rationally and vote to remain. And then, with the news of early results from postindustrial northern cities like Sunderland and Newcastle (which are strikingly similar to cities in upstate New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania), one became slowly and dreadfully aware that something else was taking place, something was shifting before one’s eyes. By the early hours of the morning on June 24 that smug, smiling, awful face of Nigel Farage was declaring a new dawn, and a day of independence for Britain. The supposedly decent, honest, ordinary people of Britain had spoken. The unthinkable had happened.

Will the same thing happen across the Atlantic? No one knows, least of all me. But the parallels are evident and the anxiety is there, the same nameless dread, that the country that you thought you knew is actually something and somewhere else entirely. That one’s country has unraveled morally and spiritually in such a terribly painful, deeply divisive way. [Continue reading…]

Might I add that us Brits have perhaps an over-developed capacity for existential dread.

But fear that produces paralysis is no better than no fear at all.

My hope in the hours before polls close tomorrow evening is that a sense of dread in the face of a possible Trump presidency cripples no one. On the contrary, it should provide all the more compelling reason to vote.

This isn’t about saying who you like. If that was the basis for voting, the Oval Office would end up vacant. It’s about choosing the next president.

A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump. A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Trump. A spoiled ballot is a vote for Trump. Staying home is a vote for Trump.

There is only one way of stopping Donald Trump becoming president: by electing Hillary Clinton.

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Trump and Russia: All the mogul’s men

James Miller writes: Between the summer of 2015 and the GOP convention a year later, a great many pundits were surprised by the rise of Donald Trump. Although polls consistently placed him ahead of his Republican peers, his style was so vulgar, his policy pronouncements so bizarre, that many pundits dismissed Trump’s chances. And still he kept winning.

Then came the drafting of the Republican Party platform by the Republican National Committee — a solemn 66-page document stating in a succinct 35,000 words the positions of the Grand Old Party. By all indications, Trump, who doesn’t care much for reading, was willing to let virtually all of it pass.

But there was one point in that mass of verbiage where the Trump team fought for a change. It wanted to remove a call for arming Ukraine against Russian-backed militants (and covert Russian troops) and softening language on Russia’s aggressive actions in Eastern Europe.

Despite the fact that multiple news agencies confirmed the original Washington Post story, Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort repeatedly denied any such thing happened, and witnesses to the change even accused the Republican leadership of trying to cover up the incident.

That was the tipping point on The Russia Connection where most of the press and public were concerned. [Continue reading…]

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‘Dear Americans’ … a warning from Germany

The Washington Post reports: In an interview conducted via Twitter, the author of the letter [shown in the tweet above] that went viral over the weekend defended his comparison on Sunday, saying exaggeration was necessary to raise attention in the United States.

“Of course it appears arrogant to claim to speak for the whole Germany. Of course it provokes ridicule if a German, of all people, says these things. That’s fine. But I just had to say SOMETHING,” explained the German author, who published his letter under a pseudonym and did not want to give his real name because he feared a negative impact on his business relations.

Born in 1972, the man said he was frequently asked during trips abroad why his grandparents had not prevented Hitler’s rise to power. “When I traveled outside Germany in the past, I’ve often been asked how the German people could have fallen for Hitler back in the ’30s and ’40s. ‘How could your people NOT have known?’ they often asked. I don’t get that question much lately,'” he wrote in a follow-up letter published on Twitter Sunday. [Continue reading…]

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Violence has long been a feature of American elections

By Jesse Rhodes, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The 2016 American presidential campaign has renewed concerns about the specter of violence in American electoral politics. The campaign has been marked by tense – and occasionally violent – altercations between supporters and critics of Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Trump encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters, and even suggested he would pay the legal fees of followers who assaulted his critics.

By refusing to commit to accepting the results of the election, he has confirmed the doubts among his supporters about the integrity of American elections. Thereby, he has increased the risk of possibly violent resistance by hard-core Trumpists.

It would be comforting to conclude that the menace of violence surrounding the 2016 presidential election is unique. But my research on the history of voting rights in the United States suggests that this is far from the case. Indeed, the threat and execution of violence around elections has a long, sad history in American politics.

Somewhat like the 2016 election – which has revolved around issues of race and immigration – efforts by disadvantaged (and often nonwhite) citizens to secure greater political influence have been met with violent repression by those already enjoying power (usually more affluent whites) throughout American history.

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‘Republicans against Trump’ protester: Trump is a fascist who is turning his supporters into animals

 

The Guardian reports: The man whose protest saw Donald Trump rushed off the stage by Secret Service agents has said the Republican nominee’s supporters turned on him when he held up a sign reading: “Republicans against Trump”.

The man, who identified himself as Austyn Crites from Reno, told the Guardian he was holding the sign at a rally when Trump supporters wrestled him to the ground.

The 33-year-old – who says he has been a registered Republican for about six years – said he was kicked, punched and choked, and feared for his life when the crowd turned on him at the gathering in Reno, Nevada.

Crites cited Trump’s treatment of Mexicans, Muslims and women as the reason he decided to protest again Trump, who he described as “a textbook version of a dictator and a fascist”. [Continue reading…]

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A scholar of fascism sees a lot that’s similar with Trump

Jonathan Blitzer writes: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an American-born professor of Italian history at New York University, specializes in male menace. What interests her is the manufactured drama of world-historical strongmen — their mannerisms, speech patterns, stagecraft, and mythomania. Late last year, Ben-Ghiat had just published a book called “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema,” about the years of Benito Mussolini, when another spectacle wrested her attention. One of the candidates for the American Presidency was looking a lot like her principal academic subject. As President Obama put it, the United States now had its own “homegrown authoritarian.”

Earlier this week, Ben-Ghiat sat at a table in her office, at N.Y.U.’s Casa Italiana, on Twelfth Street, inspecting two signatures on the screen of her laptop. One of them belonged to Donald Trump, the other to Mussolini. The scrawls — loopy, cursive, steepled — looked so similar that they seemed to blur together. Ben-Ghiat, who wore a gray sweater and dark skirt, is gracefully soft-spoken, her manner reserved. “I’m interested in how their language and writing are a kind of emanation of their bodies,” she said.

When Mussolini was a Socialist, he wrote his name as “Benito Mussolini.” “Then he dropped the Benito,” Ben Ghiat said. “He even had his stage name, which was Il Duce.” Trump also likes talking about himself in the third person. “He’s selling his product, which is himself,” she said. It’s a cult of personality peddled as good business. During the primaries, he recited a loyalty pledge in which he led his supporters in a promise to vote for him. (“I do solemnly swear that I — no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there’s hurricanes or whatever — will vote . . . for Donald J. Trump for President.”) While administering the oath, he raised his arm before the crowds in a quasi-Fascist salute. (“I mean, we’re having such a good time,” Trump said later. “Sometimes we do it for fun, and they start screaming at me, ‘Do the swearing! Do the swearing!’ ”) [Continue reading…]

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Black church burned down by arsonist who wrote, ‘Vote Trump,’ as Trump remains silent

The Daily Beast reports: The latest instance of the insanity this election has wrought took place on a dead-end street in a black neighborhood, where someone burned a 111-year-old baptist church and wrote “Vote Trump” on the side.

Hillary Clinton immediately took to Twitter to condemn the act, saying, “This kind of hate has no place in America.” It was signed “H” to show it was from Clinton herself. But when it came to the burning of a black church in his own name, Trump’s little fingers didn’t touch his favorite means of reaching millions of supporters, Twitter. Instead, his campaign issued a boilerplate statement.

So these are stakes of this election: a potential president who would not even condemn in his own words terrorism done in his own name. [Continue reading…]

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Trump campaign and Republicans paid $1.8m to companies mired in voter fraud claims

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) have paid at least $1.8m to a political operative whose roster of companies include several that have been repeatedly investigated for voter registration fraud, even as Trump has complained that the election is rigged against him.

Three employees of Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm owned by conservative operative Nathan Sproul, pleaded guilty in Florida four years ago to felony charges related to altering and destroying scores of voter registration forms. There were no formal actions against the firm.

Yet recent federal campaign finance reports reviewed by Associated Press show Sproul is now back on the RNC’s payroll, this time with a firm named Lincoln Strategy Group, a renamed version of his former firm Sproul & Associates, an Arizona-based firm that was investigated for alleged voter registration misconduct in Nevada and Oregon. [Continue reading…]

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Specter of election day violence looms as Trump spurs vigilante poll watchers

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s claims of “large-scale” voter fraud have prompted officials across the political spectrum to warn about the dangers of vigilante poll monitors amid fears of confrontations or even violence on US election day.

As opinion polls tightened this week between Trump and Hillary Clinton ahead of Tuesday’s presidential vote, there are concerns of chaos following his claims, without serious evidence, that the election could be “rigged” and his refusal to say if he will accept the outcome.

The Democratic party has launched a series of legal challenges around the country alleging voter intimidation, and on Friday in the battleground state of Ohio a judge issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s campaign and his unofficial adviser Roger Stone. The ruling said anyone who engaged in intimidation or harassment inside or near Ohio polling places would face contempt of court charges.

Republican leaders in some battleground states are reporting a surge of volunteers signing up to serve as official poll watchers, and in an unprecedented move, the Trump campaign itself has since August been requesting that volunteers sign up as “election observers” to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!”. Stone, meanwhile, has said he has helped recruit people to do “exit polls” to tackle voter fraud. [Continue reading…]

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Trump has spent decades trying and failing to get a foothold in the Russian market

The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump’s infatuation with Russia goes back more than 30 years, to the glasnost period of the Soviet Union when communism proved no impediment to get-rich-quick artists with loose scruples and gaudy tastes. In 1988 Trump was famously hoodwinked by Ronald Knapp, a Gorbachev impersonator, who stopped by Trump Tower and shook The Donald’s hand in what the latter clearly imagined was a rare moment in history, not to mention a wide enough slit in the Iron Curtain for capitalists on the make to wriggle through.

In 1986, Yuri Dubinin, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, invited Trump to Moscow to discuss building a hotel that could stand as a symbol of the mogul’s international reach. Trump sought to erect his signature “Trump Tower” as an unmistakable totem to himself in the once-impenetrable capital of the world’s only other superpower.

And yet, not then, and no since, have we seen a gilded monstrosity rising in above the onion domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Russia, it seems, has proven too elusive for Trump to establish his highly touted name-brand, even though he and his scions have boasted of the steady stream of rubles pouring their way. [Continue reading…]

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How Putin became the Che Guevara of the Right

Peter Pomerantsev writes: “He’s a Kremlin puppet!” has been a clarion call for those rallying to stop U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

But his public pro-Putin positions, and a few unfounded Kremlin links thrown in by his detractors, haven’t hurt Trump in the polls. And he’s not alone. Similar charges have been thrown at the successful campaign to leave the European Union and at right-wing movements gaining traction in Europe.

So is accusing your opponent of being Putin’s pal a good strategy? What if accusing someone of colluding with the Kremlin actually helps their cause?

Imagine, for a moment, you are the leader of an “anti-establishment” political movement. You thrill your followers by sticking it to the “liberal elites” and the “global order.” There’s nothing more “anti-establishment” than showing two fingers to such elite, aloof projects as NATO or the EU, and giving props to the man who wants to undermine them — Vladimir Putin.

What better way to milk the outrage of the “liberal” media than by siding with a Kremlin that has made attacking “liberal values” its motto? And wouldn’t you welcome attacks from liberal elites for associating you with the sort of disruption you wish to emulate?

For the “anti-establishment” Right, giving Putin the thumbs-up has become the equivalent of what pulling on a Che T-shirt has long meant for the Left. [Continue reading…]

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