Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a probability of afternoon thundershowers, and a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 22m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 84.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6:30 PM.
Recommended for reading in full —
Denise Clifton offers A Chilling Theory on Trump’s Nonstop Lies:
“26 hours, 29 Trumpian False or Misleading Claims.”
That was the headline on a piece last week from the Washington Post, whose reporters continued the herculean task of debunking wave after wave of President Donald Trump’s lies. (It turned out there was a 30th Trump falsehood in that time frame, regarding the head of the Boy Scouts.) The New York Timeskeeps a running tally of the president’s lies since Inauguration Day, and PolitiFact has scrutinized and rated 69 percent of Trump’s statements as mostly false, false, or “pants on fire.”
Trump’s chronic duplicity may be pathological, as some experts have suggested. But what else might be going on here? In fact, the 45th president’s stream of lies echoes a contemporary form of Russian propaganda known as the “Firehose of Falsehood.”
In 2016, the nonpartisan research organization RAND released a study of messaging techniques seen in Kremlin-controlled media. The researchers described two key features: “high numbers of channels and messages” and “a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”
The result of those tactics? “New Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”
(I’ve posted the RAND study previously; it bears repeating that Trump’s techniques are almost identical to Soviet and Russian ones.)
As a particular example of a Russian-style talking point, Hannah Levintova observes that The Trump Administration and Kremlin Responses to the New Russian Sanctions Are Very Similar:
In a statement last week, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Congress’ nearly unanimous approval of the sanctions bill indicates that “in certain circles” of US politics “Russophobia and the course of open confrontation with our country have become entrenched.” The ministry added, “[T]he new law on sanctions clearly showed that relations with Russia have become hostage to the internal political struggle within the United States itself.”
Seva Gunitsky, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto and Russia commentator, notes that “by saying things like ‘certain circles’ in Congress are pushing for these sanctions, they are still trying to appeal to Trump. They are saying, ‘Look, these sanctions are not really Trump’s fault; they are the Congress’ fault or the deep state’s fault.’ They don’t say it in those words, but that’s sort of implicit.”
Writing on his Facebook page on Wednesday, Russian lawmaker Konstantin Kosachev also eased Trump’s responsibility for the bill he just signed: “The news is mainly that Trump has given up,” he wrote, noting that Trump’s other option was to go against Congress.
Daniel Fried describes Russia’s Back-to-the-80s Foreign Policy (“Moscow has reprised Cold War tactics against the United States. It’s worth remembering that they didn’t work out well for the Soviet Union last time.”):
“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The latest round of Russian-American embassy staff hits—Russia cut hundreds of U.S. Embassy employees in an escalatory response to U.S. expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats last December—recall the big Soviet-American embassy staff expulsions of 1986. Few recall the details of these Reagan-era fights. But many remember that the 1980s ended badly for the Soviet Union.
And that is the point: Moscow now, like then, has been going down a dark road of confrontation with the United States and aggression elsewhere. As with the Soviets and reactionary tsars, external confrontation coincides with, and may be compensation for, stagnation at home. Putin’s tactics, like the demonization of the United States in Russian official media, appear recycled from the Cold War. Russian cyber hacking and disinformation recall Soviet “active measures” of the 1980s. Russia’s low-grade war in Ukraine is different from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (for one thing, the Ukrainians are fighting for a European future), but both aggressions triggered resistance on the ground and from the West. Russia’s leaders can try to convince their people, and themselves, that their ability to bully neighbors, repress dissenters, and shake their fists at the United States, is a sign of strength. But, just like in the mid-1980s, this won’t work.
Despite the hopes of the Soviet regime then and Putin’s regime now, the West is not on its last legs. The anti-European, pro-Russian French nationalist whom Putin supported lost badly in France’s elections this spring. Whatever deal Putin sought or thought he had with President Trump, the power of American institutions and long-term American interests in the success of certain values—including the rule of law, human rights, democracy, and the prosperity these generate—is likely to prevail, which will not help Putin. Neither Putin’s aggression abroad nor his repression at home will fix a stalled Russian economy still dependent on oil, gas, and other raw material exports, or a political system rooted in staggering corruption organized from the top.
Eugene Rumer writes that We’ve Seen This Movie Before. In Russia:
Conventional wisdom holds that the present situation in Washington is unprecedented. The hyperpartisanship, the dysfunctional administration, the accusations of conflicts of interests, the embattled and erratic White House and the president’s reliance on a small circle of trusted insiders, first and foremost his family, have stunned Washington and much of the country and the world. But veteran Russia-watchers have seen this before. They remember Russia in the 1990s.
The president, Boris Yeltsin, a charismatic figure often unable to control his impulses, was a prisoner of the Kremlin, or his out-of-town residence near Moscow. A heavy drinker, he was frequently reported to be unable to perform the duties of his office. He ended up relying on a small group of advisers who became known in Moscow as the “family.” At the center of it was his immediate family, who controlled access to him and his flow of information. First daughter Tatyana was his chief adviser and gatekeeper. Yeltsin’s press spokesman, Valentin Yumashev, who later married Tatyana and became Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was another key figure in the “family.” At one time or another, members of the “family” were reported to be under investigation by various Russian law enforcement agencies on suspicion of corruption. None ever went to trial, but allegations of corruption and ethical violations by those closest to Yeltsin became virtually an everyday feature of Russian political life, and in 1999 Yeltsin sacked the man in charge of the investigation.
(It’s worth noting that Yeltsin, at the right moment, defied the Communist party; Trump has never defied authoritarianism, even for a moment. Indeed, he daydreams of it. Yeltsin was the better, and Trump is the worse, man.)
From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, here’s What’s Up for August 2017: