mdgoonah41 wrote:
from a really well-respected journalist
I watched half an hour of this while I was restringing my guitar this morning, and although it makes for interesting viewing, the perspective of Clapper and Brennan is laughably skewed.
As Clapper starts to conclude at the point I switched off, the "Russians will be back" and we need to protect "our system".
But we're talking about a popular vote that the Russians didn't actually affect, won by Trump by a very small margin, like many other recent presidential elections.
The totality of the US electoral system—politics, representation, voting, discourse—is flawed, generating this vulnerability in its outcomes. And those outcomes have always been affected as much or more by the state of "legitimate" political discourse and the alternatives on offer at the vote.
Trump is so awful, so incompetent, such a disgusting individual. Any serious answer to the problem of Trump has to include a convincing theory about why 50% of Americans who bothered to vote, not a couple of million, but over 60 million, voted for Trump. "Russian espionage" is not that answer. It is not a serious-minded approach to the question. You could get rid of Trump through impeachment and the system Clapper and Brennan are so anxious about would still be at risk from the next PT Barnum who comes along.
