Hiding in plain sight: WHY the GOP/Trump collude with Russia.

As for the hypocrisy angle. Technically, yeah. It’s “hypocritical” to call out Russia when we have such a horrible history of international meddling too. But I see it as largely irrelevant, primarily because of this:

It’s the game of empires. Or, to use a sports metaphor, it’s two teams, battling it out, trying to score on their opponent.

If the Rams drive down the field and score on the 49ers, are they being “hypocritical” if they do their best to defend their own side of the field, when the 49ers have the ball?

No. Doesn’t matter that “we do it too.” The game is the game, and unless and until you stop playing it, you should defend your own goal.

A much better example of “hypocrisy” is when the two combatants aren’t in the slightest bit equal, and don’t have a history of head to head battling. When there’s a hegemon, like America, throwing around its weight, telling a relatively weak nation that it can’t do X, Y or Z, even though America has done exactly X, Y and Z for generations. Telling them that if you do it, we’ll crush you. Or, far worse, invading them, etc.

That’s the kind of “hypocrisy” that actually matters, in my view.

Recently, all the heads of the Intel community appeared before Congress and were unified on Russia’s meddling, past, present and future. All were Republicans, and most of them were appointed by Trump. They looked extremely uncomfortable when they reluctantly admitted they had received NO directives from Trump to do ANYTHING about election or social media interference. Their body language made it pretty obvious they hated having to answer these questions in that way. But the truth is, the Trump administration, despite unanimous agreement about the threat, has done nothing to defend the nation against that threat, including implementing sanctions that were already passed by Congress, failing to spend any of the 120 million dollars allocated to the State Department to combat that threat, failing to even hire Russian speakers, while gutting the State Department overall.

Same goes with directives for Defense, the CIA, the FBI, etc. etc. Nothing coming from the Trump administration, and no outcry from GOP leadership.

Can you imagine what the right would be doing now if it had been Obama and the Dems in the same situation? The calls of “treason” would be 24/7, and he would already have been impeached.

IMO, Trump got caught up in all of this initially because of his massive debt. Russia was basically the only source willing to lend to him, and they obviously have him over the barrel. But the GOP itself just wants to stay in power, and Russia can help them, DID help them already.

This really should be seen as a much, much bigger scandal than the current media narrative suggests.

Just to clarify a coupla points.

I think Trump and the GOP were on two different tracks with Russia until recently. It’s overlapping now, but it didn’t start out that way.

I also think Trump hooked up with Russia, not because he thought they could help him win the election. I’m betting he thought he never had a chance — even to win the Republican nom. He hooked up with Russia because of his massive debts, and he brought in all kinds of shady characters — Flynn, Manafort, Page, Gates, etc. etc. with contacts in Russia to help him. We’ve never seen any campaign with even a fraction of a fraction as much.

Russia likely didn’t think he’d win, either, but it wanted to hurt Clinton, so it put its thumb down on the scale for Trump and the GOP. Wikileaks did the same.

Once he won, he started to pay them back.

The GOP, however, accepted Russia help to win elections in general. It gladly accepted that help and worked, and is still working to prevent effective, coordinated countermeasures. As the likelihood of a blue wave becomes more and more real, the GOP knows Russian help — along with its usual voter suppression tricks — may be the only thing standing in the way of a wipe out.

All of that said, America would be obviously better off without either of the major parties. Their record of governance is a scandal in and of itself, and an epic failure going back more than a century — with only brief moments of sunlight. Both parties have proven, time and time again, they don’t represent us and they don’t deserve the power we’ve mistakenly ceded to them. Any of it.