[Ohio]

Helsinki Is One of Trump’s Finest Moments

Keep in mind that what Trump was supposed to do Monday was to drink the Kool-Aid, was to believe our Intelligence Community (IC) got it 100 percent right about Russian meddling, was to throw diplomacy out the window and publicly embarrass Putin.

Thankfully, Trump refused to do that, and now the spoiled children, just as they did after Charlottesville, are again lying and claiming Trump “sided with Putin,” when the only thing Trump’s guilty of is remaining diplomatic, which is the whole point of a summit expressly arranged to facilitate peace.

What is so incredible is that, in this the year 2018, after the intelligence catastrophe that was Iraq, after learning the IC was actively meddling in the 2016 election using Kremlin-fed propaganda in the form of a dossier, only a crazy man would swallow whole what the IC is telling him, and only a dangerously weak man would risk damaging relations with Russia further in order to symbolically appease the IC.

The truth is this, and we all know it, especially those currently in the middle of their tantrum:

1. Personally, I am not convinced Russia meddled in our election, and I find Dirty Cop Mueller’s kangaroo indictments of people he will never have to prove a case against (because he knows they will not be extradited) to be nothing less than the actions of a flailing prosecutor who’s got less than nothing. Mueller indicting non-American citizens working on behalf of a hostile government is the dumbest thing I have ever seen in my life. It would be like Reagan’s Justice Department indicting the KGB.

2. Because the documents that convinced Republican investigators Russia meddled in our election came from our IC, I find those conclusions just as suspect.

3. Even if the Russians did meddle in our elections, it appears to have been nothing more than drop-in-the-bucket Facebook and Twitter expenditures that ended up being less than meaningless. Moreover, most of this Russian monkey business occurred after the election and was targeted against Trump.

The worst case scenario is Russia figured out John Podesta’s email password was “password” and disseminated his emails. But where is the proof?

Regardless, is it not interesting that Dirty Cop Mueller’s kangaroo indictment left out one pertinent fact, the fact that — if you believe any of this — the Russians also tried to hack the GOP, and failed?

We meddle in other country’s elections, other countries meddle in our elections, and suddenly I am supposed to give a damn? Russia has been meddling in American politics going back decades and all of a sudden this fact of life demands Trump stage an international incident? Are these people out of their minds? We all know what is going on here — the only reason we are required to suddenly care about decades-old espionage-as-usual is because the media and the political establishment cannot accept losing the 2016 presidential election.

4. Once burnt, twice shy.

To my eternal shame, I swallowed the case for WMDs in Iraq hook, line, and sinker. Why, back in ’02, the very idea the patriots within the IC could get such an important matter wrong — to even suggest such a thing, was unpatriotic.

And now I am watching this dangerous horse**** play out all over again, where it is un-American to question the IC, where we have “super patriots” running around defining patriotism as drinking the FBI/CIA/IC Kool-Aid, where the jingoistic media is trying to out-jingoize each other by screaming about “acts of war,” where the pursuit of peace is treason, and those who pursue peace are traitors…
Where, for some obscene reason, we are supposed to always believe the IC, which means we must condemn the peacemakers like Trump who dare remain skeptical.

Most of all, we are required to forget that this is the same IC that missed the fall of the Soviet Union, missed 9/11; that led us into a harrowing and pointless war in Iraq; that used a dossier filled with Kremlin-fed propaganda to frame Trump; that lionizes proven liars like James Clapper, Dirty Cop James Comey, and John Brennan; that hands ego-maniacal monsters like Peter Strzok extraordinary power (and still has him on the payroll); that uses a kangaroo indictment that says the Russians hacked the DNC, even though no one in law enforcement has inspected the DNC server.

Sorry, but when the American IC is not incompetent, it is corrupt in ways that would not be believed in fiction.

6. Trump’s actions speak for themselves. His actions, not his words when engaged in direct diplomacy, which of course require a certain amount of finesse and BS, are what matter.

It is simply a fact that Trump has been tougher on Russia than both his predecessors combined. He has increased Russian sanctions, directed many of those sanctions directly at Putin’s inner circle, has drawn a real red line in Putin’s client state of Syria, twice bombed Putin’s client Assad, is openly admonishing Germany for being Putin’s energy client, overturned Obama’s appeasement of Putin by giving Poland anti-missile defense, ordered Russian diplomatic properties closed in D.C., Manhattan, Seattle, and San Francisco; Trump has armed Ukraine and is aggressively pushing our NATO partners to invest even more into an organization built specifically to defy Russia.

Which means that what Putin saw in Helsinki is a firm American president who cannot be bullied, berated, blackmailed, or cajoled, even with the threat of a week-long tantrum performed by spoiled babies back in his own country. This is a good thing.