Patterico's Pontifications

1/3/2017

Garry Kasparov: The United States Has a Putin (and a Partisanship) Problem

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 9:30 am



Garry Kasparov, the Russian human rights activist and former chess champion, has a piece in today’s Washington Post titled The U.S. doesn’t have a problem with Russia. It has a problem with Vladimir Putin.

When the entire U.S. intelligence community united to accuse Russia of tampering in the 2016 presidential election, it seemed redundant to later add that Vladimir Putin was directly involved. Nothing significant happens in Russia, and no action is taken by Russia, without the knowledge of the man who has held total power there for 17 years, first as president and later as unchallenged dictator. Having steadily eliminated every form of real political and social opposition in Russia, Putin turned his attacks on the foreign powers that could — should they decide to act — weaken his grip.

The United States, in other words, doesn’t have a problem with Russia — it has a problem with Putin.

And instead of deterrence, President Obama continues the policy of belated responses that has enabled Putin’s steady escalation of hostile acts. The sanctions against Russian intelligence assets that the White House announced last Thursday, while welcome, left me searching for a Russian equivalent for the proverb “closing the barn door after the horse is gone.”

Kasparov also has a warning for those who place partisanship over country: you are playing right into Vladimir Putin’s hands:

The Russian meddling in the 2016 election documented by the Obama administration last week relied on partisan enmity to disregard its origins and the eagerness of American news outlets to take their cues from social media by turning stolen emails into daily headlines about their trivial content. Editors and algorithms designed to maximize social sharing were woefully unprepared for a coordinated and well-funded propaganda assault.

. . . .

Hacking is an ideal new front in this type of shadow war. It’s difficult to trace and, like terrorist attacks, cyberwar has a very high impact-to-cost ratio. Once data is stolen, it barely takes any work at all, since the media is delighted to distribute it far and wide. Stolen information has the irresistible allure of forbidden fruit, no matter how banal the actual content may be. Social media has no vetting at all and has become fertile soil for Kremlin trolls and fake news organizations. These digital tools will only grow in power and in influence. After the tremendous success of the Democratic National Committee hack, there will only be more such attacks unless very strong deterrence is put in place to discourage them.

. . . .

Putin’s classic KGB strategy of divide and conquer is perfectly suited for this era of hyper-partisanship. Americans have forgotten Abraham Lincoln’s admonition that a house divided against itself cannot stand. A divided America cannot defend the values of the free world.

Even if, as seems likely, Putin probably did not swing the election, there is something very disquieting about the spectacle of many pro-Trump Republicans rushing to minimize Putin’s actions. Also laughable is the blatantly partisan manner in which Democrats have suddenly discovered a menace in Russian hacking that they couldn’t find in Putin’s murders of journalists, opposition figures, and other innocents over the last 17 years.

If Americans can’t recognize who their real enemies are, they are bound to be crushed by them.

P.S. Over the winter break I purchased and read Kasparov’s latest book: Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. I plan to review it in the next day or two. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to learn more about the true enemy.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

36 Responses to “Garry Kasparov: The United States Has a Putin (and a Partisanship) Problem”

  1. There is nothing to minimize. Americans decided the election.

    The continued effort to disenfranchise America’s choice is disturbing.

    nn (de879d)

  2. Happy New Year, Patterico.

    I don’t know. At the risk of sounding like an enabler, I reserve the right to be skeptical that this email “hack” did not originate from a disaffected DNC staffer (as Julian Assange has hinted) rather than a Russian phishing scam. If we had a mature country led by patriotic public servants we might be able to discover the truth, but I would imagine that adherence to party priorities would ensure that everyone’s interests are protected in some sort of sham investigation, while the usual suspects use it as a forum to grandstand.

    JVW (6e49ce)

  3. Now that the IT community and Julian Assange have weighed in, it seems hard to deny that we have a partisanship problem when it comes to US policy toward Russia. I’m not sure how we can have a rational foreign policy when the highest echelons of the executive branch behave so corruptly.

    And, it appears, that the GOPe is holding up its end in a race to the bottom, moving to gut congressional ethics rules.

    To think, I was worried about Donald Trump’s moral compass.

    ThOR (c9324e)

  4. The Russian meddling in the 2016 election documented by the Obama administration last week

    food stamp and our corrupt, foppishly incompetent FBI/DHS poofters did nothing of the kind

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  5. @Dana: the spectacle of many pro-Trump Republicans rushing to minimize Putin’s actions.

    If this refers to the “hacking”, it’s because the hacking is fake news.

    To date the evidence presented for the assertion has been laughable. It’s accusation by anonymous individuals who won’t say what it’s based on and won’t present it to Congress.

    Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1)

  6. In either case, that sound you heard was Mika Brzeshinski’s Cincinnati Bengal (bad helmet, great uniform) self hitting the ground after Joe Scarborough pushed open a chair for his new network-mate Me-again Kelly.

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  7. Greetings:

    This “hack” or whatever business is beginning to remind me of the “birther” controversy in that neither seem to have an identifiable consequence.

    11B40 (6abb5c)

  8. you have your @ wrong Mr. Hanna

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  9. @happyfeet: you have your @ wrong Mr. Hanna

    Yeah, I saw that. Let me fix it with the edit button.

    Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1)

  10. for the record if Mr. Putin wants to hack the RNC and reveal the corruption and sleaze we’d be otherwise wholly unaware of I think that would be a super thoughtful and constructive use of his time and resources

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  11. Hear! hear!, feet.

    ThOR (c9324e)

  12. @happyfeet: The tailgunners are going to say you called for the hacking of Republicans by Putin and you’re a Russkie-lovin traitor.

    Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1)

  13. i just don’t see it that way Mr. H

    me i have to live in such a way that I can’t put anything in an email i don’t want people to know (particularly the failmerican government spy poofter flunkies)

    I think douchebags like Paul Ryan and pervy Mitt Romney’s niece should have to play by the same rules

    fair’s fair

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  14. It’s strange how there’s not been much attention to the unsolved murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich who was killed (but not robbed) in Washington DC in July.

    Cruz Supporter (102c9a)

  15. B’rer Fox, he lay low.

    ropelight (81ae3a)

  16. The thing for me, if Putin had his minions do it they would have thrown in some gratuitous slanders of their own invention.
    The way Wikileaks played out, those emails are verbatum, true to life, indisputable, gospel.
    If even one bit of it were not 100% pure verifiable, MSM would have played it 24/7 to discredit the whole load. You can take that to the bank.

    papertiger (c8116c)

  17. But here’s the REAL news for Trumpsters: Megyn Kelly to go to NBC!

    Of course, Megyn Kelly is as much a journalist as Lois Lane, Brenda Starr, Miss Polly Purebred, Ted Baxter and Ron Burgundy.

    She will do some kind of daytime show and some half-azzed prime time magazine. For $20 million– like for or five Super Bowl commercials.

    Kelly is what… 48… an old hen among a lot of younger hotter chicks at Fox which make for better eye candy. And if Fox really wanted to keep her around, they would have. But she was fast becoming another Rita Cosby there.

    But let’s be clear: midday and ‘prime time’ TV chat and magazine shows are not journalism. They’re entertainment. And as Trumpsters all know, Americans don’t want to be governed, they wish to be entertained.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  18. Cue Admiral Ackbar, admonishing the Trump Inauguration Committee:

    http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/03/politics/rebecca-ferguson-trump-inauguration/index.html

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  19. @urbanleftbehind:

    Where was she when progressive pundits were calling for Bush to resign and let Obama take over?

    No principles, only will-to-power.

    Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1)

  20. No response to that offer would be the best…if it is a No, raciss and afraid of what supporters might do when they hear the lyrics…if its a Yes, some progressive plant will come on stage with his own noose.

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  21. Ref DCSCA (797bc0) — 1/3/2017 @ 10:58 am
    ” But let’s be clear: midday and ‘prime time’ TV chat and magazine shows are not journalism. They’re entertainment. And as Trumpsters all know, Americans don’t want to be governed, they wish to be entertained. ”

    ====================

    Do you suppose our Duly-Electeds –having seen now what happens when the laws against media consolidation are relaxed and all “News” *IS* filtered through a mere handful of extremely biased
    corporate executives– could ever be persuaded to reinstate the regulations against having more-than-{x}-media-outlets-owned-by-one-entity in the same marketplace?

    (Admission of guilt – I remember it happening, it was a LONG time ago, and when I tried to Google
    “When did Congress relax the rules on media consolidation” I got results dating from 1975, 1996, 2001, 2003, and more recent. It’ll take me a week at least to read the most-likely Top 20 articles. No time for that, kemosabe….)

    Doo-Dah, Doo-Dah (3e9ab6)

  22. 16. papertiger (c8116c) — 1/3/2017 @ 10:58 am

    The thing for me, if Putin had his minions do it they would have thrown in some gratuitous slanders of their own invention.

    I thought about that. They usually do, but there’s probably an explanation.

    Maybe they didn’t want to undermine the credibility of what they had. . Most
    of their forgeries are usually obvious – including language problems – as well as being completely preposterous to anyone who knows more than just about nothing about the subject.

    They did try some slander at the end: Pizzagate.

    Sammy Finkelman (eb0eea)

  23. Meanwhile Carlos slims is digging up Nixon again, just because, well it appears the landshark case is not as clearcut as one might have thought

    winter is coming is a fairly good primer, dryers red to black and David daffy offers the fictional treatment.

    bean (d1f714)

  24. If Putin’s goal was to divide important Democrats, or Americans heavily involved in politics from each other, rather than to confuse the public, it would not have been a good idea to include any forgeries in the initial batch of leaks.

    Sammy Finkelman (eb0eea)

  25. Sorry about that, now volodya earned yeltsin’s loyalty by putting the atty gen in a compromising position, the way comey was kept in check, except it didn’t involve money, if you get my drift

    narciso (d1f714)

  26. They did try some slander at the end: Pizzagate.

    Sammy Finkelman (eb0eea) — 1/3/2017 @ 11:48 am

    That was due to some 4chan creative interpretation Nostradamus style of otherwise innocuous wikileak docs, not because the wikileak docs themselves were false.

    papertiger (c8116c)

  27. OT: James Taranto is hanging up “Best of the Web Today”. I’ve been reading that since 2003.

    In 2012 I contributed something. See if you can guess which it is.

    Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1)

  28. Now that’s dissapointing, in all the reporting about the ‘hacking’ they didn’t mention kulkovo village, the lead cyberwarfare facility or dorm for that matter. Wonder why that was. Zor security, one of the sanctioned institution, is primarily a cyberdefense outfit.

    narciso (d1f714)

  29. Doo-Dah, Doo-Dah (3e9ab6) — 1/3/2017 @ 11:47 am

    “When did Congress relax the rules on media consolidation” I got results dating from 1975, 1996, 2001, 2003, and more recent. It’ll take me a week at least to read the most-likely Top 20 articles.

    They toughened the rules in 1987, to prohibit the FCC from granting a waiver for anyone to own both a television station and a newspaper in the same media market. (The FCC had control over television licenses, not newspapers)

    The “inside story” is that this was put into the continuing resolution by Senator Ted Kennedy to force Rupert Murdoch to sell the Boston Globe. But I think more likely the aim was to kill the New York Post. I’m not sure whose idea this was.

    Rupert Murdoch sold what he called his little (UHF) TV station in Boston instead, and the New York Post was bought by Peter Kallikow. The New York Post was in crisis in 1993, but save by the intervention of New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo (he said for the jobs, maybe also because he really didn’t like Bill Clinton) by which time it was legal for him to own both. I think Congress had corrected that law pretty quickly.

    There were a few other surprises in the 1987 continuing resolution and it caused President Ronald Reagan to promise in his 1988 State of the Union message that he would never sign another continuing resolution. There was only one year that that affected – 1988 – but there was no continuing resolution that year.

    And also in 1989.

    In 1990, Congress did pass another contnuing resiolution, and President Bush (41) vetoed it, mostly because of the committment made by Ronald Reagan, and he “shut down” the government and got heavily criticized for that. People couldn’t go into the Smithsonian Institution and things like that. It contributed to his unpopularity in 1992.

    Then in 1995, President Clinton vetoed a continuing resolution, but this time, succeeded in blaming Congress for it. he had (intentionally) narrowed his differenecs with the Republkicans on the budget as much as possible without resolving them so it made the Republicans look petty. It somehow got lost in all of thia that President S&Lick Willie had vetoed it.
    He was that good a politician.

    House Speaker Newt Gingrich started to complain about how Clinton didn’t want to resolve this – he and some House leaders has been invited on the plane to go and come back from Yitzchak Rabin’s funeral, and led to believe they would negotiate, but Clinton refused to see them and instead spent his time playing hearts with New York Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman. Then a cartoon was placed on the front page of the New York Daily News, showing Newt Gingrich as a crybaby for complaining that President Clinton wouldn’t see him. and somehow treated by Congressman Charles Schumer, standing on the House floor, like an impartial headline, and Newt Gingrich stoped arguing.

    Which allowed Clinton or the DNC to run misleading ads for a year on how Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole wanted to cut the budget in such a way so as to hurt people. But not in the New York, Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. media market, so most people active in politics would not be aware of these ads.

    Since that time there have been anumber of government shutdowns. I think mayb the last one was caused by Ted Cruz in 2013, when he made a claim that somehow Obamacare had to be prevented fom going into effect or it could never be repealed, and that he could force it somehow – all the while while the website was floundering. And President Obama deliberately tried to make the shutdown worse *. And the House would pass bills exempting certain parts of government from the shutdown by funding it. And then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would refuse to bring them up for a vote or even talk about them, and get the emedia mostly to ignore these bills as well, except for two (or was it only one?) that he did bring up for a vote and pass and send to Barack Obama who signed them into law.

    ——–
    * I think even a bridge (in Michigan, if I’m right) was closed.

    Sammy Finkelman (eb0eea)

  30. * 29. I mean the Boston Herald. Rupert Murdoch owned teh Boston Herald. Murdoch ad awaiver both n Boston and New York City.

    Sammy Finkelman (eb0eea)

  31. 2. JVW (6e49ce) — 1/3/2017 @ 9:53 am

    I reserve the right to be skeptical that this email “hack” did not originate from a disaffected DNC staffer (as Julian Assange has hinted) rather than a Russian phishing scam.

    It’s possible that it was passed on to Wikileaks with that kind of a tale, and maybe donald Trump will tell us about it today or tomorrow.

    But there was actuaklly someone (or a User ID) that claimed to be the hacker (Guccifer 2.0) and I think he had emails before Wikileaks did and would even supply interested reporters with emails.

    He also claimed to have broken into the DNC before the DCCC, whle in reality it was the DCC that was first. He claimed to be Romanian, but apparently used Google Translate to read and write in Romanian.

    More on Guccifer 2.0

    http://motherboard.vice.com/read/guccifer-20-is-likely-a-russian-government-attempt-to-cover-up-their-own-hack

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/is-dnc-email-hacker-a-person-or-a-russian-front-experts-arent-sure.html

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/house-democrats-hacking-dccc.html

    The hackers, working under the made-up name of Guccifer 2.0, used social media tools to invite individual reporters to request specific caches of documents, handing them out the way political operatives distribute scoops. It was an arrangement that proved irresistible to many news outlets — and amplified the consequences of the cyberattack.

    “It’s time for new revelations now,” the Guccifer 2.0 website proclaimed, as it began to pass out the D.C.C.C. documents, trying to entice reporters to look at them on their own. “All of you may have heard about the D.C.C.C. hack. As you see I wasn’t wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the D.N.C. breach.”

    How does this idea that there never was any hack at all at the DNC – remember it was detected – but instead it was a theft by some insider, like Snowden, with administrative access at the DNC, gain any currency at all??

    If we had a mature country led by patriotic public servants we might be able to discover the truth, but I would imagine that adherence to party priorities would ensure that everyone’s interests are protected in some sort of sham investigation, while the usual suspects use it as a forum to grandstand.

    Sammy Finkelman (eb0eea)

  32. JVW (6e49ce) — 1/3/2017 @ 9:53 am

    If we had a mature country led by patriotic public servants we might be able to discover the truth, but I would imagine that adherence to party priorities would ensure that everyone’s interests are protected in some sort of sham investigation, while the usual suspects use it as a forum to grandstand.

    There are people who are interested in what the truth is, or only trying to prove or disprove some minor points. At the end, it all has to come to a head.

    Sammy Finkelman (eb0eea)

  33. The death that were most concering was galena stairova (six the conscience of St Petersburg) and sobchak who was volodyas sponsor, not foul play but suspicious nonetheless.

    narciso (d1f714)

  34. Well, we know what Blofeld did to Kronstein.

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  35. Interesting plochy has a bio of the counterpart to kronstein, stashinkh

    narciso (d1f714)

  36. I could have guessed that this was what Trump was going to say Tuesday or Wednesday, and at least he didn’t go all the way. He actually didn’t quite agree with Assauge (who, if I understand things right, actually does not acknowledge that the DNC files were even hacked.)

    I think Trump is avoiding coming to grips with the whole thing. He only says things that people would tend to agree with. Trump did at least acknowledge that there was hacking into the DNC.

    It is all true that the DNC didn’t have good protection. But it is kind of irrelevant, except that it spoils one argument the intelligence agencies came up with.

    Anyway, it’s all going to come to a head in the Senate confirmation hearings for Rex Tillerson.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/us/politics/transition-briefing-trump-us-intelligence.html

    I think a lot of the mainstream media was not aware of Assauge’s claim (which is implausible, even if he genuinely thinks it is true. I mean it is quite plausible and likely, that Russia
    wouldn’t say – hey, we’re Russian intelligence and here’s what we found – but would try to come with some other story in order to make it more likely that Wikileaks would use the material))

    As the New York Times story says:

    It is highly unlikely that anyone approaching WikiLeaks with the emails obtained by Russian government hacking would acknowledge the source,..

    The only thing I might say, different from this story, is that the source would not be anonymous, but they’d come up with some type of legend.

    It is possible that Wikileaks might have gotten some material before it was even known that there was hacking, and the cover story, which would clearly now be known to be false, might have involved an inside informant.

    Sammy Finkelman (eb0eea)


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