18
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The agony of defeat
And just like that, the col-
lusion narrative imploded.
Which doesn’t mean there
is a political winner in the
United States. Far from it.
What emerges from the
indictment produced by
Mueller et al, in addition
to some truly laugh-out-
loud funny capers pulled on
dimwitted, blinded-by-rage
Trump rally stooges, is the
picture of a magnificently
coordinated, extremely well-
financed, and brilliantly
conducted psy-op campaign
whose principle aim was to
discredit the results of an
election, sow instability, and
thus to destabilize the nation
and weaken its ability to act
cohesively.
And the results are clear.
Mission accomplished. With
honors and distinction.
Truly, it was an almost
flawless performance. At the
cost of a few million rubles,
a handful of shell companies,
a hundred or so agents, and
an array of phony Twitter and
Facebook accounts, Russian
intelligence agents accom-
plished by way of social
media zombies, blinkered
political partisans, and the
manipulation of Americans’
ideological hatred for each
other, what no military power
on earth could ever do in a
toe-to-toe slugfest.
Enter Sun Tzu. Writing
2,000 years ago, the great
Chinese sage reminded his
audience that all war is based
on deception, and that “Those
who were called skillful lead-
ers of old knew how to drive
a wedge between the ene-
my’s front and rear…(and)
when the enemy’s men were
united, they managed to keep
them in disorder.”
By allying oneself to an
enemy’s weaknesses, Sun
Tzu wrote, one can subdue
the enemy without fighting
at all.
Bravo, Vlad.
The Russians, and Uncle
Vova in particular, under-
stand our weaknesses all too
well. Among those weak-
nesses are a gargantuan
capacity for self-absorption,
and extraordinary levels of
arrogance. By brazenly —
and apparently quite eas-
ily — aligning themselves
with those weaknesses, the
Russians produced a kind of
digital hallucination, con-
vincing many in the end
that they had installed a
Manchurian Candidate in the
oval office.
The Russian success has
also shown that they aren’t
the least bit concerned about
potential consequences,
which says something about
American power projection.
“If your opponent is tem-
peramental,” Sun Tzu wrote,
“seek to irritate him.”
It would be difficult to
locate a more temperamental
bunch than those legions of
Americans now so encamped
in their binary — and mostly
antique — political plat-
forms, and so manipulated by
social-media algorithms that
they routinely stumble into
parked cars and telephone
poles, or topple into water
fountains while rubbing their
smartphones.
That isn’t happening
because people are pay-
ing close attention to their
surroundings.
The Russian success is
admirable, and probably
unparalleled in its ease. The
irritation of the last election
cycle has now bloomed into
a full-blown rash, driving
a gigantic wedge into our
domestic and international
politics, paralyzing Congress,
turning otherwise respectable
news organizations into mud-
slinging political shills, and
even pitting neighbor against
neighbor in endless rounds
of meme-think and juvenile
one-upsmanship.
It would be hard to argue,
at this point, that the United
States today is anything
other than severely dimin-
ished as a great power on the
world stage, and internally
diseased.
That was going to be true
no matter who got elected,
and what the Russians
accomplished was a brilliant
exercise in adding fuel to an
already overheated domestic
fire.
A careful parsing of
Deputy Attorney General
Rosenstein’s language leaves
room for a spring collu-
sion surprise, but that looks
increasingly unlikely, and it
has been clear for some time
that Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation was
heading in a different direc-
tion from the Republicans’
greatest fear and the
Democrats’ greatest hope.
Mueller’s indictment of
some artful Russian spies
won’t stop the other inves-
tigations either, but they are
hamstrung by credibility
problems throughout, and it’s
a safe bet they aren’t going
anywhere. Particularly now
that so many in Washington
D.C. have egg on their face,
not least among them every
single person at the FBI.
And it won’t stop the
grassy-knoll conspiracy junk-
ies who have been backslid-
ing around, post-indictment,
with suggestions that some-
how — and this is a classic
desperation mindset — the
utter absence of prosecutable
evidence of collusion is still
prosecutable evidence of
collusion.
And once any conspiracy
theory reaches that critical
point — when no evidence
is the evidence — it’s time to
call in the dogs and put out
the fire.
Partisan hacks, of the
deeply steeped variety, won’t
be able to see, and will cer-
tainly never admit, that the
brilliance of the Russian
operation was in its duping of
virtually everyone. Each will
continue to insist the other
side was more duped than
they were and, in a sordid
twist, will insist that either
winning, or losing, the elec-
tion proves them right.
But neither claim is
true, and the sad reality is
that everybody was duped
equally, even spectacularly,
and while the Russian agents
are at home dancing the
kazachok, many Americans
are left standing around with
severe political hangovers
and no real idea who it was
that drove them home.
What’s clear from the lat-
est indictment is that in some
manner, to some degree, it
was Russia that drove us
home. We were drunk on par-
tisanship, on self-absorption,
and we were arrogant. And
we got beaten. Badly. By
experts.
And what makes that pain
even more acute, in a grown-
up world, is that we have
only ourselves to blame.
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