The Russian attack
I feel like such a dope. Through a bit of online sorcery, thirteen Russian agents tricked me into not voting for Hillary Clinton in November of 2016. There’s some solace in the fact that I wasn’t alone in my confusion. Tens of millions of other Americans also filled out ballots for other candidates. Twenty-six years of Clinton in the public spotlight, and we still didn’t have a good idea what to make of her. That’s where these agents found our blind spot and manipulated it. Though I wasn’t one of them, most voters that shunned Clinton chose a candidate who had been in the public eye for on or about forty years.
Borrell Associates, an agency that tracks and forecasts spending for the advertising industry, reports that $1.415 billion was spent on online advertising by local, state, and national campaigns in 2015 and 2016. Two out of every five of those dollars-- so almost five hundred million-- were spent on social media sites. Ten billion dollars were spent overall during the election season on media advertising of all kinds. The Russian “bots” spent $100,000.
The indictments of these Russian agents by the Robert Mueller team will likely have about the same resonance as those of foreign countries when their judicial systems indict agents of the U.S. government for interfering in their political process and in their elections. The difference is that those indictments are often written up for crimes such as an overthrow or assassination. Here, foreign agents allegedly buy ads online and develop memes that reflect political partiality. As long as these Russian agents don’t plan to live in the U.S., our courts likely won’t be able to hold them to account. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been indicted in at least five different countries. So when you hear American politicos discussing the best way for us to retaliate for interference, know that in other nations, these sorts of actions are considered the retaliation.
This distraction from the real issues of the day causes great harm to everyone, including Democrats, who are so beholden to corporate interests that they are truly incapable of accepting responsibility for their corrosive actions and devastating failures during the ’16 electoral cycle. It’s not even a question of political courage at this point. Their representatives are so intrinsically cuffed to their corporate paymasters that the bond can certainly not be broken. Since the fall of ’16, when their underhanded actions in relation to the Bernie Sanders opposition campaign in their own primaries were revealed by an email leak, they have, in their defense, done the only thing their compromised predicament allows them to do-- distract through an investigation into the leak.
Is the loud public investigation into Russian meddling helping to fuel the Trump opposition? Of course not. His approval ratings are up five points-- to 40%-- since December. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released eight days ago shows that for the first time since November 2016, more registered voters say they would support the Republican candidate for Congress in their district than the Democrat. The Democratic Party, with its nearly preternatural ability to project hyper-partisanship while standing for absolutely nothing, threatens to once again fumble away the gift of Donald Trump that was handed to them by Republican primary voters right at about two years ago.
As one of the most important examples, the President and the Republican Congress passed a crippling tax bill a few weeks ago, one that provides unprecedented cuts for the wealthy, and which will then translate into a disproportionate burden for working people and the defenseless. In December, 49% of Americans opposed that Trump tax plan with only 29% in favor, according to Public Policy Polling. Now those numbers are virtually even—41% opposed, 39% in favor. And why wouldn’t it be that way? There are no Democrats making the political case against these crushing cuts in revenue that will be made up out of the pockets of those of ordinary means. The subject came and went while politicians and the media were focusing on Vladimir Putin. The national anthem performance at the NBA All-Star Game has had a longer life in the news cycle than the tax cuts.
The electoral interference that actually took place was between the DNC, pockets of the Intelligence State, and a colluding news media. It was actually done to elevate Trump, who was the Democrats’ preferred opponent all the way up to Election Day, but also to sabotage progressives like Sanders and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. For eight years, President Obama made the case that Russia was our ally while Republicans attacked him for it. Now, in left-wing circles, you get called "comrade" if you demand that the National Security State show evidence of their charges. In order to survive, the primary goals of the Democratic Party must always be the elimination of opposition voices and convincing progressive and moderate voters that the Democratic Party is their only option. What better way to sabotage and censor than to sidetrack from the stories of their own misdeeds and spin a story instead of how the oppressor has supposedly been wronged? The only alternative option would be to repent, give back the corporate bribes, replace the compromised with new leaders, and go to work for the people, and that's not going to happen.
Yankee, go home
If you know a military member that's been stationed overseas at any time during the last ten years... or twenty years... there's a good chance that that person has been deployed to Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf as part of a war operation. We hear a lot about those assignments. But there's also a good chance that that man or woman has lived for a time in one of two other countries-- Germany and South Korea.
World War II ended in 1945. Documents were signed. It was in all the papers. But American military forces have maintained major military footprints since at the locations of both the old, dismantled Berlin Wall and throughout the Pacific. We're still holding back Communism on the Korean Peninsula even since the "police action" in Korea paused in a cease-fire in the summer of 1953. That truce represents the moment when most Americans-- because they have been continuously told-- came to believe that a three-year and never-declared "war" between North and South Korea came to an end. But its Cold War, complete with defense build-ups, trade sanctions, undercover ops and targeted violence, has continued. Thus, the presence of the American military at the edge of the Korean Demilitarized Zone for the last 65 years. We are still 23,000 servicemembers strong in South Korea. The peninsula has been more or less out of the mindset of Americans since 1953 (except for the eleven seasons
M*A*S*H was on the air)-- but America, as you could probably guess, is still a major presence in the lives of North Koreans. The USS Pueblo naval ship, captured by the North Koreans in 1968 and never decommissioned by the U.S. Navy, still sits docked along the Potong River in Pyongyang, a daily reminder from the North Korean government to its people of United States ongoing war games in their backyard.
Does it ever strike you as strange that your country's military has a presence in foreign countries, but other countries don't have a similar presence in ours? We certainly do harbor fears about a lot of different peoples. We are armed under the U.S. banner inside hundreds of countries. Nothing of the military apparatus has been dismantled since the time of the early build-up of the Cold War. Nothing has even checked the growth. We have bases in Germany and South Korea, but also in Niger, Djibouti, Italy, Greece, Japan, and Kosovo, and even in countries like Cuba with which we don't offer diplomatic relations. Conversely, the
Italian military is not based in part here in the U.S. The National Army of the Republic of Djibouti does not house its North American Command within our borders. The Greek armed forces don't have an installation in, say, the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Isn't that odd to you?
This has been an extraordinary weekend in geo-politics. The Olympics are on-- and during this round they're actually serving the larger purpose for which they are routinely marketed-- that is, thawing the often-chilly relationships between countries. This one could be historic. North and South Korea are joint participants in the winter games at Pyeongchang. The North-South Korea women's hockey team has game. The respective leaders in the North and South, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, agreed to have the two countries join forces on the snow and ice. Kim's sister, 28-year-old Kim Yo-jong, the first member of the ruling Kim family to cross the border into the South since 1953, was seated with the South Korean hosts at the opening ceremonies, a lunch was shared the following day, and a summit might be in the works for later this year after Kim Yo-jong passed a note to Moon on behalf of her brother.
And the United States is having none of it.
U.S. Vice President Pence was at the opening ceremonies also-- seated just a few feet away from the Koreans. He stayed seated for the passing of the North and South Korean athletes. On Wednesday, in Tokyo, he vowed renewed U.S. sanctions for North Korea. (New sets of embargoes are arriving now about once a month. The most recent were three weeks ago.) On the topic of warming relations between these ancient Asian siblings with shared customs and history, North and South Korea, the guy from Columbus, Indiana weighed in with this, "I'm announcing that the United States of America will soon unveil the toughest and most aggressive round of sanctions on North Korea ever, and we will continue to isolate North Korea until it abandons its nuclear and ballistic missile programs once and for all." Then after touching down in Seoul for the ceremonies, his message drew upon the symbolic, cooperative spirit of the locking Olympic rings: "We will not allow North Korean propaganda to hijack the message and imagery of the Olympic Games. We will not allow North Korea to hide behind the Olympic banner the reality that they enslave their people and threaten the wider region." Take that, Kim Jong-un. And take that, Moon Jae-in.
This is what the U.S. does-- and it didn't start with the Trump administration. We are not neutral players, as we often profess. In this case, we are not even weighted allies of one side against another. We are saboteurs. The military industrial complex, the one famously warned by President Eisenhower that certainly grew in size beyond even his wildest imagination, is a tiger in the basement that needs to be relentlessly fed, hemorrhaging the budget while putting us all in danger. The news media plays along as propagandist. Dennis Rodman was pilloried-- universally-- for traveling to Pyongyang and meeting with Kim last June, but now his visit looks prescient.
This blog was probably the only place you read praise for Rodman at that time. His diplomatic trip, which curiously did not carry the blessing of anyone in the official American diplomatic community, did not carry that blessing because it ran afoul of our perverse motivations. Rodman did not attempt to dehumanize. He did not misrepresent. He did not traffic in paranoia. He was not intruding there on behalf of American business.
Well, now Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, is Dennis Rodman, and what choo you all got to say about that? Pence looked the fool sitting there in the front row of the Koreans' box-- disengaged, arrogant, ignorant, sullen and severe. You can find plenty of images of this online to chuckle over. He looks like he's photo-bombing the rest of them. The Japanese president-- no fan of North Korea-- said hello to Kim Yo-jong. Pence refused to speak to her. (So he's not even a gentleman-- and he's embarrassing Midwestern Americans.) He looked like an ungrateful guest-- and probably at a certain point he was an unwelcomed one. As he left South Korea, he told reporters, "there's no daylight between the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan on the need to continue to isolate North Korea economically and diplomatically." But the reality seems to be that there's quite a lot of daylight there. The Koreans were literally passing notes to each other behind his back.
"Lies My Blogger Told Me"
Do ever find yourself in this situation? Here's you: I would like to read the Chris Moeller Blog, but my home PC and/or lap top is too difficult to manage when I’m on the move, unlike, say, a 330 page book that catches snugly in the crevice of my underarm while I'm carrying groceries. Do you ever catch yourself muttering under your breath and to nobody in particular-- I have a smart phone, but I’m dangerously low on data this month, and/or concerned that, despite the absence of supporting scientific data, the radiofrequency energy and non-ionizing radiation from my cellular phone is increasing my risk of a cancerous tumor? And does this ever cross your mind-- I like the Chris Moeller Blog, but only about 1 in 15 posts have actual merit and have been worth reading? Or maybe you’ve been confronted with the following dilemma-- I’ve never been able to read the Chris Moeller Blog because maybe I’m a Neo-Luddite and I don’t have a computer and I have no way of reading this now.
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, or your reaction to the ones that aren’t actually questions is confusion, problem solved. I want to interest you in a book. It’s called Lies My Blogger Told Me: The Best of the Chris Moeller Blog 2004-2017, and it’s being released by Lulu Publishing in February 2018!
All your favorites are here. The politics, the baseball harangues, the celebrity obituaries. Blog posts like "I don't like soccer and you can't make me," "The roots of Ben Affleck and a nation," and "Letterman Tribute #8." Many of the blog posts are presented with new introductions that update the topic or change the gist of the original completely. This is a high performance book with a V8 engine, an eight-speed automatic transmission, and a satin-black hood. It corners like a snake in a rat hole.
How much would you pay for such a book? Sixty dollars? Sixty-five dollars? You're not even close. Seriously though, how much? Prices are still being determined. I think it's a book you'll like it. It's going to be available in both hard cover and paperback. There's a lot more about me in it than there is about you, but you might be name-dropped in the back somewhere. It will make you forget how lonely you are and how meaningless life in America has become. And here's the best part. I didn't know this about the publishing business, but apparently it's true: It doesn't matter
how many of the books you buy for yourself and for your friends and family, Lulu will just print more. The more you buy, the more they'll keep printing new copies with essentially no upper limit. So don't hold back. We're not at that magic release date quite yet, but it's around the bend, and you'll be able to purchase through me and this site. The proofs are approved. The presses are heating. Prepare your checkbooks.
