Putin’s American Dream
Putin’s Revenge (RTE1)
THERE’S a certain kind of commentator who will look at the proposition that Trump is colluding with Russia, and who will declare that there is “no smoking gun”. I think these guys enjoy telling us that there is “no smoking gun”, it seems to confer an air of maturity on them, as if they will not be going for the populist line.
I’m just curious about the point at which they would be satisfied that there is indeed a “smoking gun” — are they looking for an actual gun, with actual smoke coming out of it?
Then there are others — many, many others — who have for some time been convinced that there are more smoking guns in there, than were found after the Valentine’s Day Massacre, and now it’s just a question of organising the paperwork. Which would effectively mean that Vladimir Putin is the de facto President of the United States, that agents of the Kremlin are running America.
Which would be… interesting. Indeed it would be so interesting, maybe in all of us there is a reluctance to accept it for what it is. Even as we look at all the guns and all the smoke and draw our own conclusions, maybe at the end we recoil from reaching that ultimate verdict.
It will be most interesting, for example, to watch the concluding part of Putin’s Revenge, the first part of which was shown on RTE1 last Monday, and which was mainly concerned with all the ways in which Putin hates America — the second instalment will describe what he decided to do about that hatred, and the extent to which he succeeded.
“Soon Russia would have the capacity to strike at the heart of American democracy,” was the last line of part one of this highly respectable documentary, featuring the sort of sober and generally high-minded speakers who would not usually be found in the “smoking gun” lobby.
Putin, we were told, reserved his deepest hated for Hillary Clinton. He had hated all the American carry-on after 9/11 in the area of “regime change”, fearing that one day it would be his regime they would be wanting to change. But it was Clinton as Secretary of State who seemed most exercised about Putin’s Russia, who represented to him the most immediate danger to his particular dictatorship.
So when she became the favourite for the presidency in 2016, naturally Putin was very unhappy, but by a very happy coincidence he just happened to have these pictures of her opponent enjoying some sort of strange urination ceremony in a Moscow hotel, allegedly.
And while we know quite a lot about “Russia’s capacity to strike at the heart of American democracy”, in terms of the fake news plastered all over the internet and the many ways in which they allegedly had the Trump campaign under their command, there is still this reluctance to suggest that in fact they stole the election for him — actually, physically rigged the voting.
In Putin’s Revenge, we saw that on page one, line one, of the Little Book of Russian Dictatorship, there is the stuffing of ballot boxes, even the use of ink that can later be made invisible if the voter has plumped for the wrong candidate, you could say that the subversion of free and fair elections is a kind of a core belief of the Putin regime, non-negotiable.
Yet he was looking at the potential victory of the woman he hated the most in the country he hated the most, he had “the capacity to strike at the heart of American democracy” using various techniques which tend to feature the word “cyber” a lot, and still many of us can hardly even mention the notion that he might have just fixed the voting for the Trumper? Indeed no less an authority than the Trumper himself has stated that if anything it was fixed against him, which is a smoking gun in itself.
So we’ll see how they deal with it in part two of Putin’s Revenge, because if the Russians did straight-up steal the election, would that not be, like, war or something?
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