Russian conclusions

On a podcast last week with Barack Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, Hillary Clinton said the Russians clearly are grooming as a Russian asset a person she did not call by name but who undoubtedly was Tulsi Gabbard. That sounds harsher than it is. In the context Clinton was using, “Russian asset” means anybody who opposed Hillary’s Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 or threatens to subdivide the anti-Trump electorate today.

It’s not like being called a Russian spy or agent. It’s not even a matter of being witting. It’s circumstantial.

In this reckoning, a “Russian asset” is someone thinking for herself, but outside the standard Democratic establishment orthodoxy. It’s someone the Russians have noticed and said nice things about to raise the possibility of dissension within the Trump resistance—even of a third-party candidacy from the left—that would help keep Russian tool Donald Trump in the White House.

Clinton said that Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate in 2016, clearly was a Russian asset.

Gabbard and Stein became highly incensed, but, really, Hillary was just saying they’re independent women, whom she might normally admire, as long as their independence encompassed fealty to the Democratic Party establishment and the imperative of unity in ridding the nation of the Trump scourge.

She’s really saying Gabbard is not smart enough to know how some may be using her.

It’s handy terminology, labeling a rival a Russian asset.

Gabbard is surely an interesting case. A Hindu born in American Samoa, she got elected to the Hawaii Legislature when she was 21 and advanced anti-homosexual policies for which she has now long apologized.

She joined the military and served in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Middle East.

She got elected to Congress and the Democratic National Committee tapped her for a vice-chairmanship. But she declared that the DNC was unfairly favoring Hillary in 2016. She quit the post and endorsed Bernie Sanders.

(Do you see the Russian asset-ship emerging?)

She is running for the Democratic presidential nomination this year with a populist domestic agenda and an isolationist foreign-policy one, taking down Kamala Harris over her California prosecutorial record and criticizing not only Trump on Syria, but Obama, indeed the notion of “regime change,” which she deplores.

She met with Syrian strongman

Assad and publicly doubted whether he’d used chemical weapons, though she also called him a monster.

She’s a jumble of her own apparent thinking, and, as Hillary sees it, the Russians just love the usefulness of that in a prominent American politician.

People miss the point when they criticize Clinton for not providing specific facts to support what she’s called Gabbard. Her evidence is against the Russians—that they have started talking nicely about Gabbard on state media.

Gabbard may be merely a passive recipient, just as others from the left like Stein who break from Democratic orthodoxy may have been passive recipients.

You see, according to Hillary. One might think Bernie Sanders would be a Russian asset by this construction. But he seems to get credit for merely being a socialist. And, after all, he endorsed Hillary eventually in ’16—which apparently is the key to avoiding Russian usefulness—and is not specifically to blame for many of his followers staying home for the general election.

If he hadn’t endorsed Hillary, or if he’d mounted a third-party campaign, he’d be a Russian asset for sure. You see, according to Hillary. Gabbard has said she would not run as a third-party candidate. If she turns around now and runs that way, then we could consider her anew—whether she’s more than a Russian asset, which is merely an independent left-leaning thinker, but a Russian agent, which would be a person conspiring to keep the asset-in-chief in the White House.

In the meantime, all of us should think for ourselves even at the risk of being Russian assets.