The Latest on the “Russia” Thing

The “Russia” thing was back in the news with a vengeance on Monday, with federal indictments of two officials from President Donald Trump’s campaign and the revelation that a lower-ranking third official had already pleaded guilty to charges and is cooperating with the ongoing investigation, and both sides of the matter had plenty to work with.

One of the indicted was Paul Manafort, who served for five months as Trump’s campaign manager and now stands accused of failing to disclose his lobbying efforts on behalf of the Russia-friendly parties in Ukraine, illegally laundering the huge amounts of money he made and otherwise failing to pay taxes on the lucrative business, and 11 other counts that include “conspiracy against the United States.” Most of the charges pre-date his involvement with the Trump campaign, so they don’t definitively provide proof of the collusion with Russia’s meddling in the past election that Trump’s critics have been so ardently hoping for, but he lasted long enough to get the Republican convention to remove language from its platform about arming the anti-Russian elements in Ukraine, and he was for five months the campaign’s manager, so it doesn’t look good for Trump.

Also indicted was Rick Gates, a former business partner in Manafort’s lucrative lobbying efforts on behalf of some of the world’s worst dictators and wannabe dictators. but as obsessively as we’ve been following the “Russia” thing we have to admit he never heard of him before. Another partner in the firm was longtime Trump friend and advisor Roger Stone, whose sleaziness goes back to the Nixon administration and has recently been kicked off “Twitter,” and who would be well-advised to hire some high-priced legal representation of his own, so Trump’s involvement with the whole sleazy operation does not look good.

We’d also previously never heard of George Papadapoulos, the relatively low-ranking national security advisor to the campaign who had already copped a no-jail-time plea by admitting to making false statements to investigators about his Russian contacts in an apparent exchange for dirt on the higher ups, but that also doesn’t look good for Trump. He probably wouldn’t have been able to swing such a sweet deal without some tales to tell on the higher-ups, and we expect he’ll do some damage to the Trump brand before this is all over.

None of it  yet  amounts to the smoking gun that Trump’s most strident critics have all been hoping for, as all of Trump’s most ardent defenders are rightly gloating, but they can’t deny that it all looks bad. All of the right wing talk radio hosts and the rest of the Trump-friendly made the case that there’s still no smoking gun, but spent most of their airtime minutes and column inches reviving years-old stories about Trump’s vanquished Democratic opponent “Crooked” Hillary Clinton, and although that awful woman is no doubt guilty of some of the charges none of it means that Trump’s high-ranking associates and perhaps Trump himself  isn’t guilty of something serious.

In any case, we expect the “Russia” thing will continue to be in the news for a while.

— Bud Norman

Meanwhile, In the Rest of the World

The rest of the world has been back in the news lately, reminding Americans what a dangerous place it is.

Iran’s mad mullahs continue their quest to acquire nuclear weapons, a most dire possibility given the openly apocalyptic yearnings of the regime, and are now close enough that even the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Obama administration has taken alarmed notice. Vice President Joe Biden offered the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee a characteristically mangled assurance that “as long as I and he are president and vice president of the United States” Obama will be committed to the security of Israel, and Secretary of State John Kerry took to the airwaves to do some uncharacteristic saber-rattling, going so far as to say that “If they keep pushing the limits and not coming with a serious set of proposals or prepared to actually resolve this, obviously the risks get higher and confrontation becomes more possible.” It is hoped that Iran’s theocratic rulers will take these statements more seriously than we do, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has issued far more explicit threats, which will not be doubted by anyone, and some sort of “confrontation” now seems inevitable.

Whatever the Iranian government decides to do it will have to be without the assistance of longtime friend Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator who went to his final reward on Tuesday despite the best efforts of Cuba’s vaunted medical system. One is not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but surely in Chavez’ case an exception should be made. The fat twerp impoverished his citizens and trampled on their rights, fomented socialist troublemaking and allied himself with totalitarian thugs around the world, and racked up a sizeable personal fortune as he posed as a protector of the downtrodden common man. Such a resume gave Chavez a radical chic cachet among some progressives, from movie stars to congressmen to a particularly ditzy young woman of our acquaintance, but we think it says it all that his death prompted yet another police state crackdown in his unfortunate land.

The already nuclear-armed North Korean regime, a reliable pal to Chavez and Iran’s mullahs, was also grabbing its share of headlines. Not so much for it’s recent nuclear tests or its threat to end the decades-old cease-fire in the Korean War, but rather because of a recent state visit by Dennis Rodman. For those of you fortunate enough to have forgotten, Rodman was a professional basketball player who contributed tenacious defense, strong rebounding, and few points to some championship Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls squads back in the short-shorts days, then parlayed that meager accomplishment and a penchant for cross-dressing, garish tattoos, and outrageous pronouncements into a brief career as a B-list celebrity. Although Rodman’s status has been downgraded several notches in the meantime he was treated as a sort of royalty during his visit to Pyongyang, hanging with the dictator at sporting events and soaking up more media attention than he’s received in years, and he repaid the favor by talking up the virtues of the world’s worst state. Rodman was so inarticulate in the effort that he made Biden seem eloquent by comparison, but as best as we can decipher he seemed to suggest that America’s gulags are just as bad as North Korea’s and that the dictator and Obama share a love of basketball that should serve as the basis for a lasting peace.

Suddenly the domestic news, which has lately been dominated by stories about the disastrous consequences of a $44 billion cut from the growth of a $3.8 trillion budget, seems almost reassuring. The rest of the world can be very intrusive, however, and we can’t keep it at bay with manufactured budget crises forever. We not that the rest of the world even seems to want to meddle in the marijuana laws of Americans states, and there’s no telling what other mischief it might have in mind.

— Bud Norman