{"id":3764,"date":"2019-05-23T11:39:16","date_gmt":"2019-05-23T11:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2019\/05\/23\/federal-rats-flee-sinking-ship\/"},"modified":"2019-05-23T11:39:16","modified_gmt":"2019-05-23T11:39:16","slug":"federal-rats-flee-sinking-ship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2019\/05\/23\/federal-rats-flee-sinking-ship\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Rats Flee Sinking Ship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.printfriendly.com\/p\/g\/NDGqrM\">Victor Davis Hanson<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\"><span class=\"wpsdcp-drop-cap-default\"><span class=\"text-node\">T<\/span><\/span><span class=\"text-node\">he entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"text-node\" style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"text-node\" style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">Two, the Trump administration\u2019s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions and kept the price of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a Russian \u201creset\u201d or get caught on a hot mic offering a self-interested hiatus in tensions with Russia in order to help his own re-election bid.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"text-node\" style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">Three, Russia has a long history of trying to warp U.S. elections that both predated Trump and earned only prior lukewarm pushback from the Obama administration.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"text-node\" style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">It\u2019s also worth remembering that President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had been recipients of Russian and Russian-related largesse\u2014ostensibly because Hillary Clinton had used her influence as Secretary of State under Obama to ease resistance to Russian acquisitions of North American uranium holdings.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"text-node\" style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">As far as alleged Russian collusion goes, Hillary Clinton used three firewalls\u2014the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm and the Fusion GPS strategic intelligence firm\u2014to hide her campaign\u2019s payments to British national Christopher Steele to find dirt on Trump and his campaign; in other words, to collude. Steele in turn collected his purchased Russian sources to aggregate unverified allegations against Trump. He then spread the gossip within government agencies to ensure that the smears were leaked to the media\u2014and with a government seal of approval.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"text-node\" style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">No wonder that special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s partisan team spent 22 months and $34 million only to conclude the obvious: that Trump did not collude with Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Victor Davis Hanson The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible. One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump. Two, the Trump administration\u2019s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2019\/05\/23\/federal-rats-flee-sinking-ship\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Federal Rats Flee Sinking Ship&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}