{"id":342980,"date":"2018-01-09T08:49:49","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T07:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-russia-thing\/"},"modified":"2018-01-09T08:49:49","modified_gmt":"2018-01-09T07:49:49","slug":"the-russia-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-russia-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Russia Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_97586\" style=\"max-width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-97586\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2017\/11\/Screen-Shot-2017-11-15-at-4.20.44-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"338\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Mike Maguire | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>In a recent interview,<em>\u00a0<\/em>journalist Luke Harding failed to substantiate the central thesis \u2013 indeed, the title \u2013 of his bestselling book,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0525562516\/counterpunchmaga\"><em>Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win<\/em><\/a>. That Putin \u201chelped Trump win\u201d is\u00a0<em>prima facie\u00a0<\/em>plausible, but what is the empirical evidence? Aaron Mat\u00e9 subjected Harding\u2019s lurid argument \u2013 that the Kremlin began cultivating Trump decades ago in order to \u201chack\u201d an election \u2013 to incisive scrutiny. The result, as Harding\u2019s reddening cheeks revealed, was embarrassing.<\/p>\n<p>It would be unfair to single Harding out for asserting without much evidence that Russia catapulted a Putin stooge into the White House. Mat\u00e9 is, in fact, an outlier for maintaining a healthy skepticism about this story (a \u201ccollusion rejectionist,\u201d in Harding\u2019s phrase). Indeed, the specter of collusion has been so consuming a journalistic obsession it has distracted from the GOP\u2019s assaults on the environment, the working poor, and global peace.<\/p>\n<p>The Democratic Party too has become captivated by the fantasy that collusion will someday be not only proven but somehow sufficient to oust the President from the Oval Office. It is not obvious how this Russian cloud \u2013 increasingly black, but persistently insubstantial \u2013 might produce enough rain to wash the Trump era away, nor whether President Pence is a ray of sunshine worth hoping for. Journalists, Democrats, and concerned&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/01\/08\/the-russia-thing\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by Mike Maguire | CC BY 2.0 In a recent interview,\u00a0journalist Luke Harding failed to substantiate the central thesis \u2013 indeed, the title \u2013 of his bestselling book,\u00a0Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. That Putin \u201chelped Trump win\u201d is\u00a0prima facie\u00a0plausible, but what is the empirical evidence? Aaron Mat\u00e9 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-342980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}