Is Trump Right For Once?

What if Trump is right about the Russian hacking scandal? It’s not that I give a damn what a narcissistic con man says. I don’t really doubt that Putin authorized hacking the Democratic party and worked with Wikileaks to defeat the Hillary Clinton that Putin and Julian Assange hate. But interference in the elections of another nation seems fairly common in recent history (and something our own government has done). That sort of interference deserves a good punch in the shoulder but not a nuclear war.

More troubling is the recent ruckus over a charge that Russian hackers had penetrated the American electricity grid through a utility in Vermont. According to Glenn Greenwald (for God’s sake, people, stop spelling Glen with two n’s—it should be Glennnn), “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials.” American news media went nuts with this news. Yet, Greenwald points out, it never happened. Burlington Electric, not the government, managed to put out the correction. The malware had been found on one company laptop that was not connected to the grid. There was no connection to Russia except that the Russians had invented the original malware, much as they had invented the Kalashnikov ak47, which does not mean, as someone wrote, that every time you find someone murdered with a Kalashnikov, the Russians did it.

Greenwald—here I differ—seems to believe that hard proof must be presented to the public by the CIA each time they make a claim. We have a representative system. In other words, we elect people we trust (theoretically) and they consult experts and devote their lives (theoretically) to making informed judgments. I don’t know what our foreign policy in the Balkans ought to be like. And so on. I did trust President Obama to get things right in most cases. Of course, I have no reason to trust Trump with our national treasury, but at least he seems loathe to attack Russia. Putin is a nasty killer, but he’s hatching 7,000 nukes. America will have to outlive him.