Hillary Doubles Down on Blame Putin! Fat Lot of Good It Will Do Her.

Hillary is officially going with the Putin Did It! strategy to distract attention from the DNC leak. This follows official DNC response of the initial reports of a leak which says the leak may be part of a “Russian disinformation campaign.”

No one from the Clinton camp or the DNC has disputed the veracity of the material released. So we have a novel theory: the leaking of actual information is disinformation. I’ll have to remember that one. It might come in handy someday. Again, though, two! two! two! logical fallacies in one: ad hominem and appeal to motive.

Clinton better get the spin machine in prime condition, because the really good stuff might be on its way: the Clinton Foundation emails were also hacked.

Let the games begin!

Pause a moment, though, and consider this. On the one hand, Hillary blames the Russians for hacking the DNC. On the other hand, Hillary claims that her private server was immune to hacking and had never been hacked.

Yeah. That’s believable.

I mentioned Hillary’s flying monkeys yesterday, and indeed, they are swarming out of the castle as we speak, screeching that Trump is Putin’s bitch. Prominent examples include Josh Marshall and Jeffrey Goldberg. (With Obama leaving, Goldberg is busy finding another throne to sniff.)

Politically I think this is a non-starter. Most Americans don’t really give a damn about Russia. They are not enamored with it, but they don’t dread it either. It doesn’t haunt their thoughts the way that it did in the Cold War. This in fact is something that drives the Russians generally, and Putin in particular, crazy. They would much rather be hated and feared than ignored: the irrelevant are ignored, but if you are feared, you matter. The Russians want to matter. They don’t to most Americans, which will mean that Hillary’s invocation of the Russian bogeyman will likely have little effect.

In the meantime, though, I am sure Putin is basking in the attention.

But what else does she have? Zip. So she’s gotta go with what she’s got.

It is also quite rich for Hillary to bemoan foreign influence on elections. For one thing, she is the woman who brought us Johnny Chung, Maria Hsia, James Riady, and John Huang. For those of you not of a certain age, these were sources of big (and illegal) foreign donations to the Clinton campaign in the mid-1990s.

For another thing, Bill Clinton was intensely involved in influencing the Russian presidential election in 1996. He took the “just win, baby” mindset to Russia, and frankly stated that the end (re-electing Yeltsin) justified any means:

The irony in all that is just too much, especially the turning a blind eye to Putin’s elevation part.

As for the conventional wisdom that Putin favors Trump, I am a contrarian. Trump is mercurial, unpredictable, and protean. He has been on every side of every issue. Anyone who believes that he can predict what Trump would do in office is deceiving himself. His current statements are probably the least reliable guide to his future actions. No one, least of all Putin, can have any confidence in predicting what a Trump presidency would be like. Even if he makes equivocal comments about Estonia today, he could turn around and send a division there when in office.

Hillary, on the other hand, is predictable, stupid, predictably stupid, and stupidly predictable. Putin has run rings around her before, and should be licking his chops at the prospects of doing it again.

The only reasons for Putin to favor a Trump election are that he wants more of a challenge, and he’s long gamma and hence relishes volatility.

Regardless of what Putin’s views are, facts are facts. Whoever leaked the DNC emails leaked facts. Moreover, it cannot be argue that the leak was selective, and thereby misleading: everything dropped. More leaked facts are almost certain to come, from the Clinton Foundation and perhaps even Hillary’s private server. And regardless of their provenance, the facts are damning.