Eighteen is Enough

In the U.S. we now live with a world of Team Trump-Putin or you may more accurately call it Team Putin-Trump. Either way, the reality is that there are two sides:
1) Team Putin-Trump
2) All others
This reality is quite clear to any rational observer, but much of our traditional media views this reality as so incredibly shocking and extreme, that we must be very very very sure this is our reality in order to acknowledge it and face it. (That was three very's. The actual number of very's is equal to the number of Trump documented lies before they stop counting lies and start to stop listening to Trump lies.)

Unfortunately, the "both sides" model of traditional political reporting dictates that there are two equal and opposite sides, that those two sides are the "Democrats" and the "Republicans". So any "Republican" who abandons Team Putin-Trump is "really" a Democrat and maybe always was a "Democrat". And if Trump is a problem, then "Democrats" need to fix it. Traditional journalism, embodied in the intransigent New York Times, helped create this dichotomy by imposing their artificial binary worldview on their stories and then treat the result as a fait accompli totally unrelated to their behavior. So the NYT often refers to "these polarized times" or our "deeply polarized country."

Max Boot is one of those political conservatives who has gone over to the "other side". His article in WaPo is quite effective at identifying red flags in Trump's behavior. Instead of counting thousands of lies in some vain attempt to convince true belivers in Trump who will not budge no matter the lie count, Boot says, when it comes to red flags, eighteen is enough : "Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset."

My one quibble with Boot is his weak closing remarks: "This is hardly a “beyond a reasonable doubt” case that Trump is a Russian agent — certainly not in the way that Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames were. " Actually, that's not true. There are many more than 18 reasons to believe precisely beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump is guilty, guilty, guilty. The only reason that reasonable people express any doubt is that the reality is so horrible - that the U.S.is and was so vulnerable to ignominious defeat at the hands of a weak and corrupt foreign power and only needed the aid of a willing weak and corrupt American agent.