Were the Russians sucked in by Facebook?

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

If the information contained in the Mueller indictments can be trusted, then it is clear that something dramatic happened from when the Russians started their effort to steer the election away from Hillary Clinton to when they actually launched the campaign.
Somehow, a nation that has a very long history of rigging its own elections, forgot how to do it when they arrived in the continental United States.
Instead of intimidating voters, stuffing ballot boxes, hacking into voting machines the usual stuff that goes on whenever Russia decides to have an election, Russian spies – according to Mueller – came over here, spent years establishing spy networks, setting up phony bank accounts, and creating political cells only to end up saying bad things about Hillary Clinton on Facebook, and to get their alleged puppets to shout ineffective chants at rallies.
What happened to these masters of election rigging?
Did they forget everything they learned at school?
Or did the lure of social media get to them in the same way it gets to the average American, turning their brains like ours into pudding with the presumption that Twitter, Facebook and other sites actually have any power to do more than annoy people?
For some reason, the Russians – if you can believe Mueller – actually believed that if they said enough bad things about Clinton, people who liked her would someone be convinced to vote against her. 
This is a delusion common to many of the anti-Trump protestors who took to the streets to rant and rave, hoping that they might shame Trump supporters into hating him more than they hated Clinton.
The Russians, who clearly – if you believe Mueller – expended a huge investment in this network and yet completely forgot they used to rig elections back home.
Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton clearly overestimated the capacity of the Russians in claiming the Russians had a use hacking network capable of reaching into each and every voting machine to turn a Clinton vote into one for Trump?
Perhaps the Russian spies got caught up in Facebook the way many poor Americans have, falling into a kind of trance the moment they log on, getting lured away from their intended purpose by pictures of pets other people post?
Back home, the Russian government, must have been furious that after years of setting up the operation, calculating the risk of doing all that they did, the best their agents could come up was to say rude things about Clinton – and most of these hardly original since many Americans – including some angry Bernie Sanders’ supporters – were saying a lot more often.
You would think that the Russians with their history of great writers would come up with more original slander than what Mueller claims they actually posted?
After decades of fighting the Cold War against the Russians, we know these are not stupid people. And yet, the Mueller indictments reads like a bad comic book, showing us a great conspiracy not to overthrow our government in any logical way, not to steal or secrets or even wire tap the Democrats at the Watergate Hotel, but to come here, log on to Facebook and call Clinton names?
The Mueller indictments clearly show us that the Russians did not send their best and brightest over to help Trump – if you can actually believe any of us – but a second rate team of spies that didn’t know how the hell to rig an election when they got here, and basically did what the Democrats did after the election, spewed crap that nobody in their right mind would take seriously, especially anybody who actually liked or disliked either of the candidates.
Of course, these Russians spies clearly did not have insight into what was then going on inside the Clinton Campaign or they might have been much more effect. Clinton’s team had it all over the Russians, learning how to take over the DNC from the inside, how to steal debate questions, how to spin and weave.
If the Mueller indictment reflect in any way the capability of the Russians, we clearly have overrated them over the last half century, and perhaps we should send our spies over to see if they have anything other than hot air in their nuclear launch silos because this supposed conspiracy is all hot air.