I’m relieved Joe Biden is getting intelligence briefings. Through him, we can now hear the dark facts about our crucial upcoming election.
From today’s Times article:
DETROIT — Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said on Friday he is now getting intelligence briefings, and has been told Russia continues to try to meddle in November’s U.S. election.
China also was conducting activities “designed for us to lose confidence in the outcome” of the 2020 election, Biden told supporters during an online fundraiser for his campaign.
“We know from before, and I guarantee you that I know now, because now I get briefings again. The Russians are still engaged in trying to delegitimize our electoral process. Fact,” Biden said.
He warned that if Russia continued to interfere there would be “a real price to pay” if he wins the November election against Republican President Donald Trump.
And you know something? I wrote about this a few months ago in one of the last chapters of How I Learned The Facts of Life: Real news versus fake news in a time of plague, injustice, gobsmacking trumpery…and whatever comes next.
Nah, I wasn’t getting intelligence briefings, although I’m intelligent and kind of briefed myself.
Robert Mueller, in his July 2019 appearance before the House, certainly briefed me.
Robert S. Mueller III offered no new revelations on Wednesday into Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections or President Trump’s attempts to derail his probe. But he offered a stark warning on Russian election tampering — “They’re doing it as we sit here” — and a sober assessment of where politics are after the Trump campaign welcomed foreign interference in 2016.
“I hope this is not the new normal,” he told Representative Peter D. Welch, Democrat of Vermont,“but I fear it is.”
–From the New York Times, July 24, 2019, with my bolding.
Here’s how I started Chapter 25, entitled “So what are we looking at in the future of fakes?”
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could cheerily offer reassurance that we’re done with fake news, we’ll never again be pinged by stomach-churning smears and crazy propaganda from anywhere, let alone Russia?
It would be nice.
However. Even before the front page of the February 21, 2020 New York Times (“HOUSE IS WARNED OF RUSSIAN EFFORT TO BOLSTER TRUMP”), I’d picked up a slew of information about entities who intend to jump onto the junk pile, wherefrom they will crow.
Once again – but this time not unaware – we are facing an onslaught of lies, nutty conspiracies and fake news/propaganda created by foreign governments, national antagonists, crazy internet sites and endless numbers of acolytes and true believers and dupes, all eager to spew out fakery.
The assault on facts has revved up, and there will be a few new twists in the methodology.
So I was less perspicacious than merely an omnivorous reader of the facts in the news.
Still, my conclusion to How I Learned The Facts of Life is fairly sunny. That is, I don’t think too many people will be suckered by Russia or China this time.
Most of us are too horrified and enraged at the reality the last election engendered.