On Inaccurate Language and Sloppy Thinking

Two of the most bitter debates underway in mid-2017 are over Syria and over the campaign against Russia. Many charges are thrown around loosely and without evidence. I'll give two examples. You are not an apologist for the Syrian government simply because your provide evidence that that government has been falsely accused of using chemical weapons. The Syrian government is a very repressive government, though it has a long secular history in a region which is far from secular. The enemies of the Syrian government include both an internal democratic opposition as well as foreign powers and salafist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. The latter are doing most of the fighting against the Syrian government with aid from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Turkey. Seymour Hersh has written extensively on attempts by Turkey and Western intelligence agencies to pin fake charges on the Syrian government that it has used chemical weapons in the current war. Hersh's normal US outlets, such as the New Yorker, have declined to publish his work. To argue that Hersh is right is not to be an apologist for the Syrian government, which has enough documented crimes in its record without these bogus charges. Those charges are intended only to "justify" direct attacks by Western governments on the Syrian government and the campaign to remove it. They do not address what is really going on in Syria, and they will not lead to a just end to the conflict in Syria.

By the same token, the charges of Russian intervention into the 2016 US election are filling the news every day. It started with the charge that the Russian government was behind the release of DNC Emails proving their conspiracy against the Sanders candidacy to Wikileaks. There is still zero public evidence that this charge is true, and some convincing evidence that it is not true. Now, the charges are escalating, though it is very interesting that nobody has provided any evidence of information from Russia being used to discredit candidate Clinton in the actual election. There is no charge, for example, of Russian involvement concerning Clinton's private Email fiasco. I find it very sloppy thinking, therefore, to believe that anything that the Russian government may or may not have done had any significant effect on the election. It may very well be that members of Trump's inner circle has had traitorous and despicable relations with the Russian government, and they should be held to account for that if it can be proven. But none of that should be fuel for a new cold war against Russia. We all have minds, and we should be able to parse not only what is proven from what is not proven and what is important from what is not important. Three US intelligence agencies (not 17) say they are confident that the Russian government interfered in our election. A fourth, the NSA, says it thinks that is true but with lower confidence. If such interference involved releasing DNC Emails to Wikileaks (Wikileaks maintains that an insider leaked them), that was a service to the American electorate, but it seems far-fetched to believe that those released Emails swayed the election. How else might Russians have interfered? There is a charge that they hacked some of our famously insecure voting machines (strong Republican opposition has prevented us from having more security in voting), but no charge that they actually did anything to affect vote counts. As the famous commercial once asked, "Where's the beef?" What exactly is that the Russians, who also have real crimes to answer for, such as their totally unjustified annexation of Ukrainian Crimea and meddling on Ukraine's eastern border, what is it exactly that Russia did to influence our election? Meanwhile, the Trump regime's program to deregulate everything, from clean water to net neutrality, marches on. I understand the desire to stick charges of treason on Trump and his cronies, but there isn't likely enough substance to make those charges stick, even if every allegation were proven to be true. And if they do, we'll get Mike Pence, an ultraright Christian supremacist, who conceivably would be much more effective in pushing Trump's agenda than Trump himself. Progressives are often contemptuous of how Trump's supporters are being manipulated to support things that will hurt them. When will many progressives wake up to the manipulation which is doing the same to them?