Cyber-Reality and He Who Cries ‘Fake News’

By JOHN YOUNG

Ah, fake news. nnIn determining that Russian actors went on a social media disinformation rampage in 2016, analysts cited many markers. One was that bogus pro-Trump, anti-Hillary posts featured “language patterns that indicate non-native English and consistent mistranslation” of our language.

Not to throw anyone off the trail, but that could either be Russians or it could be a US president who writes like a third-grader.

Ah, fake news.

OK, give him credit. Trump is skillful enough to have replicated Donald Jr.’s syntax when he composed a letter to Robert Mueller claiming that the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians had to do with adoption.

News bulletin: Trump just tweeted what we all knew was true all along, the solicitation of campaign dirt from foreigners — the collusion he said over and over never happened.

OK, so it happened, but it’s “totally legal.”

So why lie about it?

Now his dodge is that he didn’t know about a meeting in his own tower, with his own son, with his son-in-law, with his campaign manager. If it was “totally legal,” why does that matter?

Fake news.

Trump feigned ignorance about that hush money over his sexploits. Then more audio magic: a tape from his former attorney betrays the truth.

Cash or check? Good question. Really good. It opens up the possibility that the people (ie., New York state prosecutors) might ultimately get to see Trump’s taxes.

Trump likes to claim ownership of “fake news” in bashing the press, but at every turn, suspicions raised by reporters prove to be verifiable.

Yes, reporters have made errors and omissions in reporting all of this, errors to which news organizations dutifully owned up. When has Trump owned up to even one of his outright lies?

Trump accuses the news media of distorting what happened following his disastrous Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin. That was no distortion, Mr. President. That was the magic of video recording. You stood before cameras and said what you said. We heard it.

Back to the real story that underpins this matter and which has had Robert Mueller working overtime.

While Trump has called the Russia matter a “hoax,” the clear consensus of the intelligence community is just the opposite. Russians not only hacked the computers of Trump’s opponents but nosed their way into state voting systems.

Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire, both Democrats, say that Russians attempted to hack into their Senate computer systems.

Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security just launched the National Risk Management Center to fight cyberattacks against critical infrastructure like credit card systems and the electric grid.

And yet, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee last week rejected $250 million to beef up state voting systems from cyberattacks.

Bad decision, said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy: “As we focus on the past, we are missing what is happening and what will happen again.”

Clearly Senate Republicans judge that we can’t afford such things. And that may be true when we are saving our dimes to pay for that wall – costing $150 million a year — it appears Mexico won’t be buying for us.

And don’t forget the need for that $12 million military parade Trump wants.

It’s really quite fascinating. Trump assembled a now-defunct Presidential Commission on Voter Integrity, seeking information on every American voter, until states refused to play along. He’s just riveted on vote security.

Yet when the whole of the national intelligence community identifies a foreign attack on voter systems, it’s fake news, says the man with the tweeter toy.

John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2018

Populist.com