Better in their words…

Along with the Imprimis article on Putin, this piece is also insightful.
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WSJ – 4/25/2017
By Holman W Jenkins

The American media needs to get a grip. News in essence is about how today differs from yesterday, a corollary of which is that yesterday was different from today.

Reporters commit the fallacy of anachronism out the wazoo with their treatment of a report that Paul Manafort, who briefly served as Trump campaign manager, indirectly offered in 2005 to help the Putin regime with its PR efforts in the West. I don’t know Mr. Manafort or have any need to defend him, but an implication that he was working against U.S. interests is plausible only if you confuse 2005 with 2014, when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia over its aggressive actions in Ukraine.

Back in 2005, improving Mr. Putin’s PR, in fact, was a major U.S. goal due to the need for Russia’s support of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

This reliance began almost immediately, with Mr. Putin in December 2001 blessing the use of an ex-Soviet air base in Kyrgyzstan to mount attacks on the Taliban. By 2009, ambushes and pilfering of U.S. supplies moving through the southern route in Pakistan had become so intolerable, President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus made a deliberate choice to increase reliance on the northern route. Not without irony, most of the U.S. freight for the war ended up flowing over Soviet rail lines built to support its own Afghanistan war in the 1980s. Hundreds of U.S. troops a week passed through Russian airspace on their way to the battle.

When President Bush traveled to Moscow in 2002 and sang Mr. Putin’s praises, he was engaged in PR for the war effort. When President Obama was caught on a hot mike patting Dmitry Medvedev on the arm and asking him to pass along a message of future flexibility to Boss Putin, it wasn’t because Mr. Obama mistook Mr. Putin for a champion of Obama values. The Russians even then were prepping for America’s use of a former Soviet air hub in Ulyanovsk, birthplace of Lenin.

If you wonder why the U.S. and other countries were and have remained relatively mute on the sins of the Putin regime, Afghanistan is a decent place to start. Watergate analogies have been bandied about lately, but what really is needed is a Pentagon Papers scandal. We need an emptying of the files to lay out in its full glory the history of awkward, contradictory and humiliating straddles that Western governments have engaged in concerning the rise of the Putin regime.

It probably is too much to expect any awareness of this history from glib millennial reporters feasting on the Trump-Russia story. It may be too much to expect from Jeff Bezos, saturated in Silicon Valley’s ethos that history is bunk and only tomorrow matters.

But don’t news outlets like the Washington Post and the Associated Press have editors who have some sense of what happened the day before yesterday?

Mr. Trump suffers the opposite problem. Just as his understanding of “wiretapping” seems to date from the 1971 movie “The French Connection,” he appears blithely, confidently at sea amid the evolving quandaries of the U.S. relationship with Russia. A tad perverse is the hunt now for organized “collusion,” with Russia or anyone, on the part of so disorganized a campaign. Didn’t Mr. Trump, during a televised news conference, openly invite Russia and other hackers to release Hillary Clinton emails? Didn’t he laud WikiLeaks? How much collusion do you want?

He later claimed he was joking, but he clearly reveled in the Clinton campaign’s email mugging. The problem is, so did the media—all of the media. If your taste didn’t run to revelations that Donna Brazile leaked CNN debate questions to Mrs. Clinton, then it surely ran to the discovery that John Podesta sneered at conservative Catholics. Those “colluding” in the Russian goal of making U.S. democracy seem a feckless circus would fill the Tidal Basin.

Every third time he opens his mouth, Mr. Trump says something about Russia or Mr. Putin that he probably shouldn’t. He was destined to have a steep learning curve given his lack of experience in government. A year from now, if he lasts that long, don’t put it past him to have a better handle on Putin than Obama or Bush did. Mr. Putin himself is the major factor in changing the alignments to allow and require Western governments increasingly to treat him unambiguously as leader of a hostile power.

As for Trump “collusion,” where there’s smoke, there’s fire, goes a typical bit of journalistic deep thinking. But sometimes there’s just a smoke machine furiously being cranked by Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee.

In the end, Mr. Schiff will likely prove right about one thing only: his oft-stated complaint that the Obama administration did little to deter Mr. Putin’s adventurism. Indeed, the mind slightly boggles that Russian jets still fly unmolested over Ukraine and Syria without facing covertly supplied U.S. man-portable missiles.