The first sign of a problem with Trump [no, not the Russia/hacking garbage of which I agree pretty much with Goldberg’s take]? I tend to trust Rogin when it comes to this kind of undisclosed sources story - and I’m guessing the undisclosed source here is a Mattis ally.
The interesting thing about the Mattis pick for SECDEF was that it reassured viz foreign policy precisely because Mattis gave the very clear impression of being a guy who would not take the job unless he had been given certain guarantees re policy direction and key staffing questions - if the tension between Mattis and the transition team is real that would suggest that someone is trying to undermine or peel back those guarantees - I’d call that not promising. Thing is, Mattis strikes me as a guy would walk away from the nomination if he’s not satisfied about something he views as important - him walking away would be a disaster for Trump - which means Mattis has all the leverage here - which means if this is just a per usual new administration power struggle and Mattis loses it - ie he walks - that would be a highly troubling development.
As for Russia etc etc - this is nonsense. Putin is not a brilliant tactician although he’s clearly far out paces Obama - essentially, he’s all about looking strong and clever by making the West look weak and foolish - and so a weak and ideologically addled president like Obama was the gift that kept on giving far as ol’ Vlad was concerned - that the sycophantic western media kept enabling Obama’s feeble idiocy was just sauce for the goose - that Obama and the left are now acting as if they’re the strong horse here is just pathetic. That the right is now embracing a disreputable scoundrel like Assange is also pathetic.
Podesta fell for a pretty pedestrian phishing scam, one that the Russian source of it didn’t even put much bother into trying to cover up, almost as if they wanted everyone to know who did it. Russia is capable of unleashing much more sophisticated cyber threats if it really wanted to mess with the US election. Possibly the ‘attack’ was sanctioned at a high level - but it seems pretty clear to me that the real goal of it was to ‘embarrass’ Hillary regardless of a possible benefit to Trump - if Russian operatives cheered her loss it’s because they succeeded in screwing with Hillary better than they could have hoped. But here’s the point - if the ‘hack’ altered the election [a big if I think] it was because the Podesta emails revealed what the MSM so badly wanted kept hidden - namely, that the Clinton Foundation was an influence peddling scam, that Hillary was at least as inveterate a liar as Trump and not nearly as good at it, and that the MSM and the liberal elite in America are two sides of the same coin. In other words, the ‘hack’ was damaging because the MSM not only failed as a neutral arbiter of facts but actively tied itself to a specific agenda - the correlation between the damage implied by the emails and the corruption of the MSM by an ideological bias was directly proportional. It’s the same reason Benghazi and the private server became such huge issues - because the MSM refused to acknowledge the reality of these things being huge issues, that enabled Hillary’s [and Obama’s] lying which led to the discovery to the private server which led to Comey which led to the Democrats committing to a deeply flawed candidate which in a ‘change’ election gets you to Trump - Putin didn't ‘hack’ the election, the left’s ideologically cloistered i arrogance and diocy did.
[think about it - if this fairly pedestrian phishing attack was about getting Trump elected and not simply about embarrassing Hillary then it would mean the Russians behind it understood the dynamics of the American political landscape better than American experts on the dynamics of the American political landscape understood the dynamics of the American political landscape. That's simply not credible - this election was decided by a couple hundred thousand voters in key districts in swing states who had VOTED FOR OBAMA IN 2012 deciding Obama had been a bust, Hillary was promising four more years of this bust, but they didn't like Hillary regardless of what she was promising so... why not give Trump a try. Tell me, who is this Russian genius who figured out they could get Trump elected by narrowly targeting a handful of ex-Obama voters in some swing states? It's ridiculous. To me the Comey letter was much more damaging than Russia's cyber shenanigans - I think Trump was heading for victory but the 'pussy grab' tape had maybe put the brakes on that - then comes the Comey letter, knocks the pussy grab out of the headlines, reminds people of how much they really didn't like Hillary - and that's the difference. And who's to blame for the Comey letter? Hillary - and the left wing media that refused to take the Benghazi lies and the private server seriously - if the media had simply been able to admit that the Obama administration was clearly lying about Benghazi in order to protect its bogus foreign policy narrative leading up to the election, then none of this happens]
