(September 6, 2024 at 8:28 am)Angrboda Wrote:(September 6, 2024 at 8:14 am)Belacqua Wrote: Well that's a fair and balanced article. Not.
And that, if true, would be a problem because why exactly?
Because there are a whole lot of "alleges" and "the Justice Department says" and guilt by association. There are links to documents which are completely unsourced.
There are Republican talking points which may or may not be credible, put near to allegations about Russian interference, but with no connection established. For example, the idea that Walz is doing "stolen valor" is brought up, and maybe that's true or maybe not, but there is no evidence given that Russia is playing that up.
We also know that people in government lie to support their preferred candidate. So it would be nice to have some sort of real evidence, and not this mish-mash of allegations and accusations that some media company that no one had ever heard of had hosted guests who support Trump because Russia asked them to.
Then you've got this sentence:
Quote:Trump has publicly complimented Russian President Vladimir Putin, an autocrat known for imprisoning and killing critics.
And that links you to a blistering editorial in which Trump is quoted several times as saying that Putin is "smart." Well, Putin is smart. Have you heard him speak? It makes you realize how extremely bad most US politicians (since Obama) are at speaking. A lot of smart people do evil things. And Trump's description of the war in Ukraine quoted in that article was pretty accurate at the time. Despite what wishful thinking makes Americans say, Ukraine has lost 20% of its land, and that's never coming back. So the headline and the editorializing are trying to make a big deal of what is, essentially, true but impolitic to say.
Confirmation bias, decades of anti-Russia propaganda, and lots and lots of partisan rhetoric can make things seem way more conclusive than they really are.