Richard Wolffe in The Guardian:
George Orwell conjured up a totalitarian regime where Ignorance Is Strength, but he surely never conceived of this. How can we know that two and two make four, or that the DNC isn’t responsible for its own hacking, or that Vladimir Putin isn’t a bigger American friend than the entire European Union and Nato alliance? As Trump explained so clearly, when he talks about Russia as a rival, he really means it as a compliment, no matter what your lying ears have told you.
…“My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said that it’s Russia,” Trump said, referring to his own director of national intelligence. That would be the American director of American national intelligence. “I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia,” Trump continued, talking about the Russian president of the Russian Federation. “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties. I, I really believe that this will probably go on for a while. But I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? Thirty-three thousand emails gone. Just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails.”
You know what else is missing? Elvis Presley at the chip shop. The X-files on Area 51. And the president’s patriotic duty, if not his brain. It seemed so normal that this eruption was the first work-product of Trump’s new communications chief, Bill Shine, the former Fox News exec, jammed in just before no less than two Fox News interviews with those titans of journalism, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Why take the word of all your intelligence agencies when you have the word of Putin and Fox News to outweigh them?
More here.