Trump Walkback: When I Said I Had No Reason to Think the Hackers Would Have Been Working for Russia, I Meant I Had No Reason to Think the Hackers Would Not Have Been Working for Russia

Ed Morrissey does a good job of rounding up the negative reaction to Trump's Helsinki remarks, including from people who are generally fair to Trump.

Is Trump telling the truth now about his would vs. wouldn't speak-o? I don't know.

As many people have noted -- Byron York, for example -- Trump is loathe to admit the existence of Russian meddling because:

1, it taints an election victory that he's justly proud of, and

2, because he suspects -- not without reason-- that the whole Russia Narrative was cooked up by Hillary Clinton and Hillary partisans in the leftwing media and then seized upon by the deranged NeverTrump liberal Republican wing. He sees admitting Russian meddling as a half-step towards confirming the alleged Russian collusion the media and Democrats and NeverTrumpers are foaming about, and tends to claim both premises are false, instead of conceding that one is true while remaining firm that the other is false.

Mollie Hemingway put it well on Special Report last night: While Trump should be smarter about separating out the "Russian meddling" story from the "Russian collusion" allegation, so should Trump's critics, who routinely, and sometimes probably deliberately, conflate the two, acting as if proof of the former is also proof of the latter.

An editor at The Atlantic, for example, just tweeted out last week that the indictment against 12 Russian nationals for hacking Jon Podesta's email account is, by some alchemy he doesn't explain, also proof of Russian collusion.

Here's a "staff writer" at The Atlantic doing precisely that --

The cucks' favorite bull also seems fond of conflating Russian meddling with Russian collusion, pretending that Trump calling one a "witch hunt" must naturally mean the other is a "witch hunt" too:

Here's an Atlantic editor doing precisely what Hemingway is talking about -- taking an indictment of a Russian national who attempted to influence the NRA as evidence that the NRA is a Russian front group:

The NRA is not also indicted, and in fact, the indictment contains nothing to besmirch the NRA at all. This is just The Atlantic doing the selfsame wishcasting and cultish conspiracy theorizing they accuse their opponents of doing.

A media which is ever-vigilant for Trump's false assumptions and conspiracy theories seems too overworked by those exertions to spend a single second patrolling their own cultish beliefs for any mental errors of their own.

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:30 PM

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