If German media had no double standards, they’d have no standards at all. The #TrumpJrRussia hyperventilation

I usually never write about politics, but the pathological fixation of the German media with Trump is getting beyond mere stupidity.

Here some headlines from the bullshit departments at Sueddeutsche, FAZ and Spiegel. Yes, WELT, I know you are still breathing. For now.

Mind you, there is the election coming September, yet there is hardly anything about it. It is Trump who is clearly upsetting everything, politics as well as economy.

SZ: Trump Junior mitten im Wirbelsturm

FAZ: Präsidentensohn im Zwielicht

Spiegel: Trumps Schmutztruppe (Trump's dirt troop)

Here is the best debunk of the whole non-story about Trump Jr. from the pen of the Streetwise Professor.

Why Would You Meet With a Nobody Promising a Watch, If Putin Already Gave You a Rolex?

I presume you have heard, ad nauseum, the hyperventilating about the Donald Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer, and the email correspondence leading up to it, in which Trump Jr. expressed intense interest in the possibility that the lawyer might be able to pass some dirt on Hillary originating with the Russian government.

I think my rule of thumb that the true significance of a Trump-related revelation varies inversely with the frenzy it sets off holds here. Maybe I need to revise the rule to say the significance varies inversely with the exponential of the cube of the frenzy.

For starters, what campaign wouldn’t check out an offer of compromising material on an opponent–especially one like Hillary? And do you think that Hillary or her campaign would have passed up a similar offer? Hardly. This is the way the game is played. This is the way the game has always been played–by the Clintons in particular. Like Tip O’Neill said: politics ain’t beanbag.

And let’s not forget that the Steele digging expedition, which originated with Republican opponents to Trump but which continued with funding by as yet unnamed (why not? why no curiosity here?) Democratic operatives after Trump and Hillary had clinched their respective nominations, involved paying to get Russian dirt on Trump. So the Black Earth of the Russian steppes is open for the Democrats to plough, but is off limits to Republicans?

If the Democrats (and the media) didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

But these things are not the biggest thing. I have yet to see anyone point out the obvious here. Namely, if in June the Trump campaign was openly interested in compromising material allegedly supplied by the Russian government, would completely undermine the dominant collusion narrative. Why meet with a Russian walk-in on the possibility she would produce official Russian kompromat if there was already an active conspiracy between the Russian government at the highest levels and the Trump campaign to obtain such information? Why meet in a public place with some woman off the street whom you don’t know from Adam’s off ox offering you a watch, when Putin has already given you a Rolex?

Yes, there are possible ways to reconcile these possibilities, but they make the story even more convoluted and baroque, and therefore less plausible.

Then there are the inconvenient realities that the woman lawyer wildly exaggerated her connections, and lied about having information. She was not a Russian government lawyer, of one thing. She was a private attorney dangling this bait solely to get a meeting, in order to importune Donnie Jr. on behalf of a sanctioned client to relax the Magnitsky Act. She then blathered about some deal involving adoptions (which she clearly had no ability to swing). Manafort–whom we are told, repeatedly, has been around the Russian block many times–realized she was a fraud: no doubt he has met her kind many a time. The meeting ended quickly, and crucially, there was no second meeting.

In other words, Natalia Veselnitskaya told a tall tale in order to break the ice. Which she then proceeded to fall through.

Veselnitskaya denies telling Trump that she was dishing dirt on Hillary. She could be right. That bait came from the intermediary to set up the meeting. Maybe he was the fabulist. Who knows? Who cares? What we know is that whoever spun it, it was a fable, and the moral of the story is that grifters lie in order to get face time with powerful people. Who knew?

So we know Trump Jr. was open to getting compromising information from Russians. Not shocking. At all.

We also know that he didn’t get any.

We also know that if he was open to it on 9 June, it is highly unlikely that there was at that time a conspiracy between the campaign and the Kremlin to discredit Hillary.

One interesting coda. Trump Jr. released the email chain related to the meeting. This set reporters, including notably one of the four (!) NYT reporters (Adam Goldman, AKA @adamgoldmanNYT) on the story and CNN’s bald, chubby, budding Kurt Eichenwald-lookalike, Hillary pom-pom squad member (I add the personal details so that you can distinguish him from the other members of the CNN cheerleading team) Brian Stelter (@brianstelter), into a foot stomping, breath holding tizzy. How dare he preempt them?!? How dare he make it impossible for them to quote selectively from the emails?!?

Goldman was shocked! Shocked! That personal emails were released. Again: if they had no double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

And by the way–how did the NYT get the emails in the first place? Seems to me that the fact that they did lends credence to Trump’s March assertion that his team was under government surveillance. But that possibility to has escaped attention. Because it doesn’t advance the mission, and indeed undercuts it.