PING!
The Rats spent billions on campaign ads, yet they wanted people believe that $100k would turn an election.
If that’s the case they ought to hire the russkies that came up with such effective, powerful ads with so little money.
Russia put a LOT more effort into the 2016 election than a few Facebook ads. Russian bots were everywhere on social media.
But, most of the effort was not so much “Pro-Trump” as it was simply sowing chaos - a time honored Russian tactic. Even Obummer acknowledged the nature of the effort correctly.
*Pro-Trump wouldn’t even make sense. Trump advocated building up defense and focusing on deterring the big problems instead of getting overly tied up “forever” in places like Syria. Particularly in 2016, who were considered the “big” threats? Russia and China... ISIS was considered quite dangerous, but, it was also very clear ISIS could be easily overwhelmed, esp. if we co-opted the Kurds as our main ground force. We didn’t need to inject, say, 30k troops for 10+ years, plus a host of contractors.
My biggest problem with Vance’s speech was that it was off-focus. Working with Europe to have them pick up more of the load defending Europe is a REALLY big deal, dealing with that herd of cats is quite difficult, and requires enormous cooperation, a lot of work, and a lot of good will. Telling the Euros how to run their elections, so long as they aren’t mowing down the opposition by the hundreds or thousands with gunfire, really isn’t our business.
WE justifiably get pretty miffed when they tell us how to run our internal affairs, no?
If we want to have a discussion on freedom, call a summit, and point the finger at ourselves as much as them. There are plenty of our own faults to point at.