#watersportsgate and Golden Showers

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Clearly somebody at the BBC has a subtle sense of humour. No doubt if noticed the BBC will also be labelled a Fake News

What is perhaps shocking about this entire saga is that some are genuinely shocked, and that is indeed rather surprising because the claim is well within scope of the type of personality he has spent the past year projecting. The response on twitter under the hash tag #watersportsgate is also highly amusing.

Should we be sympathetic and respectful towards the next president of the US?

Let me rephrase that question. Should we be respectful towards a pussy grabbing thin skinned neo-nazi anti-science conspiracy-mongering racist who lies about almost anything and everything?

What is all this about?

If you missed it, then let’s step back a moment so that I can explain what happened.

Buzzfeed and CNN published stories about a report compiled by a British intelligence official. Within this was the claim that Russia has not only been assisting Trump for years, but also has been collecting compromising information on him.

As part of all this we have this little bit of unverified and perhaps unverifiable gossip …

However, there were other aspects to TRUMP’s engagement with the Russian authorities. One which had borne fruit for them was to exploit TRUMP’s personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable “kompromat” (compromising material) on him. According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination show in front of him.

Net effect?

Twitter explodes with a stream of golden satire. The writers of Saturday Night Live explode with joy because this has potentially more or less written the script for Alec Baldwin Tomorrow.

BuzzFeed has published the entire report. CNN instead pulled out bits that it was able to verify.

Should they have published unverified information?

In the age of “Fake News” was it right for them to publish? Was this in the public interest, or should they have withheld because they were unable to truly verify things?

BuzzFeed makes it rather clear where things stand …

The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. BuzzFeed News reporters in the US and Europe have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not verified or falsified them.

This is the same information presented to both Trump himself and also Obama. Why should they be briefed and leave the public in the dark, don’t we all have the right to know what information is flowing to the top? Is it not very much in the public interest for us to know?

BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.

None of this is new, it has apparently been circulating for months now …

The documents have circulated for months and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen them. Mother Jones writer David Corn referred to the documents in a late October column.

Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson tweeted Tuesday that the former Senate Democratic leader had seen the documents before writing a public letter to FBI Director James Comey about Trump’s ties to Russia. And CNN reported Tuesday that Arizona Republican John McCain gave a “full copy” of the memos to Comey on Dec. 9, but that the FBI already had copies of many of the memos.

Is it true or not?

There are a couple of rather obvious possibilities here. To be specific …

  • It’s real and so we are literally living inside the plot of The Manchurian Candidate.
  • It’s fake, or to put that another way “Don’t fuck with the Intelligence community”

The truth is that it is neither, but is instead unverified and yet sourced from multiple reliable sources so has a lot of credibility.

So should it have been published?

Given the fact that this information has been circulating amongst decision makers for months and talked about in private, if you believe in the concept of a free press, then it is very much in the public interest for us to understand what is being discussed and what is influencing decision makers. What would blow this story out of the water is evidence that BuzzFeed and CNN simply made this up, but clearly that is not what is going on here, it is not normal anti-fan fiction that earns the tag “Fake News”.

The view from the Trump camp, and all who are aligned emotionally, is that both CNN and Buzzfeed are now deemed fake news outlets. That clearly illustrates that they don’t actually understand what that term means.

What is also interesting about all this is how BuzzFeed and CNN opted to handle it all. They took distinctly different approaches.

BuzzFeed tossed it all out with the “Here it all is, this is what has been circulating”, but added a clear understanding that much had not been verified. CNN on the other hand, took this stance …

At this point, CNN is not reporting on details of the memos, as it has not independently corroborated the specific allegations. But, in preparing this story, CNN has spoken to multiple high ranking intelligence, administration, congressional and law enforcement officials, as well as foreign officials and others in the private sector with direct knowledge of the memos.

Some of the memos were circulating as far back as last summer. What has changed since then is that US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect a few days ago.

There is nothing “Fake” in any way about the CNN story. They have stuck to what they can verify and withheld the more juicy gossip that they were unable to verify. They also carefully lay out the precise facts, their sources, who was given this information and when, and where it all came from.

The “Fake News” rebuttal is not valid … period.

This is not fiction manufactured for clicks. I might add that the folks who take the “fake news” stance on this tend to also be the same who digest what they get from Wikileaks as truth without any verification at all … ever.

But what if this unverified information damages the reputation of Mr Trump?

Let me once again remind you of where things actually stand by rephrasing that question.

What if this unverified information damages the reputation of a pussy grabbing thin-skinned neo-nazi anti-science conspiracy-mongering racist who lies about almost anything and everything?

Personally, I find it all wholly credible.

I’m not alone. Here is a highly respected BBC journalist, Paul Wood commenting on it all …

“I was shown the report at the end of October/beginning of November and I was able through an intermediary to ask the CIA what they thought of it, the case officers wouldn’t speak to me themselves, but they said they thought it was credible. Further, that there was more than one tape, there was audio as well, there was video, it was more than one place, it was St Petersburg it was Moscow, and they thought it was certainly worthy of consideration and in fact that’s why it ended up on President Obama’s desk last week.

be under no illusion, things do not get to the President’s desk unless the people giving these intelligence briefings think they are at the very least credible and worthy of further investigation.”

– Paul Wood, A BBC journalist with sources inside the UK and US intelligence community.

What comes next?

Potentially hearings, and that then lays the foundation for impeachment.

To be clear here, it is simply a step that direction, this is not at this point in time the most probably outcome. Even if it was proven beyond any doubt that Russia funded Trump, bankrolled him, and hacked the election, it would still take a super-majority vote to toss him out of office. That would also require a huge breakdown of his relationship with the GOP. In other words, while this is not on the cards, when it comes to Trump the extraordinary is also not unthinkable.

It is quite frankly astonishing to observe that 7 days prior to inauguration and he is at war with both the intelligence community and also major media organisations. I’d advise stocking up on popcorn, this is going to be a very interesting year.

A few Favourite tweets under #watersportsgate

Some of these are truly “golden” moments …

https://twitter.com/MattTurner4L/status/818979368487809026

Further Reading

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