#something something dimitri's super power being finding impossible things

[somuchbetterthanthat]

me, letting the credits roll to the end for once cause i'm in the middle of work, catching the sudden name of "charlie of the" at the end of ep 5.

me, a minute later: wait

so anyway i finally googled "charlie on the MTA" and boy did i just discover something

Yes, I feel incredibly dumb rn. this is why it's also best to listen to the credits, I guess. Especially in a podcast that relishes on being meta.

[agent-cupcake]

So happy you but up the headcanons! All of them are gems and I love them so much. Rereading the Dimitri and Felix rivalry hc made me want to ask for claude and yuri rivalry, but dark of course because both of these boys are sane and logical and would move on if they both caught feelings for you and weren't attached to you by a dark obession lol.

Sorry, I know you asked for love rivalry but I simply could not help myself and got a little carried away with seeing the so-called rivalry to his inevitable conclusion :3c

~Not that it’s probably necessary, but I had to consider the timeline for this. A rivalry between them wouldn’t fit in the events of the game because of Claude’s ambition, but he leaves the country in most endings. My solutions would be to have Claude split his time between Fódlan and Almyra as a politically active prince such as in his solo ending or to propose that Yuri would spend a lot of time in Almyra. Reasons for this could be that he went in aid of his good friend and military commander Balthus (Yuri would make for an awfully good royally sanctioned spy) or that he’s abusing the newfound system of open-market international trade for his criminal enterprise. Either way, Claude is powerful Almyran royalty and Yuri is a shady figure of the underworld. Not too unlike a story I’ve written, but this is separate from that. None of this really matters, ultimately, but whatever I like to think of how this would work out.

~Both men are powerful and ambitious. Both of them are emotionally isolated despite (or because of) their positions. They’re friends, or at least on friendly terms so there’d be a lot of overlap in social circles. And, really, they are quite similar so it’s plausible that they’d go for the same type.  

~I’ve since changed my stance on reasons why Claude might develop a fixation on someone. He is concerned with the intrinsic value of a person. He values the thoughts, feelings, and especially the perception of people he is close with. Claude is also a loner, a fundamentally lonesome person who wishes to be seen and loved on his own merits despite the guard he puts up and the social games he plays. Not to say I entirely retcon my previous opinion, but I focused too hard on the idea that he would need to dehumanize you by zeroing in on utilitarian usefulness rather than be driven to darker feelings by his fear of being alone and need to find a connection.

~This all goes for Yuri too, although it’s easier for me to imagine Yuri getting his authentic feelings twisted up and dark. Yuri’s circumstances were somewhat similar to Claude’s, except that he was shown genuine affection by his mother and the old man. Therefore, he knows what it is to lose that. He learned early on what it is to have people die because of him, to shoulder the burden of guilt that comes with such profound loss. Yuri’s scarred by a brutal, painful upbringing where “love” was a commodity to be traded in for favors (even by his mother) and genuine, honest relationships became nearly impossible to comprehend. If he met you and developed those true, affectionate feelings, if he found a so-called light in the darkness, maybe it’d make sense that he’d do everything he could to keep it from losing it.

~Their similarities in this instance would work out for this scenario. Somebody useful to them, somebody authentic enough to appeal to their deeply ingrained sense of loneliness, somebody clever or interesting or fun… There’s a lot of reasons they could develop unhealthy feelings for you born out of an innocently platonic friendship.

~And it would have to be platonic on both counts. Yuri and Claude are too self-aware for them to make a move if you made a choice early on. Or, I don’t think it’d become as big of a production because they wouldn’t have emotionally invested so much in you. Leading them both on unintentionally just by having a normal human friendship is kinda sad but also kinda funny.

~They’d know that you were close with the other. Of course they would. Maybe it would hurt, but neither would express that feeling to you. Claude would ask pointed (but not direct) questions about your feelings and dazzle you with grand overtures. Yuri would work the seductive and sweet angle, trying to win your heart the old fashioned way. But, you know, with more uncomfortable subtext and innuendo.   

~Something that has not changed is my opinion that Claude would be obsessive about his darker feelings. Not on a consistent, all the time basis, but more like a hobby. A puzzle he couldn’t solve, an itch he couldn’t quite scratch. He’d search for all of the pieces of you in the hopes that the final picture would allow him to understand his increasingly dangerous feelings. Claude’s not stupid, he’s really self aware. Enough to feel guilt, enough to recognize that what he’s doing isn’t right, and enough to justify himself out of the responsibility of doing amoral things for the right reasons.

~Yuri, on the other hand, wouldn’t be so… aggressive about it. He’d want you to come to him, to return to him again and again to prove to himself that what he feels isn’t wrong, to ingratiate himself into your life in a way that validated everything he felt for you and put you on more equal footing. He’d internalize everything a lot more, feel a lot of guilt about the intensity of his feelings, but he’d find ways to keep you close. Or, for you to keep him close.

~Don’t get me wrong, though, you wouldn’t get so much of a glimpse of this weaker, more vulnerable Yuri. He’d go the opposite direction of his guilt or doubt, wearing an impenetrable smiling, sarcastic, playful mask. My main point is that I see him as being more emotionally wrecked by having these dark feelings due to his self hatred. I also think Yuri would be more generally sensitive to unhealthy romance dynamics, especially if it became physical at all. 

~In an interestingly twisted way, Yuri hypocritically recognizing Claude’s behavior as being dangerous would encourage him to be more proactive about his own feelings and feel less guilty about doing so. Being the protective type rather than the obsessive really just fits Yuri so much better, although I see it as one ultimately leading to the other.

~It’s not about winning. They’d be competing, clearly battling against each other for you in a way that would not only be creepily objectifying, but also emotionally strenuous, but they’d keep on insisting that it wouldn’t be about winning. They’d just want you to be happy, to be safe. They both would just want what’s best for you. And what is best for you? Just ask them.

~Claude’s argument: Yuri’s lifestyle is dangerous. He’s a good guy, Claude really does trust him, buuuuut he’s not exactly the type of man you’d be safe with, you know?

~Yuri’s argument: Claude’s not treating you right. He’s obviously manipulating you, how could you possibly miss that? You deserve better, don’t you agree?

~But in the same breath they’d both insist that if you didn’t want to be with them romantically, that would be fine. They both, truly and unselfishly, would just want you to be happy. Just want to stay close with you. Veeeeeery unselfishly. 

~Their interactions with each other would be amazingly fake and aloof. Making small talk and smiling all the while vying for your attention in a nearly juvenile tug-of-war. Still, I don’t think, even through all of this, that they’d dislike each other. It’s not about winning, right? It’s not a game, right?

~Okay, so, I know the whole thing with scenarios like this is an inability to face rejection, but if you were to chose Yuri over Claude or vice versa, that’s where it would end. Committing yourself to one of them still wouldn’t work out super well because that’s the nature of giving into such dark and unhealthy feelings, but it would no longer be a rivalry.

~Let me propose, then, that you would eventually reject both of them. At first, the whole thing would have been so fun and so nice. Getting all of this attention from two powerful and attractive guys would be exciting. You’d feel so lucky, they’re both charming and friendly and kind. But then things would have gotten more intense and there’s this weird love triangle that is incredibly trite and uncomfortable and you wouldn’t have wanted to hurt either of them so it’s better to just leave it, right?

~Yuri would be more likely to use his personal feelings as a tactic of manipulation, I think. Worse, he probably wouldn’t see it that way. He knows, he truly knows, how dangerous and terrible the world could be and he’d do anything to shield you from it and his feelings would reflect that. Granted, if he felt you weren’t getting it, I don’t think Yuri would exactly be above veiled threats or bludgeoning you with fear tactics and even a dash of shame for how you’d played with both their hearts.

~Claude would do his best to convince you that you didn’t actually want to go. You didn’t have to chose either of them, but you couldn’t leave, either. That was way too dramatic. Besides… wasn’t it a little selfish? This was where you were needed, he relied on you. He trusted you. Sure, Claude’s a visionary, but what does that vision matter if the one who he shares his dreams with is gone?

~Maybe that wouldn’t work, though. Long term, it probably wouldn’t. I mentioned before that they wouldn’t hate each other, so if it came down to actually losing you, why not work together?

~Love triangles are for chumps, invest in a horribly unhealthy three person dynamic with possible kidnap and very overt tones of mental and emotional manipulation.

~That would solve all the the problems, wouldn’t it? Why would you try and leave them after they made so many compromises for you? Really, would you be that ungrateful and callous? They would both care about you so much, love you, even. Yuri and Claude would be trying to make it work despite the fact that it came down to essentially a tie in this bizarre game, why couldn’t you do your part? Landing such attractive and powerful guys, having them lay their hearts at your feet, you’d have to be a really terrible and selfish person to reject that. Not that you’d be given a lot of choice, but the devils in the details and if you fought them on this, it probably wouldn’t end up very pretty for you.

~Not saying either of them would hurt you. Physically, I mean. Probably. 

~In some ways, the compromise would make the guilt easier for them to bear. The fact that they were also being forced to deal with something they wouldn’t necessarily want to would be a leveling ground for them to justify any of your unhappiness with the situation. Like, it was all an equal amount of compromise to make things work for all three of you. 

~Claude would know how much Yuri meant to you and feel like the fact that he hadn’t taken that away from you absolved him of a lot of the responsibility of the other things he’d taken from you. Plus, Claude’s a distracted guy who’d lose track of things sometimes, always getting caught up in whatever project he was working on at the time, so he’d know that you wouldn’t be lonely during those times.

~Yuri would see Claude as being, in many ways, a better person than him. More out of a horrible sense of self perception than fact. So Yuri could have his piece of you with the recognition that Claude was there to balance the worst parts of himself and make you happy in ways this dark, twisty version of Yuri might not think he could.

~I don’t think that either Yuri or Claude would ever truly get along because of how similar they are and the fact that they both kinda lost to the other but I also don’t think that would be a huge issue. Their verbal sparring would be entertaining, honestly. 

[benisasoftboi]

Unorganised thoughts on Silver Snow:

When I finished Golden Deer, I said that it had felt like a more traditional Fire Emblem story than Blue Lions. Silver Snow is that but even more so (though GD is still the most trad-FE cast, IMO)

Having already played those two routes, it felt very much like a whirlwind tour of them both, plus another battle thrown in at the end - a battle that probably should have been harder, but I (completely accidentally) built the bulkiest Byleth imaginable, especially resistance wise, plus high magic - and so, by pairing high defensive stats with Nosferatu, I tanked every attack that came my way 

Gaming, for me, is just doing whatever the hell I feel like, stumbling into good results, and then pretending that I did it on purpose

I spent the whole battle with the Dragon Tales theme song stuck in my head. Kind of killed the mood

I really enjoyed that after wrapping up both the Edelgard and TWSITD plots, they basically Persona 4 you by trying to convince you that the whole game’s done now and all that’s left is to chat with everyone - though unlike in P4, there’s very obviously something left to do because they give you a whole month of prep time, rather than just one day

I felt the same way about this on Golden Deer - none of the characters are appropriately shocked by Rhea’s highly questionable actions 

Also - she says she’s going to explain the whole truth! And she doesn’t! Only the Byleth creation stuff! The other revelations from Golden Deer are missing! Rhea! Why! Are! You! Like! This!

This is actually a problem I have with this game as a whole - they want to keep certain lore and secrets exclusive to certain routes, but it results in every story feeling in some way incomplete. Like, Fates gets a lot of crap, but at least you did get a full story from your half (third? never played Revelation) a game for the price of a whole one. Blue Lions gets the worst of it, I think 

Plus, when you know some of said secrets, it makes characters who refuse to share them in other routes seem weirdly (and sometimes, contrivedly) cagey about things they really do not need to be cagey about. See: Claude refusing to tell Dimitri and Byleth in Azure Moon that he wants to End Racism, and instead vagueing about ‘achieving his dream’. This is not Edelgard wanting to conquer Fodlan and dismantle the entire social structure, Claude, your ideals really are not so controversial that you need to be this coy. Dimitri and I are cool, we getcha 

My one sentence review of the whole game is basically: Great characters, great world building, great gameplay - but really, really frustrating plot structure

I’m also really upset that Seteth does not have a dragon form

Speaking of Seteth, I married him this time around. I mostly decided to do it for laughs, but while Byleth/Dedue is still my number one Byleth pairing, I came to really, genuinely like them together. Seteth is one of my favs, now more than ever

It helps that romancing Seteth feels a lot less... creepy than romancing most of the students. I like Linhardt, but romancing him felt very weird to me because I couldn’t get over Byleth having first known him as a 16 year old under their care. Dedue, for the record, doesn’t elicit this response  because he doesn’t really feel as much like a student to me? Role-wise he feels a lot closer to the knights, and it’s just that he's been enrolled as a student for convenience’s sake, which makes him and Byleth feel more equal than they do with most of the other kids. Helps that he’s also on the older end

Anyway, Seteth and Byleth would be the nerdiest couple ever, is the impression I got from their ending. The confession scene made me laugh in how ‘oh we’ve got a lot of work to do - btw wanna get married? - sweet, now let’s get back to work’ it was. Mark Whitten is a gem

It’s also the the first time I felt like the game was actually shipping me with a main lord (Seteth taking that role in the absence of the box lords on this route). Haven’t done Crimson Flower yet, so no opinion on the Edelgard/Byleth relationship yet, but regarding Claude and Dimitri my (pretty damn controversial, possibly a bad idea to put out there) opinions on them with Byleth are that

Claude and Byleth are platonic bros, regardless of Byleth’s gender. I just don’t get any feeling of romance from their relationship at all, and so pairing them off feels weird (to me, personally - I don’t hate the ship or anything, though)

Meanwhile Dimitri 100% had a crush on his teacher at school, but after more than five years of enduring trauma after trauma, and then half a year of beginning to heal (whilst fighting a war culminating in the execution of his step-sister), Dimitri is nowhere near ready for a romantic relationship. And when he is, I wouldn’t want him with any of the main cast, Dimitri x Village Girl OTP. I guess if it has to be anyone, I’d be okay with Mercedes, maybe Marianne - hell, maybe even Claude - but really, I just want him to get a fresh start. I think that’s the healthiest option for him, in the end

I do think it’s a pairing that could work in an AU where Dimitri doesn’t have any of the experiences he has in canon, though 

And again, this is just my personal reading

I’ll also admit that I may be influenced by the fact that his two most popular pairings are with Byleth and Dedue, who I greatly prefer with each other. Mostly because I love Dedue with all my soul and his ending with Byleth is by far his happiest, in my eyes at least. It’s the only one where he puts some distance between himself and Dimitri and evens out the power balance in their relationship, which makes me happy because oh boy, the Dimitri/Dedue relationship is super interesting and compelling, but also (again, by my reading) all kinds of unhealthy as it’s presented for most of the game - power balance issues like I say, the fact that they tend to indulge, even encourage, each other’s worst instincts and behaviours, mutual guilt complexes - like I say, it’s fascinating, but damn screwed up. IMO, they’re one of the best examples I’ve seen of how unhealthy relationships aren’t always the result of one bad person, and how two good people can end up being very bad for each other

Though it is, again, a pairing I can see working (and actually being incredibly cute) in an AU where they’ve lived less horrible lives

And it’s not like I don’t want them to be friends, I just want them to also develop healthier boundaries and equal levels of respect

oh my god none of this has anything to do with silver snow what am I doing

But hey, speaking of Dimitri - I flip flopped on whether I thought his death was handled better or worse here than Golden Deer. It was given, I felt, more appropriate gravitas, but again suffered from ‘Dimitri’s dead! No, Dimitri’s alive! Oh wait, now he’s dead again’ in like, three successive scenes. And then you see his... ghost? I guess?

Dimitri really seems to get the short end of the stick on routes outside his own. Claude’s non-Deer roles were, in both cases I’ve played, much stronger and more fitting, and Edelgard is Edelgard

Maybe he’ll be good in Crimson Flower. Please. I miss Dimitri mattering. He’s probably my favourite of the three

There’s a point - obviously I don’t fully know Edelgard yet, but from what I got from the White Clouds section, above anything else she strikes me as an incredibly realistic depiction of a slightly edgy, extremely idealistic, but also highly naive and short-sighted teenager

Her whole goal, it seems, is meritocracy. She hates the crest system and the nobility, and she wants to create a system of equal opportunity. I can get behind that, but I really hope she’s prepared to accept the fact that true equal opportunity is basically impossible without recreating The Giver, as inequality is always more complex than one single factor being to blame for everything. Has Edelgard considered other limitations that make true meritocracy difficult to achieve? Has she been working on, say, a comprehensive benefits system? Or is she more of a libertarian type, and so primarily all about negative freedom and removing direct oppression? I hope Crimson Flower goes into detail on this, I’d be genuinely interested to know

I also find it interesting that she gets very angry about the fact that people hurt her and her family as a means to their own ends, so she decides that her own ends are to eliminate the system that lead to that happening - and she doesn’t care who she has to hurt in the process

This isn’t a CinemaSins *ding* plot hole observation, I genuinely think it’s interesting, and not actually that unrealistic

I also suppose her goal is no less naive than End All Racism By Being Nice To People, but Claude isn’t killing and persecuting people in attempt to achieve that, so it invites less scrutiny

I do wonder if I would have felt more strongly positively about her if she’d been my first playthrough. I do believe she’s a person that sincerely means well, and she’s certainly sympathetic, but - hmm. I’ll make my mind up when I finish CF

Anyway, paired endings. A few that I got include Raphael and Bernadetta (by far my favourite Bernie ending so far, seriously, what is that Caspar ending), Shamir and Leonie, which was cute and goofy (as Leonie’s endings tend to be, I notice, I do like that girl), Felix and Dorothea (not my favourite for either, but cute), Sylvain and Mercedes (the same but even cuter), Cyril and Petra (which felt wrong, partly because I love Cysithea a hell of a lot, and also because despite knowing there’s only about a year between them, Petra looks so much older pre-time skip), Ferdie and Marianne (super wholesome and sweet), and Linhardt and Caspar (my boyyyyssss that I refuse to ever separate again)

Not sure what I’m going to aim for on CF aside from keeping those boys together and also Ferdie/Hubert, as I’ve Heard Things

Flayn and Manuela have an A support so I figured they had a paired ending and it turns out they do not, which means Manuela was alone forever and Flayn ran away because apparently she hated having Byleth for a step mother I guess, rude

My Byleth (Myleth?) was prepared to be the best step mother in the history of the world, so offended

I realised ‘Javelins of Light’ is one of my absolute favourite tracks in the whole game. Mostly because it sounds like something out of Danganronpa, which made me nostalgic

I also like ‘Guardian of Starlight’ for somehow managing to sound like a Danganronpa/PMD: Explorers crossover track

I love how out of nowhere the Immaculate One fight is. It really does just feel like they needed something to distinguish the route from Verdant Wind outside of Claude not being around, so they just had a map that was less cool in every way except for the dragon

Is there an explanation for why Nemesis doesn’t show up on this route?

Also - I didn’t mention this in Golden Deer thoughts but I also found that final battle way, way easier than it was probably meant to be because I’d made everyone into a flier and so the floor damage hazard was meaningless

Which I totally did on purpose and not so I could make a stupid joke post about my all-wyvern team 

Anyway, in conclusion, Silver Snow was a good route, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would (I’d kind of thought it was just going to be GD without Claude, which isn’t... totally wrong, but it’s got some other stuff going on too), I liked Seteth getting to have a bigger role, I thought it had the best final boss (if not the best final boss map), and I liked that I got some more Dragon Lore (never a bad thing)

please don’t yell at me for my controversial shipping opinions 

[kendrixtermina]

Thank you for the rant that put into words everything I couldn't! Only 1 thing to add, onto the point about ascribing ulterior motives to fans of "objectively bad" characters - YES, that's it, and also partly why the Nazi/coloniser/imperialist/etc. accusations get thrown around! As if people can't like things they hate without being stupid/evil. (Also, offtopic but I'm glad I'm not the only one comparing Dimitri and Sayaka lol, the Holy Tomb scene reminded me strongly of Sayaka vs Elsa Maria.)

It’s basically the same plot to an extent (for all that there are also differemt subplots going on in each one):

Heroic, noble character sets super high expectations of themselves and defines themselves in opposition to “selfish” people, breaks and loses all hope or self-preservation when they can’t live up to those impossible standards, eventually slide into self-hate and vindictiveness and there’s a lingering sense of tragedy because they were once good and noble. 

In both cases, you have black and white thinking as a main character flaw, and a breaking point occurring when the character, being a 3D human being, can’t think of themselves as “wholly good” anymore - because the only alternative is “wholly bad” and all you have left to do is to direct your badness at other bad people. In the end most ppl can’t live on hate alone and need something to sustain themselves. 

Personally I’ve never bought the interpretation that the girls were “punished for their hidden selfishness” - rather, though they definitely have responsibility for their actions, they were tricked to begin with. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. The fault was not so much that they were “selfish” but that they a) acted out of incomplete self-knowledge and b) ought to forgive themselves for making human mistakes. 

Perhaps Claude could be compared to Kyoko then in that he claims to be completely self-interested to hide from the vulnerability that his inner idealism would create but though acting like a total gremlin early on eventually ends up acting heroically in the latter part of the story. Though he never becomes quite as completely ruthless/jaded as early series Kyoko, nor does Edelgard ever get quite as nihilistic as Homura, though she also has some degree of resigned fatalism, hard-boiled coldness in the face of resignation and an attitude that “no one will believe me about the truth and no one will understand me”  because she starts out knowing a lot of stuff that the other’s don’t causing her actions not to make much sense to them. (A2 from Nier:Automata would be another good parallel: “I didn’t betray [Organization the MCs work for] - it was US who were betrayed!” She starts out knowing some, but not all, about how everything in the setting is fake, causing one of the MCs to get a fixation on killing her when he’s thrown into an existential crisis. But unlike Dimitri, 9S actually finds out that everything is fake. )

With Homura that’s her main thing (and she kinda wants to save Madoka against her will without ever understanding what matters to her), whereas with Edelgard it’s only ever an undercurrent while on the surface she totally wants to defy destiny and though she does shrug off losses as inevitable when they happen, she never stops trying to prevent them. (even on non-Cf routes she does stuff like agree to talk with Dimitri and offer to let Claude go at Gronder)

Of course you could also cast Byleth as homura since she’s the stoic one with the timestravel power, but Byleth is much more of a team player.

XD The parallel kind of popped into my head since both stories involve time travel shenanigans, a complete shattering of the assumptive world, and a plot that first looks like a classical example of the genre but has more and more subversions the more you find out about what’s going on behind the scenes. 

[96thdayofrage]

Democrats’ Blind Obsession on Russia-gate

Exclusive: Instead of focusing on President Trump’s poor policies – or fixing their own shortcomings – Democrats obsess over Russia-gate, though the case is flimsy and reeks of McCarthyism, as Daniel Lazare explains.

Democrats are jubilant now that “Trumpcare” has bit the dust. But they should be careful because Russia-gate, the pseudo-scandal that they’ve latched onto in hopes of driving Donald Trump out of office, is also flashing red. The more they ignore the warning signs, the greater the odds that they’ll go down in flames as well.

Russia-gate, of course, is the story of how the Kremlin allegedly used surreptitious means to hijack the American political process and place a “Siberian candidate” in the White House. It purportedly started five years ago when, according to the famous Christopher Steele dossier, Vladimir Putin foresaw that Donald Trump would become president and set about turning him into a compliant tool of Russian interests.

The Kremlin supposedly threw sweetheart real-estate deals his way (although a lucrative hotel plan never materialized for unexplained reasons) and fed him valuable intelligence about his opponents, all the while blackmailing him with a secret video showing him cavorting with prostitutes at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton.

Then, at the height of last year’s election, Russia was said to have followed up by hacking Democratic National Committee computers and releasing thousands of private emails to WikilLeaks in order to embarrass Hillary Clinton and tip the contest in favor of Trump. This audacious effort succeeded when Trump eked out a victory by virtue of the Electoral College. As a result, Vladimir Putin now controls not one presidential office but two, one in Moscow and the other in Washington, DC.

It’s a cool story about treason, international intrigue and hot babes, but it’s no more convincing than “Birthergate” was seven or eight years ago. Putin would have required superhuman powers to predict that Trump would become president at a time when no one other than “The Simpsons” thought he had a chance. The “golden showers” episode, in which Trump’s female hires supposedly urinated on the same bed that Barack and Michelle Obama used on one of their official Russian visits, is unverified and probably unverifiable as well.

The dossier also contains obvious errors and non-sequiturs, as Consortiumnews’ Robert Parry points out, e.g. placing Trump attorney Michael Cohen at a meeting with a Russian official in Prague, a city that Cohen says he’s never visited, or crediting Putin with stirring up resistance to Obama’s proposed Pacific trade deals when opposition had been building for years on its own. The fact that Steele, an ex-MI6 agent, has been in hiding since January does nothing to enhance his credibility.

But yet another flaw concerns the DNC hack itself. Although everyone from The New York Times to the neo-lib hipsters at Vox accepts the story as gospel, it is in fact gone into a nosedive as a growing army of cyber analysts, Internet sleuths, and other Doubting Thomases probe its most obvious contradictions.

‘Confirmation Bias’

One line of attack concerns the question of “confirmation bias,” the tendency of investigators who are already inclined to blame Russia to zero in only on evidence supporting their point of view. When DNC officials discovered that their computers had been compromised, they did what anyone in such a situation would do: they called their lawyer, in this case a former federal prosecutor and cybercrime specialist named Michael Sussmann.

Sussman, in turn, called an old friend named Shawn Henry, former head of the FBI’s cyber division and now president of an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike. Henry contacted his chief technical officer, Russian-born Dimitri Alperovitch, who sent over a team of investigators. Within the day, the CrowdStrike team concluded that the intruders were Russian government operatives.

It sounds as logical and objective as obtaining the name of a top-flight medical specialist and then scheduling an appointment. But the resemblance is misleading. For one thing, cyber sleuths are not objective. As even The New York Times admits: “Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker is known, is more art than science. It is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty.”

Hence, it’s more like obtaining the name of a faith healer than a physician. For another, this particular group of cyber sleuths seems to have been even less objective than most.

Like any enterprise, CrowdStrike is in the business of convincing potential customers to purchase its services. Hence it had an incentive to blame the email loss on a dark and spooky Kremlin conspiracy rather than something more mundane such as an internal leak.

As an ex-Soviet who emigrated to America as a teenager, moreover, Alperovitch was particularly inclined to blame Russia first. As he once told a reporter: “A lot of people who are born here don’t appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they’ve never had it any other way. I have.”

The Soviet-born journalist Yasha Levine, who covered the 2008 Russo-Georgian War over the breakaway province of South Ossetia, recalls that the air at the time was thick with charges of Russian government cyber warfare, none of which proved true, and that Alperovitch “was one of the minor online voices supporting the idea that the cyber attacks against Georgia were some kind of Russian plot.”

Since then, Alperovitch has joined forces with the Atlantic Council, a hawkish Washington think tank funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO, Ukrainian exiles, Persian Gulf oil exporters, and U.S. arms manufacturers, all with interests hostile to a sensible and constructive approach to U.S.-Russian relations.

Indeed, the Atlantic Council has been a spark-plug powering the New Cold War with Russia and maintains close ties with Clinton and her supporters. In 2013, it gave her its “distinguished leadership award,” and in 2015 it recruited her to give a major address kicking off its “Latin American women’s leadership initiative.”

The Atlantic Council also chose ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a major Clinton ally, to head a Mideast study group that echoed Clinton’s call for a Syrian “no-fly zone, “a proposal that would almost certainly lead to a direct U.S.-Russian military clash.

So the Russophobic Clinton camp hired Russophobic Dimitri Alperovitch, both linked via the Russophobic Atlantic Council, to find out who hacked the DNC. To absolutely no one’s surprise, they decided that Russia was it.

Sloppy Methodology

But CrowdStrike has come under criticism not only on the grounds of bias but methodology. Critics have noted that the firm’s report on the DNC hack was loaded with weasel words suggesting that Russian intelligence was guilty without quite coming out and saying so. It argued, for instance, that hackers were so sophisticated that they had to be state supported:

“Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none, and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft – both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.”

The hackers’ methods are so “consistent with nation-state level capabilities” that they “are believed to be closely linked” to Russian intelligence. But does this mean that they, in fact, connected? The report didn’t say. A few weeks later, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz admitted that proof was lacking when he told Bloomberg News: “We talk about having high confidence, but there’s no absolute in cyber security, and that’s one of the things that makes it so hard.”

An earlier report by a California cyber security firm known as FireEye was equally evasive. In 2014, it declared that the hackers show “evidence of long-standing, focused operations that indicate a government sponsor – specifically a government based in Moscow” – which in turn “suggests that [they] receives direct ongoing financial and other resources from a well-established organization, most likely a nation state government.”

Indicates, suggests, most likely – this was no more than speculation. When a hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0 released another batch of Democratic Party documents a couple of days later, DirectThreat, yet another cyber-security firm, concluded that the intervention “most likely is a Russian denial and deception (D&D) effort” aimed at throwing investigators off the track.

The reason had to do with telltale traces that Guccifer 2.0 had left behind, specifically a document uploaded in a Russian-language format by someone calling himself “Felix Edmundovich,” an obvious reference to Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, as the Soviet political police were originally known.

For the Kremlin-done-it crowd, this was proof that Russian intelligence was involved. But this led to another objection: if the hackers were so super-sophisticated, how could they be guilty of such an elementary mistake?

Referring to two of Russia’s top intelligence agencies, Jeffrey Carr, a well-known cyber-security expert, was unable to restrain his sarcasm: “OK. Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix’s name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor.”

Sam Biddle, The Intercept’s formidable tech writer, was equally dismissive: “It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.”

As Gregory Elich noted in an excellent roundup on Counterpunch, disguising the origin of a hack is trivial even for beginners. Referring to half-baked amateurs, James Scott, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, pokes funat the very idea of cyber-sleuths claiming to know where one originates:

“It’s common knowledge among even script kiddies that all one needs to do is compromise a system geolocated in Russia (ideally in a government office) and use it as a beachhead for attack so that indicators of compromise lead back to Russia. … Want to add another layer? Compromise a Chinese system, leap-frog onto a hacked Russian machine, and then run the attack from China to Russia to any country on the globe. Want to increase geopolitical tensions, distract the global news cycle, or cause a subtle, but exploitable shift in national positions? Hack a machine in North Korea and use it to hack the aforementioned machine in China, before compromising the Russian system and launching global attacks. This process is so common and simple that’s its virtually ‘Script Kiddie 101’ among malicious cyber upstarts.”

Government Ineptness

After the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a report on Dec. 29 alluding to “malware” used in the DNC attack, Mark Maunder, CEO of Wordfence, Seattle-based makers of a popular computer-security program, joined with a colleague named Rob McMahon to try to track it down. Working through the night, they discovered that the malware was an early version of a publicly available program known as P.A.S. that had been developed in the Ukraine.

This was strange, they recounted, since “one might reasonably expect Russian intelligence operatives to develop their own tools or at least use current malicious tools from outside sources.”

Maunder and McMahon also examined 876 Internet Protocol addresses used by the hackers provided by the Department of Homeland Security and found that the largest number originated in the U.S., followed by Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and China. Some 15 percent were TOR exit notes of unknown origin since they are designed to be anonymous.

“The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia,” Maunder and McMahon concluded. “But they don’t appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors….”

In other words, proof is nowhere to be found. The only certainty about the DNC hack is that certainty is unwarranted. CrowdStrike’s credibility meanwhile took a major hit after it published a report in December claiming that Russia had used the same malware to hack an Android app that Ukrainian artillery units used to target Russian-backed separatists, a feat that enabled separatists to turn tables on the Ukrainians by pinpointing their location instead.

As a result, CrowdStrike wrote, “Ukrainian artillery forces have lost over 50 percent of their weapons in the two years of conflict and over 80 percent of D-30 howitzers, the highest percentage of loss of any other artillery pieces in Ukraine’s arsenal.”

Unfortunately, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies complained that the company had misused its data in coming up with such figures while the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said that the hacking and resultant combat losses had never occurred at all. Yaroslav Sherstyuk, the Ukrainian military officer who developed the Android app, called the CrowdStrike report “delusional” in an angry Facebook post.

So when CrowdStrike’s findings were put to the test, they failed. Skepticism is therefore in order no less than during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq when the intelligence community lined up solidly behind reports that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction Iraq – and Clapper, at the time head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said that the Iraqi dictator had “unquestionably” spirited them over the Syrian border when no WMDs were found.

Democrats certainly have much to criticize. They could go after Trump for sabotaging the fight against global warming, for cutting everything from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the National Institute of Health to add more money to the Pentagon’s budget, for unleashing violence on immigrants, or for escalating U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. Instead, they’ve seized on Trump’s call for a rapprochement with Russia, one of the few semi-sensible things he said on the campaign trail. And the Democrats have made it the centerpiece of a hate-Putin campaign straight out of Orwell.

But if the story of a Kremlin hack of the DNC goes, then precious little of Russia-gate will remain beyond a dubious memo and a few innocuous meetings with the Russian ambassador. The more the Democrats push this latest Washington pseudo-scandal, the more they risk joining the GOP on the political trash heap. Trump could well end up as the last man standing amid the rubble.

Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).