Harry Reed Sheep Dipping

Harry Reed is sheep dipping when he says there is a relationship between the Trump Campaign and Russian hackers who seem to be going after Democrats favoring their candidate.  The term has another meaning in the Intelligence Community, but that clearly does not apply here.  The one that does is from persuasion and marketing - throwing out ideas in a stream, hoping some of them will stick with the intended audience.  Truth does not enter into this.  It is just offering semi-plausible explanations, hoping one of them will find favor with an audience.  The Russians are famous for this kind of thing, doing it in the Ukraine when the rebels they were supporting shot down a commercial airliner with a missile system they got from the Russians.

The Russians surmised first that the Ukrainians shot down this airliner with fighters, mistaking it for Vladimir Putin's airplane which was passing that way at the moment.  Then, they decided the Ukrainian ground forces shot it down by mistake.  As incredible as it sounds now, these stories stuck with some of the people in the Ukraine.  In the following months there were more theories about how the events happened and none of them indicated the Russians gave a complicated missile system to people who didn't have the capability to do target identification first.

Harry Reed offers this sheep dip as a way of explaining why the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton's e-mail servers, and an assortment of things showing up on the Wikileaks servers were hacked because the Republican opposition must be aligned with them.  This is the same person who started the story that Mitt Romney the previous Republican candidate paid no taxes.  The truthfulness of that story was demonstrated often, but never to Reed's satisfaction.  He still says it, knowing it is not true.

A few people will believe this kind of "truth" long enough to have the saying of it achieve it purpose.  What should we say about politicians who do this sort of thing in an election cycle that says the majority of people here do not trust their political candidates?   Vince Lombardy,  one of the best American football coaches, used to say that Winning isn't Everything - It's the Only Thing.  That applies very well in football, but national politics is not a game.  We should expect that political candidates will play a version of truth that fits their side of a story, but not lie outright with the idea that nobody will find out until after the election is over.  Where are all of those fact-checkers when you really need them?