The president* was up and tweeting early this morning.

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Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 7, 2017

Yeah, I can imagine that the world's leaders are amazed by the whole business and are talking about it constantly.

Japanese Delegate: "Can you believe this dolt is going on and on about Podesta's server?"

French Delegate: "Zut alors! Podesta encore! Ou est le cannabis très puissant?"

Australian Delegate: "Not Podesta again. He'll be on about the electoral college in a bit. Where's the bloody bar?"

And so on.

The big show, of course, is the bilateral meeting between El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and Vladimir Putin, he of the dead eyes and the gift for seizing opportunities, to say nothing of sovereign territories. Russian ratfcking is not on the agenda, of course, because that would require the president* to be president of the whole country, as opposed to president of his Twitter account and his political base.

The meeting comes amid a spate of stories about new Russian hacking, this time of the computer systems at various nuclear plants around the United States. From Bloomberg:

The intruders could be positioning themselves to eventually disrupt the nation's power supply, warned the officials, who noted that a general alert was distributed to utilities a week ago. Adding to those concerns, hackers recently infiltrated an unidentified company that makes control systems for equipment used in the power industry, an attack that officials believe may be related. The chief suspect is Russia, according to three people familiar with the continuing effort to eject the hackers from the computer networks. One of those networks belongs to an aging nuclear generating facility known as Wolf Creek -- owned by Westar Energy Inc., Great Plains Energy Inc. and Kansas Electric Power Cooperative Inc. -- on a lake shore near Burlington, Kansas. The possibility of a Russia connection is particularly worrisome, former and current officials say, because Russian hackers have previously taken down parts of the electrical grid in Ukraine and appear to be testing increasingly advanced tools to disrupt power supplies.

Now the sudden appearance of this story at this time can't help but engage the Spidey sense of anyone with a healthy suspicion of the intelligence community. In addition, kindly Doc Maddow did a long segment on her Thursday night show about an apparent attempt to catfish her program with some fake documents alleging the Trump's campaign colluded with Moscow. This is now a full-scale information war between this imperfect democracy and a determined oligarch, and the president*, sadly, seems to be on both sides of it.

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He certainly has a sweet tooth for Putin's kind of ethnocentric nationalism. His speech on Thursday in Warsaw was straight out of the Christian Identity hymnal. (I would also recommend you check out the response on the part of Respectable Conservatives, who rushed to minimize what the president* was plainly saying. White nationalism has given a kind of forbidden thrill to American conservatives ever since old Bill Buckley lined up against Dr. King in the 1960s. It's the secret sauce of the conservative movement, which is why Charles Murray is rich.) Apparently, we are supposed to consider Russia part of "the West" now, despite the fact that, historically, the Enlightenment never got there, and the country slid almost seamlessly from absolute monarchy, to a Communist dictatorship, to its present authoritarian kleptocracy.

It's probably unfair of me to suggest that some of the people defending the president*'s speech secretly admire Putin's version of the culture wars, and that some of the more religious types wish for the spiritual despotism of the Russian Orthodox. So now, despite the fact it shares none of the values of Western democracy and none of the democratic traditions common to most western nations, Russia is one of us, helping to keep the barbarians at bay. No wonder the president gave Putin that pat on the back. We're all on the same team. Let's talk about John Podesta now. It's safer.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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