Americans Are Lost in the Weeds, and Google Doesn’t Help

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Posted By: The Observer February 5, 2018

Continuing Google Censorship

Google continues to censor The Trenchant Observer, not displaying search results on hot topics such as the Christopher Steele Dossier. In fact, Google hasn’t sent any users to the articles by the Trenchant Observer published in recent months.

It makes you wonder why, when BING, Yahoo, Duck-Duck-Go and other search engines refer a number of users to recent articles, Google does not.

February 5, 2018
COMMENTARY: Americans are Lost in the Weeds, Just Where Trump Wants Them to Be

As news reporters and cable news commentators fill their columns and air time with endless details about the Nunes Memo, or the democratic Memo, we should recognize that Joseph Goebbels himself, the Nazi propaganda minister, would be immensely proud of the Trump Team’s execution of his basic propaganda techniques. Get everyone arguing about something irrelevant. Distract attention from what is really going on.  Create controversy.  Confuse the public.  Debate any opponent’s criticism endlessly, until ordinary citizens are confused.

How many voters, do you think, paid attention to the story that top Russian intelligence agency leaders came to Washington last week (before February 5) to meet with top U.S. intelligence officials (and who knows who else)?  Or to the story that this occurred only days before Trump announced that he would not implement the sanctions against Russia and Russians that had been enacted into law by the Congress, by overwhelming veto-proof majorities?

Few, I suspect.  Americans were lost in the weeds arguing over the Nunes Memo.

Just stop for a minute and think:

Whereas there is ample and endlessly redundant evidence in full public view of Donald Trump’s efforts to tamper with witnesses and impede the Senate, House and Mueller investigations into his relationships with Russia and Russians, he has everyone down in the weeds discussing this or that detail of the release or contents of a memo which is basically irrelevant, devoid of content, and which regardless of its content would not carry the water he is reported in his deluded state to think it could.

One awaits further indictments of Trump associates. Only by putting Trump’s enablers and liars in jail will any progress be made toward forcing him from office.

One also awaits real oversight of the Trump administration. A good place to start would be the State Department, where a close examination of Trump’s policies and actions towards Russia might be undertaken, while a very serious investigation into the consequences of Trump’s and Rex Tillerson’s abandonment of the human rights component of U.S. foreign policy might be highly useful. So far, the consequences in both areas have been disastrous.

In the domestic arena, there is high scrutiny of Trump’s actions and policies, and strong forces which can push back against the most disastrous ones.  Sadly, this is not true in the foreign policy arena, where Congressional oversight is all the more necessary.

These are the stories Americans and American media should be following, if they can get their noses out of the weeds.

The Trenchant Observer

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About the Author

The Observer
"The Trenchant Observer" is edited and published by The Observer, an international lawyer who has taught International Law, Human Rights, and Comparative Law at major U.S. universities, including Harvard, Brandeis, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Kansas. He is a former staff attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (IACHR), where he was in charge of Brazil, Haiti, Mexico and the United States, and also worked on complaints from and reports on other countries including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. As an international development expert, he has worked on Rule of Law, Human Rights, and Judicial Reform in a number of countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Russian Federation. In the private sector, The Observer has worked as an international attorney for a leading national law firm and major global companies, on joint ventures and other matters in a number of countries in Europe (including Russia and the Ukraine), throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and Japan. The Trenchant Observer blog provides an unfiltered international perspective for news and opinion on current events, in their historical context, drawing on a daily review of leading German, French, Spanish and English newspapers as well as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other American newspapers, and on sources in other countries relevant to issues being analyzed. The Observer speaks fluent English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, and also knows other languages. He holds an S.J.D. or Doctor of Juridical Science in International Law from Harvard University, and a Doctor of Law (J.D.) and a Master of the Science of Law (J.S.M.), from Stanford University. As an undergraduate, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree, also from Stanford, where he graduated “With Great Distinction” (summa cum laude) and received the James Birdsall Weter Prize for the best Senior Honors Thesis in History. In addition to having taught as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, The Observer has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs (CFIA). His fellowships include a Stanford Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Development, the Rómulo Gallegos Fellowship in International Human Rights awarded by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and a Harvard MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. Beyond his articles in The Trenchant Observer, he is the author of two books and numerous scholarly articles on subjects of international and comparative law. Currently he is working on a manuscript drawing on the best articles that have appeared in the blog.

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