Trump and Putin

I am not upset by the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki.  I am upset by Mueller and the media.  Mueller's decision to release the indictment of the 12 Russian spies appears to have been politically motivated to make the Putin meeting more difficult for Trump.  It's the most overt indication I have seen that Mueller is not being even-handed and unbiased.  This action seemed clearly to benefit the Democrats and to make it impossible for Trump to have the friendly summit with Putin that he wanted. 

I think it is good that Trump likes Putin and wants to form a good relationship with him.  The US and Russia still have the two most destructive nuclear arsenals in the world.  It's good that they don't want to use them on each other. While everybody in Washington is saying Putin is a terrible dictator, he is not saying things like Khrushchev's, "We will bury you."  I don't think any American journalists asked any questions at the joint press conference about nuclear weapons.  If so, the media ignored them.  The entire focus was on Russian meddling in the US election, in part because of Mueller's release of the indictments.  In essence the press said, "We don't care about nuclear annihilation, we only care about election hacking." 

The thing is: Russia did hack some stuff during the election; I'm not sure what or exactly who did it.  Putin may have been personally involved, or maybe not.  We know he dislikes Hillary because Hillary had tried to remove him from office.  He probably also doesn't like Hillary because her husband, Bill, was instrumental in expanding NATO up to the very borders of Russia, which Putin saw as an existential threat.  George W. Bush carried on the expansion.  To me, the Baltic countries -- Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia -- are just a nuclear tripwire.  They are on the Russian border.  If Russia attacks them they back up to the Baltic ocean and are only a few miles wide.  NATO defense against a massive Russian invasion looks almost impossible to me.  So the only response by NATO and us "as if the attack had been on the US mainland," is nuclear.  The US will have to launch a nuclear war against Russia in response.  After a massive nuclear exchange, hundreds of millions of people will be dead on both sides.  But the press does not care about that possibility; it only cares about election hacking.  The press is willing for a hundred million people to die, if it means no more hacking.  I don't think they have their priorities right. 

Maybe Trump did let Putin off the hook as far as accusing him of hacking the election.  But does anyone really believe Putin would admit he did it?  It's pointless to try to get him to confess.  Trump was trying to form a working relationship with Putin.  The press was insisting that Trump treat the hacking as if Putin had an ugly wart on his face and Trump had to tell Putin he was so ugly that it made people sick to look at him.  The press was basically yelling at Trump to spit in Putin's face, and when he didn't they called him a coward and a traitor. 

Watching the antics of the impassioned American press at the press conference, I am sure Putin thought, "Thank goodness I don't have a free press and don't have to deal with hate-filled maniacs like this."  The American press did not cover itself with glory.   Do they really believe that nuclear war is the best response to election hacking?  People need to calm down.