Dominic Green

There are two ways of looking at the multi-million dollar suit that the Democratic National Committee filed last week in a New York court. One is that any attempt to establish facts in a public court about Russian meddling in the 2016 election is more than welcome. The other is that the case may fail to establish anything in court, because of its overreaching scope and partisan presumption. Accusing as many foreign and domestic actors as possible of being part of what, for lack of a better phrase, amounts to a vast right-wing conspiracy, is the very worst way to go about establishing facts.Conspiracy is no exaggeration. The list of defendants is extravagant. The Trump team are all there: Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, and Donald Trump Jr..

Mark Zuckerberg came to Washington this week. Just an ordinary, common-sense guy, with matching hoodies in his roll-on, and a company that was worth well over half a trillion dollars before it emerged that it had shared its subscribers’ personal information, instead of sticking to its real business of selling that information to advertisers. The future president wore a suit for his perp walk before the media and his Congressional cross-examination by some random old people. He could not help but look contemptuous—like the uncool grandchild of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Busted for drugs in 1967, Jagger and Richards knew that time was on their side.

Some people will believe anything, so other people will say anything, especially if they’re desperate. The headline news in Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s chat with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is bin Salman’s statements that both Israelis and Palestinians “have the right to their own land”; that Saudi Arabia has “a lot of interests” in common with Israel; and that, pending an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, Israelis and Gulf Arabs could do the Sword Dance after the misunderstandings of the last seventy years.Such is the healing power of desperation. The Saudis have pretended for seven decades that the Zionist Entity does not exist, and that, if it does, it should not.

It’s all relative with Saudi Arabia. Everyone who matters is related to everyone else. Even relative to the degraded standards of Afro-kleptocracy and Arab dictatorship, the Saudi state is nothing more than the al-Saud family business, plus its clerical and military appendages. And relatively speaking, the Saudis are hypocrites even by the low standards of Arab governance. They have always divided the world into those with whom they are prepared admit economic relations, and those with whom they claim not to have relations of any kind, but secretly do. The former include Saudi Arabia’s slave class of imported servants and construction workers, oil-hungry governments.

Yesterday, Donald Trump went to New Hampshire, the ‘Granite State’ or, as he calls it, a ‘drug-infested den’. He has launched an initiative against prescription opioid addiction, and would like to execute drug dealers. He has not specified whether he would prefer to do this in the manner of Dirty Harry, or by a legal and perhaps more appropriate method, such as lethal injection. Some of his audience whooped in approval when he suggested the death penalty for drug dealers. The opioid epidemic is worst among Deplorables, and New Hampshire is a pretty Deplorable state, with plenty of unemployed white gun owners.

Remember Nudge? It was a 2008 book by Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, full of bright technocratic ideas for using ‘choice architecture’ to ‘nudge’ the plebs to make the ‘right’ decisions. The Guardian’s reviewer called it ‘never intimidating, always amusing, and elucidating: a jolly economic romp with serious lessons within’.   On Saturday, the Guardian published a whistleblower’s account of how Cambridge Analytica used data originating from ‘tens of millions' of Facebook profiles to construct choice architecture that could nudge the plebs to really vote the ‘right’ way, by using targetted adverts to swing marginal constituencies to the Republicans.

The AIPAC conference, that annual celebration of the triangular romance between America, Israel and American Jews, concluded last night with the traditional protestations of undying love, democratic compatibility and common values. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s identity crisis deepens, and a redefinition of the goals of the American-Israeli relationship looms. AIPAC is studiously bipartisan, but the maladroit policies of the Bush and Obama administrations and the rightward turn of Israeli politics since the Second Intifada have made Israel a partisan issue in American politics. A recent Pew survey found more polarization than at any point in the last four decades: 79% of Republicans sided with Israel, but only 27% of Democrats.