I live outside the USA and there's two messages to be heard out of the USA:
- "We'll catch this guy and kill him"
and
- "Give him up, or else..."
The US administration sounds like a foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath to the rest of the world, a psychopath who's still holding the Obama agenda to "protect whistleblowers" in their hands even while they make threats and act crazy.
Meanwhile inside the USA the highly predictable campaign to discredit the source is underway, with all the media happily participating, and nobody asking any questions.
We expect these things from a country like Russia or China. We don't expect them from the beacon of democracy, the USA. It means the USA pretty much _is_ Russia right now. Maybe a little less bad - fewer dissidents get killed (Hastings, anyone?). But overall, same thing.
Putin knows this and they play exactly that angle. Idiotic behavior on the side of the US administration makes that just soooo easy.
> The US administration sounds like a foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath to the rest of the world
No offense but if this is really what you hear then there is absolutely nothing the U.S. could do or proclaim that would change your mind, or that of the world.
So in that regard why worry about what the world thinks anyways? The world will hear what they want to hear, nothing more or less.
You need only look at the people comparing American human rights to Russian ones, or saying that the NSA is evil when they spy but the German BND "are not actually spying domestically and besides, they're incompetent".
The world has already decided, but let's not act like it's a completely evidence-based decision that was made.
The US administration sounds like a foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath to the rest of the world, a psychopath who's still holding the Obama agenda to "protect whistleblowers" in their hands even while they make threats and act crazy.
Meanwhile inside the USA the highly predictable campaign to discredit the source is underway, with all the media happily participating, and nobody asking any questions.
We expect these things from a country like Russia or China. We don't expect them from the beacon of democracy, the USA. It means the USA pretty much _is_ Russia right now. Maybe a little less bad - fewer dissidents get killed (Hastings, anyone?). But overall, same thing.
Putin knows this and they play exactly that angle. Idiotic behavior on the side of the US administration makes that just soooo easy.