Handicapping "Russia-Gate"

Back in the late eighties, the idea occurred to me to try my hand at picking NFL games versus the spread.  I wrote some software, which utilized statistics in the hopes of being able to successfully pick the winners.  This really did not work the way that I wanted, but there was this one guy who seemed impressed with it.  There was a thought towards publishing it, but I decided not to.  It wasn't good enough, I thought.

Silly me.  Since when being honest was a good way to make money!  I could have marketed it as better than what it really was and never give a sucker an even break.  Maybe I could have made a fortune off that scam.

I have come to see the world as a mostly immoral or amoral place.  People are moral creatures, but mostly their morality is self-centered.  "What's fair" is usually relegated to the subjective mode, and becomes more like "what's in it for me".

Let me now segue into this current event, aka Russia-gate.  Supposedly, there is a scandal.  Supposedly, everyone gives a hoot about clean and honest government.  Supposedly, we want to bring justice to the crime, since there must have been one somewhere.  "Where there's smoke, there's fire" has already been uttered with respect to the immunity request sought by Flynn.  But a skeptical mind might look at it differently.   But this has nothing to do with the truth, or does it?

If it is politics, you can bet that truth isn't being sought.

There have been many times in which I mentioned the parable of the wolf v the lamb, and who wins that argument.  So, to handicap this thing, you have to know where the real power lies.  Does it lie with the media, which is the loudest and the noisiest, or elsewhere?

Noise does not equal power.  But it may be mistaken as such.  Hence, all the noise that the Dems are making about Trump and Russia may not be the deciding factor.  Or it might.  Just depends on how it is being perceived.

The late Herb Cohen said something about power.  By the way, Herb Cohen wrote the book You Can Negotiate Anything.  What Cohen said about power is that you have as much of it as you think you have.  Even if you have it, and don't believe you have it, then you don't have it.  On the other hand, if you don't have it, but believe you do, then you have it.  Completely subjective, I would say.  It has nothing to do with the objective reality of the situation.

The Democrats do not have a leg to stand on, if facts and truth mattered any.  Everything they are doing is pure bluff.  If Obama had anything on Trump, he would have used it.  So, he has nothing.  All the Dems can do is pretend that they have a story, which should be obvious that they don't.

The GOP has all the power wrapped up in their hands.  But if they get bluffed out of a winning hand, it is only because they let themselves be intimidated by the left wing noise machine.  They will have been like Cohen said: one who had power and believed as if he didn't, so he didn't.  The Dems will have the power because they believe they do even though they don't.

It really comes down to what the GOP is made of.  If they are made of chalk, they will fall apart.  If they have any backbone, they will be able to dispose of the Dems with the greatest of ease.

Unfortunately, I am not the amazing Kreskin, with the ESP to determine what is in the minds of these guys,  Their track record doesn't look promising though.

If I was a betting man, I couldn't handicap this one.  But I would like to favor the GOP because they have the better hand, in my estimation.