Backbearings

Who's the Russian mole?  Could it be the head of one of Obama's intelligence agencies?

Still it may be profitable in real-life Washington to go back a few years, as Dana Priest in the New Yorker does, to unravel a problem similar to that which baffled Sherlock: why did the dog not bark in the night? Or as Priest puts it,why couldn't the Obama era intelligence community detect Russian meddling.

There are too many coincidences for it to be just bad luck. Some journalists are belatedly realizing they are living through the aftermath of the Big Bang. A huge strike happened without them even being aware of it and the scale of it is boggling. The Obama administration failed to detect the rise of the Islamic state, was surprised by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Putin's intervention in Syria, did not see the rapid development of Kim's nuclear arsenal and, publicly at least, ascribed the assault on the Benghazi consulate to a video -- and as the New Yorker points out, were even blindsided by Russian election interference openly happening on Facebook.

And then, of course we have the famous Romney - Obama debate in which Obama chides Romney “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because you know, the Cold War has been over for 20 years."

Read the whole thing.