Ostriches, it's time to yank your heads out of the sand

The above image shows you a page from Roger Stone's unpublished memoir. (For more, see here.) Keep those words in mind as you read the following.

Hillary dropped eight points in two days. It's part of a trend: The same poll had her down 17 points in a mere two weeks -- two weeks in which Donald Trump suffered from incredibly bad press, two weeks in which he ran very little advertising. Everything that could go wrong for Trump did go wrong, and yet he improved his position. If he keeps up this progress, he will pull ahead before another fortnight has passed.

And that's not the only poll. NBC:

Clinton now enjoys 48 percent support, while Trump holds steady with 42 percent. Last week, Clinton led Trump by 8 points.

USA Today:

Hillary Clinton is still 7 points ahead of Donald Trump nationally, according to a new Monmouth University Poll, but her lead has decreased from earlier this month.

The poll out Monday found the Democratic nominee led Trump 46%-39% among likely U.S. voters. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson had the support of 7% of those surveyed, and 2% backed Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

With registered voters, Clinton had 43% support, Trump had 36%, Johnson came in with 8% and Stein had 2%.

A poll released in early August had Clinton 13 points ahead of Trump with likely voters and 12 points ahead with all registered voters.

Now go here:

Donald Trump is gaining ground on Hillary Clinton in three of the Rust Belt's most important states, according to polls released on Monday.

Emerson College released surveys that showed Trump even with Clinton in Ohio, trailing the Democratic nominee by 3% in Pennsylvania, and behind her by 5% in Michigan.

Many of you cackled at me for saying that Trump was catching up. Still laughing?

Others have cackled at my suggestion -- which I first offered some time ago -- that the Russians will release fake anti-Hillary documents. Well, now Dana Milbank (who did not get where he is by spewing weirdo conspiracy theories has sounded the exact same theme in a WP editorial:

The Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported Monday night that Russian hackers have also been targeting state voter-registration systems. And, in an apparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, they’re leaking what they believe to be the most damaging documents at strategic points in the campaign.

Last week, we learned something else: The Russians aren’t just hackers — they’re also hacks. Turns out that before leaking their stolen information, they are in some cases doctoring the documents, making edits that add false information and then passing the documents off as the originals.

Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll reported last week that the hackers goofed: They posted both the original versions of at least three documents and their edited versions. These documents, stolen from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, were altered by the hackers to create the false impression that Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was funded by Soros. A pro-Russian hacking group, CyberBerkut, had inserted Navalny’s name, bogus dollar amounts and fabricated wording.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Are Vladimir Putin’s operatives planning to dump edited DNC documents on the eve of the presidential election?

I'd say that the likelihood of this happening is somewhere in the 95% range.

Perhaps they’ll show that the Clinton Foundation has been funding the Islamic State, or they’ll have Hillary Clinton admitting that she didn’t care about those Americans who died in Benghazi after all. Maybe they’ll show that she really did lose most of her brain function in that fall several years ago and is now relying on Anthony Weiner to make all of her decisions.

On Sunday, Neil MacFarquhar wrote in the New York Times about Russian attempts to undermine a Swedish military partnership with NATO. The campaign is spreading false information that there’s a secret nuclear weapons stockpile in Sweden and alleging that NATO soldiers could rape Swedish women with impunity.

Putin has meddled in domestic politics in France, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere, helping extreme political parties to destabilize those countries. He appears to be doing much the same now in the United States, where, in addition to the DNC and state voter system hacks, there have also been reports this summer about Russia hiring Internet trolls to pose on Twitter and elsewhere in social media as pro-Trump Americans.

I have reason to believe that one such troll has graced the comments section of this very blog. I gave him helpful suggestions as to how to seem more convincing when posing as an American Trump supporter.

Milbank did not take this idea as far as he should have. To make a lie stick, it needs to be backstopped. That is to say: The liars need to present additional evidence designed to make lie seem credible.

What form will this "backstopping" take? I can only guess.

We may presume that Team Trump has planted ringers with Camp Clinton; doing so is standard operating procedure for Roger Stone, the infamous dirty trickster who has long been Donald Trump's close friend. The mole may testify that he or she witnessed behind-the-scenes skullduggery. This false testimony will seem to verify the contents of the forthcoming Russian fakes.

That's just one way the concoctions can me made to seem real. There are others.

There are also other ways the Trumpers can manipulate the election -- schemes that do not involve fake documents. Covert operatives can engineer civil unrest. Or they can set off a major "terrorist" event. Both of these scenarios would benefit the candidate who promises strength and order.

The cleverest scenario would involve a major terror event (such as a portable nuke going off in the Trump Tower in Chicago, which happens to have a completely disused first floor) backstopped by fake evidence designed to convey the impression that the Clinton campaign had advance knowledge of the event. The Trump mole within Camp Clinton could be very helpful here.

Brutal. Psychological. Effective.

Given the truly hideous levels of Clinton Derangement Syndrome in this country, and given the election fraud that will tip close races in Trump's favor (about which I will have more to say soon), I think that Donald Trump is a near-lock to win this election. Only a few scenarios could spoil his chances:

1. Mr. Poor Impulse Control could spout something truly reprehensible in the very last week. By "truly reprehensible" I mean any statement that goes up way past eleven on the Disgusto-Meter: Fuck Jesus or All niggers should die or Ever since my daughter got her nose job, I get hard just looking at her. He'd have to say something that bad. (And even then, he'll still get 40% of the vote.)

2. The government could reveal damning communications between the Team Trump and Putin's people. Why else did we build that massive NSA center near Bluffdale, Utah, if not to identify a foreign threat to the nation? I doubt that Donald Trump and his team have practiced proper tradecraft. If a Russian conspiracy to put Trump in office does exist, the folks at Never Say Anything almost certainly already possess evidence to that effect.

The problem: They have to find a legal way to make that evidence known.