I got a laugh out of the clumsy narrative servicing in this article: Americans Will Head to Space Again Without a Russian Taxi:
Since the Space Shuttle’s retirement six years ago, NASA has been buying spots aboard Russian Soyuz craft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. It’s a politically awkward arrangement to say the least, given more than a decade of strained relations, Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the dented American pride of having to ask in the first place.
That line appears to be the whole point of the article. After that, the rest is just a slapdash mishmash of news bites, reading as if the author copy-pasted a bunch of semi-related tweets into a single document. It lacks the coherent structure or flow from paragraph to paragraph that this article and a few others I read show he’s actually capable of creating.
Apparently, writing a good article in this instance was less important than the opportunity to repeat this partisan assertion-as-fact.