*There's a distraction that's so much bigger than this article suggests. I've blogged quite a few: Trump's, "Ban" will kill American's ability for dual citizenship. Any of the 3 current forms of the Health Care bills will be devastating to the middle and lower classes. No one seems to be monitoring the growing pharmaceutical drug epidemic. Not one person I know has even mentioned the calculated growing US debt etc. Then I get the most idiotic questions, "Why don't you want to live here"?
In the months following Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the US presidential election, it has become increasingly clear that the Democratic party is unwilling—and perhaps unable—to come to terms with the country’s post-election reality. The party’s inability to accept defeat has since manifested itself through an increasingly hysterical campaign to blame Hillary Clinton’s defeat on alleged Russian interference.
The charge that Russia, in the words of respected Russia expert and longtime Clinton associate Strobe Talbott, breached “the firewall of American democracy” has been repeated so often and by so many that it has taken on the patina of fact. It has become an article of faith, among disappointed Clinton partisans, mainstream political commentators, Democrats on Capitol Hill and Republicans like senator Lindsey Graham, that the election was tainted and that Trump’s legitimacy as president is questionable, at best.
The tendency to blame domestic disappointments on foreign bogeymen is not new and is perhaps better understood as a wave that periodically surfaces, then temporarily subsumes American politics. Indeed, this current reliance on conspiracy theories and accusations of unpatriotic disloyalty has been a feature, not a bug, of discourse regarding Russia since the onset of the crisis in Ukraine in early 2014. Yet this paranoia is, so far, little more than a distraction. By blaming Clinton’s loss on Russia, the political establishment is able to largely ignore the way economic, trade, and foreign policies failed large numbers of Americans. And, by elevating Vladimir Putin to supervillain status, this neo-McCarthyism is hindering debate and undermining legitimate attempts to deescalate tensions with our Russian colleagues.
MSNBC’s house intellectual Rachel Maddow has been among the most vociferous and, at times, most incisive critics of president Trump. Yet she also recently questioned whether Trump is actually under the control of the Kremlin. During her broadcast on March 9, Maddow told viewers that what she finds “particularly unsettling” is that “we are also starting to see what may be signs of continuing [Russian] influence in our country. Not just during the campaign but during the administration. Basically, signs of what could be a continuing operation.” [emphasis mine.]
That Maddow, a popular and respected liberal voice, would indulge in rhetoric of this sort is a worrying sign given the lack of hard evidence it is based on. While many have convinced themselves that Russia tipped the scale of the election toward Trump, the more sinister allegations of Putin infiltrating the White House have not been born out. Even the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd in early March that he has “no knowledge” and “no evidence” of “collusion” between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Yet Maddow’s charge recalls some of the worst excesses of the early 1950’s, when our political life was marred by the Red Scare and a climate of paranoia prevailed. Unsubstantiated allegations, not dissimilar to the kind Maddow just levied, were characteristic of that era. Back then, none other than senator Joseph McCarthy himself, wondered: “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” Several years later, Robert W. Welch, founder of the far-right John Birch Society, accused president Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
It might be tempting to dismiss the efforts of prominent Democrats to paint Trump as a “Manchurian President” as a temporary overreaction to the (thus far still unsubstantiated) charges that Russia “hacked” the 2016 presidential election. However, to do so would be to miss what has become an ugly and persistent feature of American discourse about Russia over the past several years.
Full article > http://tinyurl.com/y8qqhd4y
