Russia is lucky to be alive today since US elites viewed post-Soviet Russia as their personal property, “ours to lose:” Bill Clinton administration and its associates led “economic genocide” of fragile, newly independent Russia in 1990s with especially catastrophic results for children and the elderly, laughed about “stuffing shit down Yeltsin’s throat.”…US elites thought Russia was theirs for the taking. US personnel today even have plans to break up Russia and hand out its parts, saying it’s too big.
“The burning, seemingly unstoppable anger at the “establishment,” however defined, has given Trump an opening that [Mrs.] Clinton cannot exploit….People who had never contemplated voting Republican for president were considering Trump.”…Washington Post, May 18, 2016, “Trump’s appeal stretches to suburbs that had been trending blue,” David Weigel
Entire political class favors US taxpayer funded mass murder: “Democrats claim to oppose National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, but the anti-Russian hysteria they promote strengthens the hand of such super-hawks. It makes military conflict more likely, if not with Russia then with perceived Russian surrogates such as Venezuela or Iran.”
The US is a failed state since it can’t or won’t protect its borders, has no basis for having a military or collecting taxes. US today is simply a taxpayer funded money laundering operation. “For the last 70 years, the obsession of US strategists has not been to defend their people, but to maintain their military superiority over the rest of the world.” “The “Russian interference” narrative really has nothing to do with cyber hacking or anything else so high level. The narrative is aimed squarely at the American voter….It is meant to imply that American voters were illicitly misled by false information and therefore lacked the required free agent ability to make a decision in regard to the candidates in the 2016 election...that votes for Trump were invalid.”...
5/14/19, “Russia-gate’s Monstrous Offspring," Consortium News, Daniel Lazare
“Russia-gate has shed any premise of being about Russian interference, writes Daniel Lazare, but the idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable.”
“Americans used to think that Russia-gate was about a plot to hack the 2016 election. They were wrong. Russia-gate is really about an immense conspiracy to do four things:
No. 1: Ratchet up tensions with Russia to ever more dangerous levels; No. 2: Show that Democrats are even more useless than people imagined; No. 3: Persecute Julian Assange; No. 4: Re-elect Donald Trump as president.
This was the takeaway from Mitch McConnell’s devastating “case closed” speech last week in which the Senate majority leader jeered at President Barack Obama for mocking Mitt Romney’s claim (seven years ago now) that Russia was America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” As Obama famously replied during that presidential debate: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
But that was so 2012. Now, says McConnell, it looks like Romney was right.”…
[Ed. note: A 4-way win for the Establishment: 1. Voters who chose Trump only did so because they were deceived by Putin, 2. Imaginary Russia War Scare enslaves US taxpayers to war profiteers, 3. An important winning agenda item of the 2016 election is erased without comment, that the US must end its constant foreign aggression, and 4. Now the whole world knows US elections are meaningless, that the US is a dictatorship, and that voters are powerless to do anything about it.]
(continuing): ““We’d have been better off if the administration hadn’t swept [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s [alleged] invasion and occupation of Georgia under the rug or looked away as Russia forced out western NGO’s and cracked down on civil society. If President Obama hadn’t let Assad trample his red line in Syria or embraced Putin’s fake deal on chemical weapons, if the Obama administration had responded firmly to Putin’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 2014,"…
[Ed. note: Sorry McConnell, per Obama himself in 2015 it was the exact opposite, Obama even states that US regime change engineering (“power transition”) in Ukraine caught Putin “off balance:”: “Obama Openly Admits ‘Brokering Power Transition’ In Ukraine“]
(continuing): “to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, and to Russia intervention in [US regime change war in] Syria — maybe stronger leadership would have left the Kremlin less emboldened, maybe tampering with our democracy wouldn’t have seemed so very tempting.
[Image: “President Mikheil Saakashvili (left) greets Senator McCain in Batumi.” 1/11/2010, “Georgian President Decorates U.S. Senator McCain,” Radio Free Europe, “At a ceremony in Georgia’s Black Sea city of Batumi, Saakashvili praised McCain for his strong support [easy to do with unlimited US taxpayer dollars] of Georgia during the August 2008 [5 day] Russian-Georgian war.“]
“Instead,” McConnell went on, “the previous administration sent the Kremlin a signal they could get away with almost anything, almost anything. So is it surprising that we got the brazen interference detailed in special counsel Mueller’s report?”
Lies and Distortions
Like so much out of Congress these days, this was a farrago of lies and distortions. It wasn’t Moscow that started the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, but Tbilisi. While Russia has indeed cracked down on U.S.-backed NGO’s [only the US is allowed to meddle] Washington has done the same by forcing Russia’s highly successful news agency RT to register as a foreign agent and by sentencing Maria Butina, a Russian national studying at American University, to 18 months in prison for the crime of hobnobbing with members of the National Rifle Association. The charge that Syrian President Bashar al Assad “trampled” Obama’s red line by using chemical weapons is hardly as clear-cut as imperial propagandists like to believe – to say the least – [The US “regime change” operation in Syria continues to illegally occupy a third of the country] while the agreement between Putin and former Secretary of State John Kerry to rid Syria of chemical weapons was not fake at all,but an example, increasingly rare unfortunately, of diplomacy being used to prevent an international crisis from getting out of hand.
And so on ad nauseum. But what could Democrats say in response given that they’ve spent the last three years trying to out-hawk the GOP? Answer: nothing. All they could do was try to turn tables on McConnell by charging him with not being anti-Russian enough.
Thus, New York’s Sen. Chuck Schumer accused him of “aiding and abetting” Moscow while Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin accused him of running interference for Putin because he “feels the Russians were on the side of the Republicans in 2016 and just might be again in 2020.””…
[Ed. note: “The “Russian interference” narrative really has nothing to do with cyber hacking or anything else so high level. The narrative is aimed squarely at the American voter….It is meant to imply that American voters were illicitly misled by false information and therefore lacked the required free agent ability to make a decision in regard to the candidates in the 2016 election….that American votes for Trump were invalid because voters no longer had free agent control of their minds….Voter free agency, given any and all information in the public sphere, is the cornerstone of democracy. It is the assumption that everyone is free to make a decision in regard to their political choice….Its concept supposes the ability of voters to self filter that information, as all decision makers do, and make the correct decision that they feel best serves their interests. The absence of voter free agency invalidates democracy as a legitimate process within any form of government…one giant step toward toppling democracy. The Russian interference narrative is a salvo on voter free agency. It is apparently going to be used within any democracy that begins to refuse to advance Neoliberal-Neoconservative agendas. Its implication is that not voting for those agendas implies a fundamental lack of agency (due to an outside controller). A direct parallel to this tactic was when the communists would lock up their opponents in mental institutions. In the future, look for them to build on the foundation that they have laid in the past couple of years.” commenter, “Disclaimer,” 4/28/19, “Did the Russians Really Interfere in Our Elections?” Boyd D. Cathey]
(continuing): “Democrats Feed the Super Hawks
........
[Ed. note: “The “Russian interference” narrative really has nothing to do with cyber hacking or anything else so high level. The narrative is aimed squarely at the American voter….It is meant to imply that American voters were illicitly misled by false information and therefore lacked the required free agent ability to make a decision in regard to the candidates in the 2016 election….that American votes for Trump were invalid because voters no longer had free agent control of their minds….Voter free agency, given any and all information in the public sphere, is the cornerstone of democracy. It is the assumption that everyone is free to make a decision in regard to their political choice….Its concept supposes the ability of voters to self filter that information, as all decision makers do, and make the correct decision that they feel best serves their interests. The absence of voter free agency invalidates democracy as a legitimate process within any form of government…one giant step toward toppling democracy. The Russian interference narrative is a salvo on voter free agency. It is apparently going to be used within any democracy that begins to refuse to advance Neoliberal-Neoconservative agendas. Its implication is that not voting for those agendas implies a fundamental lack of agency (due to an outside controller). A direct parallel to this tactic was when the communists would lock up their opponents in mental institutions. In the future, look for them to build on the foundation that they have laid in the past couple of years.” commenter, “Disclaimer,” 4/28/19, “Did the Russians Really Interfere in Our Elections?” Boyd D. Cathey]
(continuing): “Democrats Feed the Super Hawks
........
The result: a Democratic consensus that Russia can’t be trusted and that America must put itself on a war footing to prevent Putin from “toppl[ing] the mighty oak that has been our republic for two hundred years,” as Schumer put it. It’s an across-the-board agreement that the long-awaited Mueller report has only strengthened by regurgitating the intelligence-community line [without evidence] that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” and then cherry-picking the facts to fit its preconceived thesis. (See “Top Ten Questions About the Mueller Report,” May 6.) .......
Democrats claim to oppose National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, but the anti-Russian hysteria they promote strengthens the hand of such super-hawks. It makes military conflict more likely, if not with Russia then with perceived Russian surrogates such as Venezuela or Iran.
Simultaneously, it backfires on Democrats by making them look weak and foolish as they argue that even though the Mueller report says “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,” somehow “significant evidence of collusion” still exists, as an increasingly unhinged Rep. Adam Schiff maintains. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of congressional Democrats, no evidence does not mean no evidence.
In fact, it means the opposite.
Voters are unmoved. Ten times more Americans – 80 versus 8 percent – care about healthcare than about Russia according to a recent survey. When CNN pollsters asked a thousand people in mid-March to name the issues that matter most, not one mentioned Russia or the Mueller probe. If they didn’t care when collusion was still an open question, they care even less now that the only issue is obstruction plus a phony constitutional crisis that desperate Democrats [and Establishment Republicans] have conjured up out of thin air.
Trump the Chief Beneficiary
Besides Fox News – whose ratings have soared while Russia-obsessed CNN’s have plummeted – the chief beneficiary is Trump. Post-Mueller, the man has the wind in his sails. Come 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders could cut through his phony populism with ease. But if Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post succeeds in tarring him with Russia the same way it tried to tar Trump, then the Democratic nominee will be a bland centrist whom the incumbent will happily bludgeon. Former Vice President Joe Biden – the John McCain-loving, speech-slurring, child-fondler who was for a wall along the Mexican border before he was against it – will end up as a bug splat on the Orange One’s windshield.
Beto O’Rourke, the rich-kid airhead who declared shortly before the Mueller report was released that Trump, “beyond the shadow of a doubt, sought to … collude with the Russian government,” will not fare much better. Sen. Elizabeth Warren meanwhile seems to be tripping over her own two feet as she predicts one moment that Trump is heading to jail, declares the next that voters don’t care about the Mueller report because they’re too concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and then calls for dragging Congress into the impeachment morass regardless.
Such “logic” is lost on voters, so it seems to be a safe bet that enough will stay home next Election Day to allow the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem yet again.
Assange Convicted in Eyes of Press
Then there’s Julian Assange, currently serving a 50-week sentence in a supermax prison outside of London after being ejected from the Ecuadorian Embassy. By claiming that the WikiLeaks founder was “dissembling” by denying that Russia was the source of the mammoth Democratic National Committee leak in July 2016, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has effectively convicted him in the eyes of Congress and the press.
The New York Times thus reports that Mueller [without evidence] has “revealed” that Russian intelligence was the source while, in a venomous piece by Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger, The Washington Post declared that Assange “is neither whistleblower nor journalist,” but someone who helped Russian intelligence interfere in “the American electoral process.”"...
[Image below, Time 7/15/1996: US has done much more than "meddle" in Russian elections, US actually ran Russian Pres. Yelstin's 1996 re-election campaign: 7/15/1996, Boris Yeltsin Time cover, “Yanks to the Rescue.”…Article, “Rescuing Boris,” Time, Michael Kramer, Moscow, 6/24/2001, originally published 7/15/1996]
(continuing): "Schumer thus greeted Assange’s April 11 arrest by tweeting his “hope [that] he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government [though no evidence exists for such],” while, in a truly chilling statement, [supposed "good guy] Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia declared that “[i]t will be really good to get him back on United States soil [so] we can get the facts and the truth from him.”
Assange is guiltier than ever. If Washington gets its hands on him, he’ll no doubt be hauled before some sort of Star Chamber and then clapped in a dungeon somewhere until he confesses that Russian intelligence made him do it, even though a careful reading of the Mueller report strongly suggests the opposite. (See “The ‘Guccifer 2.0’ Gaps in Mueller’s Full Report,” April 18.)
Assange languishing behind bars, war breaking out in Latin America or the Persian Gulf, Trump in the Oval Office for four years more – it’s the worst of all possible worlds, and the [Republican Establishment and] Democratic Party’s bizarre fixation with Vladimir Putin is what’s pushing it.
Ultimately, Russia-gate is yet a variation on the tired old theme of American innocence. If something goes wrong, it can’t be the fault of decent Americans who, as we all know, are too good for our deeply flawed world. Rather, it must be the fault of dastardly foreigners trying to hack our [non-existent] democracy….
But Russia-gate may be the greatest delusion of all. After decades of celebrating Donald Trump as the essence of American flash and hustle, the corporate media have decided that the only way he could have gotten to the White House is if Putin put him there. The upshot is a giant conspiracy to force Americans to turn their back on reality, an effort that can only end in disaster for all concerned, Democrats first and foremost.”
“Daniel Lazare is the author of “The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy” (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nationto Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at Daniellazare.com.”
…………………………………….. Democrats claim to oppose National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, but the anti-Russian hysteria they promote strengthens the hand of such super-hawks. It makes military conflict more likely, if not with Russia then with perceived Russian surrogates such as Venezuela or Iran.
Simultaneously, it backfires on Democrats by making them look weak and foolish as they argue that even though the Mueller report says “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,” somehow “significant evidence of collusion” still exists, as an increasingly unhinged Rep. Adam Schiff maintains. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of congressional Democrats, no evidence does not mean no evidence.
In fact, it means the opposite.
Voters are unmoved. Ten times more Americans – 80 versus 8 percent – care about healthcare than about Russia according to a recent survey. When CNN pollsters asked a thousand people in mid-March to name the issues that matter most, not one mentioned Russia or the Mueller probe. If they didn’t care when collusion was still an open question, they care even less now that the only issue is obstruction plus a phony constitutional crisis that desperate Democrats [and Establishment Republicans] have conjured up out of thin air.
Trump the Chief Beneficiary
Besides Fox News – whose ratings have soared while Russia-obsessed CNN’s have plummeted – the chief beneficiary is Trump. Post-Mueller, the man has the wind in his sails. Come 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders could cut through his phony populism with ease. But if Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post succeeds in tarring him with Russia the same way it tried to tar Trump, then the Democratic nominee will be a bland centrist whom the incumbent will happily bludgeon. Former Vice President Joe Biden – the John McCain-loving, speech-slurring, child-fondler who was for a wall along the Mexican border before he was against it – will end up as a bug splat on the Orange One’s windshield.
Beto O’Rourke, the rich-kid airhead who declared shortly before the Mueller report was released that Trump, “beyond the shadow of a doubt, sought to … collude with the Russian government,” will not fare much better. Sen. Elizabeth Warren meanwhile seems to be tripping over her own two feet as she predicts one moment that Trump is heading to jail, declares the next that voters don’t care about the Mueller report because they’re too concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and then calls for dragging Congress into the impeachment morass regardless.
Such “logic” is lost on voters, so it seems to be a safe bet that enough will stay home next Election Day to allow the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem yet again.
Assange Convicted in Eyes of Press
Then there’s Julian Assange, currently serving a 50-week sentence in a supermax prison outside of London after being ejected from the Ecuadorian Embassy. By claiming that the WikiLeaks founder was “dissembling” by denying that Russia was the source of the mammoth Democratic National Committee leak in July 2016, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has effectively convicted him in the eyes of Congress and the press.
The New York Times thus reports that Mueller [without evidence] has “revealed” that Russian intelligence was the source while, in a venomous piece by Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger, The Washington Post declared that Assange “is neither whistleblower nor journalist,” but someone who helped Russian intelligence interfere in “the American electoral process.”"...
[Image below, Time 7/15/1996: US has done much more than "meddle" in Russian elections, US actually ran Russian Pres. Yelstin's 1996 re-election campaign: 7/15/1996, Boris Yeltsin Time cover, “Yanks to the Rescue.”…Article, “Rescuing Boris,” Time, Michael Kramer, Moscow, 6/24/2001, originally published 7/15/1996]
(continuing): "Schumer thus greeted Assange’s April 11 arrest by tweeting his “hope [that] he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government [though no evidence exists for such],” while, in a truly chilling statement, [supposed "good guy] Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia declared that “[i]t will be really good to get him back on United States soil [so] we can get the facts and the truth from him.”
Assange is guiltier than ever. If Washington gets its hands on him, he’ll no doubt be hauled before some sort of Star Chamber and then clapped in a dungeon somewhere until he confesses that Russian intelligence made him do it, even though a careful reading of the Mueller report strongly suggests the opposite. (See “The ‘Guccifer 2.0’ Gaps in Mueller’s Full Report,” April 18.)
Assange languishing behind bars, war breaking out in Latin America or the Persian Gulf, Trump in the Oval Office for four years more – it’s the worst of all possible worlds, and the [Republican Establishment and] Democratic Party’s bizarre fixation with Vladimir Putin is what’s pushing it.
Ultimately, Russia-gate is yet a variation on the tired old theme of American innocence. If something goes wrong, it can’t be the fault of decent Americans who, as we all know, are too good for our deeply flawed world. Rather, it must be the fault of dastardly foreigners trying to hack our [non-existent] democracy….
But Russia-gate may be the greatest delusion of all. After decades of celebrating Donald Trump as the essence of American flash and hustle, the corporate media have decided that the only way he could have gotten to the White House is if Putin put him there. The upshot is a giant conspiracy to force Americans to turn their back on reality, an effort that can only end in disaster for all concerned, Democrats first and foremost.”
“Daniel Lazare is the author of “The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy” (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nationto Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at Daniellazare.com.”
Added: Inspired by Daniel Lazare’s text, following are Trump’s four Time covers, the first in Jan. 1989 which mentions speculation that he might someday run for President: Lazare: “After decades of celebrating Donald Trump as the essence of American flash and hustle, the corporate media have decided that the only way he could have gotten to the White House is if Putin put him there. The upshot is a giant conspiracy to force Americans to turn their back on reality.”…
Jan. 16, 1989, Time cover. Image from Time, July 23, 2015 article, “How Donald Trump Became Donald Trump,“ Time, Dan Mitchell. (Jan. 16, 1989 Time article on its website (excerpt below) didn’t include cover image)
Jan. 16, 1989, “Flashy Symbol of an Acquisitive Age: DONALD TRUMP,” Time,
“Young, handsome and ridiculously rich, DONALD TRUMP loves making deals and money, loathes losing and has an ego as big as the Ritz — er, Plaza.”
p. 2, “At 6 ft. 2 in., real estate tycoon Donald J. (for John) Trump does not really loom colossus-high above the horizon of New York and New Jersey. He has created no great work of art or ideas, and even as a maker or possessor of money he does not rank among the top ten, or even 50. Yet at 42 he has seized a large fistful of that contemporary coin known as celebrity. There has been artfully hyped talk about his having political ambitions, worrying about nuclear proliferation, even someday running for President.“
………………………..
August 20, 2015, Trump Time cover headline reads: “Deal with it.“ Image above from ETonline.com, 8/20/15 (scroll down). Time article is subscription
8/20/15, “Donald Trump Poses With Bald Eagle for ‘Time’ Magazine,” etonline.com, by Jackie Willis
“Donald Trump is on the cover of Time magazine, and the headline reads: “Deal with it.””
………………………………….
Jan. 7, 2016 Time cover below, predicts Trump will beat GOP Establishment and become GOP nominee: “The man is moving people, and politics does not get more basic than that:”
1/7/2016 cover, “How Trump Won,” Time.com, image, Time.com National Review 1/7/16 quotes from 1/7/16 Time article by David Von Drehle: (Time 1/7/16 article requires subscription)
David Von Drehle writes in Time:
“The man is moving people, and politics does not get more basic than that. Trump is a bonfire in a field of damp kindling–an overcrowded field of governors and former governors and junior Senators still trying to strike a spark. His nearest rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has traction in Iowa among the evangelical bloc and–in contrast to Trump–is a tried-and-true conservative. But with little more than half the support Trump boasts in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Cruz has a long way to go to show that he can move masses.”“We hear a lot of complaining from Republicans — often justified — that the media “tries to pick our nominee for us.” Trump fans probably won’t be complaining about this one.” Time cover image from National Review
“How the real estate magnate took the Republican Party from its old bosses.”
“A Campaign Like No Other”
………………………….
11/9/16, Time cover: “President-elect Donald Trump addresses supporters at his victory night party at 2:52 a.m. on Nov. 9 in New York City.” “This Is TIME’s Cover of President-Elect Donald Trump,“ Time.com, Olivier Laurent
...........................
Comment: Trump's greatest achievement was beating the vicious Republican Establishment which normally insists we have weak candidates who have no intention of winning, eg McCain, Romney, Dole. The US doesn't really have two parties. The GOP E has the same agenda as Democrats starting with open borders. In the minority, they can just tell Republican voters, "the Democrats won't let us."
Comment: Trump's greatest achievement was beating the vicious Republican Establishment which normally insists we have weak candidates who have no intention of winning, eg McCain, Romney, Dole. The US doesn't really have two parties. The GOP E has the same agenda as Democrats starting with open borders. In the minority, they can just tell Republican voters, "the Democrats won't let us."
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