Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives
Published on
Monday, April 03, 2017
by
Rolling Stone
Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives
Whatever the truth about Trump and Russia, the speculation surrounding it
has become a dangerous case of mass hysteria
by
Matt Taibbi
Michael Flynn and Donald Trump. 'When it comes to Trump-Putin collusion,
we're still waiting for the confirmation,' writes Taibbi. 'But on the mass
hysteria front, we already have evidence enough to fill a dozen books.'
(Photo: John Locher/AP)
So Michael Flynn, who was Donald Trump's national security adviser before he
got busted talking out of school to Russia's ambassador, has reportedly
offered to testify in exchange for immunity.
Trump has stuffed his Cabinet with tyrants, zealots and imbeciles - all bent
on demolishing our government from within
For seemingly the 100th time, social media is exploding. This is it! The big
reveal!
Perhaps it will come off just the way people are expecting. Perhaps Flynn
will get a deal, walk into the House or the Senate surrounded by a phalanx
of lawyers, and unspool the whole sordid conspiracy.
He will explain that Donald Trump, compromised by ancient deals with Russian
mobsters, and perhaps even blackmailed by an unspeakable KGB sex tape, made
a secret deal. He'll say Trump agreed to downplay the obvious benefits of an
armed proxy war in Ukraine with nuclear-armed Russia in exchange for
Vladimir Putin's help in stealing the emails of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and
John Podesta.
I personally would be surprised if this turned out to be the narrative,
mainly because we haven't seen any real evidence of it. But episodes like
the Flynn story have even the most careful reporters paralyzed. What if,
tomorrow, it all turns out to be true?
What if reality does turn out to be a massive connect-the-dots image of St.
Basil's Cathedral sitting atop the White House? (This was suddenly
legitimate British conspiracist Louise Mensch's construction in The New York
Times last week.) What if all the Glenn Beck-style far-out charts with the
circles and arrows somehow all make sense?
This is one of the tricks that keeps every good conspiracy theory going.
Nobody wants to be the one claiming the emperor has no clothes the day His
Highness walks out naked. And this Russia thing has spun out of control into
just such an exercise of conspiratorial mass hysteria.
Even I think there should be a legitimate independent investigation - one
that, given Trump's history, might uncover all sorts of things. But almost
irrespective of what ends up being uncovered on the Trump side, the public
prosecution of this affair has taken on a malevolent life of its own.
One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who doesn't
believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going on virtually
unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent weeks.
The aforementioned Mensch, a noted loon who thinks Putin murdered Andrew
Breitbart but has somehow been put front and center by The Times and HBO's
Real Time, has denounced an extraordinary list of Kremlin plants.
She's tabbed everyone from Jeff Sessions ("a Russian partisan") to Rudy
Giuliani and former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom ("agents of
influence") to Glenn Greenwald ("Russian shill") to ProPublica and Democracy
Now! (also "Russian shills"), tothe 15-year-old girl with whom Anthony
Weiner sexted (really, she says, a Russian hacker group called "Crackas With
Attitudes") to an unnamed number of FBI agents in the New York field office
("moles"). And that's just for starters.
Others are doing the same. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, upon seeing the
strange behavior of Republican Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes, asked
"what kind of dossier" the Kremlin has on Nunes.
Dem-friendly pollster Matt McDermott wondered why reporters Michael Tracey
and Zaid Jilani aren't on board with the conspiracy stories (they might be
"unwitting" agents!) and noted, without irony, that Russian bots
mysteriously appear every time he tweets negatively about them.
Think about that last one. Does McDermott think Tracey and Jilani call their
handlers at the sight of a scary Matt McDermott tweet and have the FSB send
waves of Russian bots at him on command? Or does he think it's an automated
process? What goes through the heads of such people?
I've written a few articles on the Russia subject that have been very tame,
basically arguing that it might be a good idea to wait for evidence of
collusion before those of us in the media jump in the story with both feet.
But even I've gotten the treatment.
I've been "outed" as a possible paid Putin plant by the infamous "PropOrNot"
group, which is supposedly dedicated to rooting out Russian "agents of
influence." You might remember PropOrNot as the illustrious research team
the Washington Post once relied on for a report that accused 200 alternative
websites of being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the
election season."
Politicians are getting into the act, too. It was one thing when Rand Paul
balked at OKing the expansion of NATO to Montenegro, and John McCain didn't
hesitate to say that "the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir
Putin."
Even Bernie Sanders has himself been accused of being a Putin plant by
Mensch. But even he's gotten on board of late, asking, "What do the Russians
have on Mr. Trump?"
So even people who themselves have been accused of being Russian plants are
now accusing people of being Russian plants. As the Russians would say, it's
enough to make your bashka hurt.
Sanders should know better. Last week, during hearings in the Senate,
multiple witnesses essentially pegged his electoral following as unwitting
fellow travelers for Putin.
Former NSA chief Keith Alexander spoke openly of how Russia used the Sanders
campaign to "drive a wedge within the Democratic Party," while Dr. Thomas
Rid of Kings College in London spoke of Russia's use of "unwitting agents"
and "overeager journalists" to drive narratives that destabilized American
politics.
This testimony was brought out by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner. Warner has
been in full-blown "precious bodily fluids" mode throughout this scandal.
During an interview with The Timeson the Russia subject a month back, there
was a thud outside the window. "That may just be the FSB," he said. The
paper was unsure if he was kidding.
Warner furthermore told The Times that in order to get prepared for his role
as an exposer of 21st-century Russian perfidy,he was "losing himself in a
book about the Romanovs," and had been quizzing staffers about "Tolstoy and
Nabokov."
This is how nuts things are now: a senator brushes up on Nabokov and Tolstoy
(Tolstoy!) to get pumped to expose Vladimir Putin.
Even the bizarre admission by FBI director (and sudden darling of the same
Democrats who hated him months ago) James Comey that he didn't know anything
about Russia's biggest company didn't seem to trouble Americans very much.
Here's the key exchange, from a House hearing in which Jackie Speier quizzed
Comey:
SPEIER: Now, do we know who Gazprom-Media is? Do you know anything about
Gazprom, director?
COMEY: I don't.
SPEIER: Well, it's a - it's an oil company.
(Incidentally, Gazprom - primarily a natural-gas giant - is not really an
oil company. So both Comey and Speier got it wrong.)
As Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg noted, this exchange was terrifying to
Russians. The leader of an investigation into Russian espionage not knowing
what Gazprom is would be like an FSB chief not having heard of Exxon-Mobil.
It's bizarre, to say the least.
Testimony of the sort that came from Warner's committee last week is being
buttressed by news stories in liberal outlets like Saloninsisting that
"Bernie Bros" were influenced by those same ubiquitous McDermott-chasing
Russian "bots."
These stories insist that, among other things, these evil bots pushed on the
unwitting "bros" juicy "fake news" stories about Hillary being "involved
with various murders and money laundering schemes."
Some 13.2 million people voted for Sanders during the primary season last
year. What percentage does any rational person really believe voted that way
because of "fake news"?
I would guess the number is infinitesimal at best. The Sanders campaign was
driven by a lot of factors, but mainly by long-developing discontent within
the Democratic Party and enthusiasm for Sanders himself.
To describe Sanders followers as unwitting dupes who departed the true DNC
faith because of evil Russian propaganda is both insulting and ridiculous.
It's also a testimony to the remarkable capacity for self-deception within
the leadership of the Democratic Party.
If the party's leaders really believe that Russian intervention is anywhere
in the top 100 list of reasons why some 155 million eligible voters (out of
231 million) chose not to pull a lever for Hillary Clinton last year,
they're farther along down the Purity of Essence nut-hole than Mark Warner.
Moreover, even those who detest Trump with every fiber of their being must
see the dangerous endgame implicit in this entire line of thinking. If the
Democrats succeed in spreading the idea that straying from the DNC-approved
candidate - in either the past or the future - is/was an act of "unwitting"
cooperation with the evil Putin regime, then the entire idea of legitimate
dissent is going to be in trouble.
Imagine it's four years from now (if indeed that's when we have our next
election). A Democratic candidate stands before the stump, and announces
that a consortium of intelligence experts has concluded that Putin is
backing the hippie/anti-war/anti-corporate opposition candidate.
Or, even better: that same candidate reminds us "what happened last time"
when people decided to vote their consciences during primary season. It will
be argued, in seriousness, that true Americans will owe their votes to the
non-Putin candidate. It would be a shock if some version of this didn't
become an effective political trope going forward.
But if you're not worried about accusing non-believers of being spies, or
pegging legitimate dissent as treason, there's a third problem that should
scare everyone.
Last week saw Donna Brazile and Dick Cheney both declare Russia's apparent
hack of DNC emails an "act of war." This coupling seemed at first like
political end times: as Bill Murray would say, "dogs and cats, living
together."
But there's been remarkable unanimity among would-be enemies in the
Republican and Democrat camps on this question. Suddenly everyone from
Speier to McCain to Kamala Harris to Ben Cardin have decried Russia's
alleged behavior during the election as real or metaphorical acts of war: a
"political Pearl Harbor," as Cardin put it.
That no one seems to be concerned about igniting a hot war with
nuclear-powered Russia at a time when both countries have troops within
"hand-grenade range" of each in Syria other is bizarre, to say the least.
People are in such a fever to drag Trump to impeachment that these other
considerations seem not to matter. This is what happens when people lose
their heads.
There are a lot of people who will say that these issues are of secondary
importance to the more important question of whether or not we have a
compromised Russian agent in the White House.
But when it comes to Trump-Putin collusion, we're still waiting for the
confirmation. As Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters put it, the proof is
increasingly understood to be the thing we find later, as in, "If we do the
investigations, we will find the connections."
But on the mass hysteria front, we already have evidence enough to fill a
dozen books. And if it doesn't freak you out, it probably should.
C 2017 Rolling Stone
