Russia-gate's Monstrous Offspring
May 14, 2019
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.
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News
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:
"We'd have been better off if the administration hadn't swept [Russian
President Vladimir] Putin's 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, to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, and to
Russia intervention in Syria - maybe stronger leadership would have left the
Kremlin less emboldened, maybe tampering with our democracy wouldn't have
seemed so very tempting.
"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,
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 - 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.
Looking into Moscow's Red Square at night. (U.S. Air Force/ Karen
Abeyasekere)
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."
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 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.
Schiff increasingly unhinged. (Caricature/DonkeyHotey via Flickr)
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 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.
Trump ready to take on challengers. (Caricature/DonkeyHotey via Flickr)
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 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."
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," while, in a truly chilling statement,
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 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 democracy. It's a deep-rooted form of xenophobia that has fueled
everything from the criminalization of marijuana (smuggled in by evil
Mexicans) to the 1950s Red Scare (a reaction to Communism smuggled in by
evil Russians), and the war on terrorism (the work of evil Muslims). The
idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course
unthinkable.
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 into 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 Diplomatiqueand blogs about the Constitution and related
matters at Daniellazare.com.
