I find my blog partner Keith to be reliable conduit for his
Party's ideas. For me, this is helpful right now because I feel I've wandered into
an absurdist carnival trying to unravel the burning threads of the political
tapestry now unfolding before us. Keith at least tries to put a semblance of order
to it, and even though Party loyalty has
him off on what looks to me to be a fool's errand at this point, his thoughts
give me something to respond to. So
let's see what we can make of his latest piece (American Counterpoint 2/15/18).
It was a re-post of a letter he submitted to the New York Times in response to
an editorial about Trump and Russia.
This
Russia thing has been percolating now for what seems like an awfully long time.
As soon as the Democrats recovered from
the cognitive dissonance that paralyzed them in the immediate aftermath of the
2016 election, they started casting around for a quick path that might somehow restore
the natural order of things for them. Their first gambit was through recount
petitions, but when these quickly fizzled, other more fraught strategies started
making their way onto the table.
Search For A Fix
The
extreme left, of course, having few inhibitions, talked openly about
assassination. Kathy Griffins' notorious
severed-head stunt was at one level nothing more than an intemperate comedienne's
attempt to lash out. At a deeper level, however, it served as a trial balloon for
gauging America's tolerance for tactical violence at this juncture. To the
Democrats' credit, almost no one at any level of their party came to Ms.
Griffins' defense when she was pilloried for what she did. So, with recall and
assassination out, the only fast remedy left available to impatient Democrats
was impeachment.
Party
strategists have been toying with groundwork for this dangerous option since
the very beginning of the Trump presidency. Even before he took the oath of
office, dark murmurings began leaking into the press about Trump's
international business dealings. Everyone knows that any businessman who
routinely swims in enough treacherous waters has a history that, even if not
strictly illegal, can be made to smell pretty fishy if exposed to the open air.
The Democrats were confident stuff could be found, and sure enough once they
started looking, stuff indeed appeared almost immediately.
And this
was all the Democrats, able to count on help from a scandal-hungry media, would need to begin the long, tortured process
of spinning innuendo into narrative, and
narrative into an apparent fact pattern that offered hope of getting them to
their goal of unseating Trump. The plan was always likely to gain a boost after
the mid-term elections, if as seemed likely, they could pick up a few Congressional seats.
Political Gold
What
they have been able to seize upon, however, is something much better than a
run-of-the-mill financial scandal. Trump did business in many places, and one
of them was Russia, the land where Dr. Evil himself, Vladimir Putin, reigned
supreme. Now it seemed that Putin's agents, including a small army of Internet
trolls, had been at work during the 2016 election doing the bidding of the
former KGB operative and lending their dirty hands in support of Trump's
candidacy.
This was explosive stuff since, if they could suggest collusion, it could be spun out into something that
looked a lot like treason, which would be political gold for them. Not only could
they count on unanimous support from their own Party colleagues in going after
Trump, they could gain ground even among Republicans, who have always been
suspicious of him anyway and might be expected to have an atavistic Pavlovian
response to any storyline involving Russians and treason.
Maybe
even best of all for the Democrats, whose self-confidence has been pretty much
shattered since the election, they at last had an answer to the question of why
America didn't seem to love them anymore.
America did, in fact, still love
them, but this love had come to naught because a nefarious foreign power had intervened.
Barak And Hillary's Reset
It is
not my intention here to disparage the notion that the Russians are meddling in
our democracy. As someone who has followed
Russian behavior for decades now I fully
accept the diagnosis that they are anti-democratic actors out to
manipulate our system to their advantage.
What I find hard to swallow is that the
Democrats seem to be just now waking up to this reality.
It wasn't
that long ago - the early years of Barak Obama's Presidency, in fact - when they were telling us that bad
relations between our two nations was entirely the fault of that bumbling
warmonger George Bush, and that our new
president would usher in an era of competent diplomacy and friendship. Who can
forget the 2009 news clip of Obama's newly-anointed Secretary of State - none
other than Hillary Clinton - holding hands with the Russian Foreign Minister as
they laughingly fondled together the big toy "RESET" button she had just
presented to him as a gift?
Roots Of The Story
This
pre-Trump affinity between liberal Americans and Russia, of course, goes back way before Obama's time and in fact began
taking hold in the years following the Russian Revolution. The Comintern was
established in 1919 with the express purpose of destabilizing foreign
governments. While the Internet was not available in those days, these early
agitprop specialists accomplished quite a lot through agents of influence they
garnered for themselves in the press, universities, and other sectors Soviet
strategists believed could help mold the public opinion in target nations into
a shape consistent with early Soviet notions about the world's inevitable communist
future. The young Soviet Union became the
Cuba of its day among the leftish in-crowd.
Joseph Stalin
dissolved the Comintern in 1943 because he needed to reassure his WWII allies
that he was for the time being a friend
to capitalist democracies and no longer laboring to subvert them. After the
war, however, he quickly returned to his old ways, and without re-establishing
the Comintern, he in fact double-downed on its mission. He brought it under his
direct control in the form of the intelligence service that evolved into the
KGB and that years later would become Vladimir Putin's alma mater. Disinformation, bribery, subornation of journalists,
and other subversive techniques had been around for as long as adversarial
diplomacy existed in the world, but the
Soviet KGB refined them to new levels of artistry. They were really good at
this stuff and referred to the various techniques collectively as "active measures".
The
Soviet Union ceased being a sexy role
model for the international Left as soon as Stalin died and the Russians
themselves came clean about the realities of his rule. However, they no longer
cared about positioning their own system as a role model. Instead, they devoted
their foreign resources during the 1960's and 1970's towards supporting "wars of national liberation" in
third-world nations, and boosting the
peace and anti-nuclear movements in the
United States and Western Europe. Few activists participating in those mobilizations
saw themselves as having any affinity with the Soviet Union, yet many of them
came to view the Russians as the lesser of two evils relative to their own
governments. Inspired by Cuba, the
so-called "New Left" had an impact on liberal opinion in the U.S.
that was disproportionate to its numbers.
Trainee Becomes The Boss
Vladimir
Putin joined the KGB around 1975 when the agency was near the apogee of its
power. He was too young at the time to have been a player yet, but he had sharp eyes and sharp elbows. Distaining
ideology and enjoying power for its own sake, he internalized the techniques
his agency used to manipulate it. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created
exactly the kind of vacuum a man like Putin seemed destined for, and he quickly
emerged out of nowhere to find his way to the top of the new non-Communist Russian
government. The old Soviet KGB infrastructure hardly missed a beat as it
morphed yet again, this time into the Russian FSB. Now, however, its one-time
trainee was its boss, and he was ready to
employ all the tricks of the destabilization game as he looked abroad.
Conscious
of this history, I was not at all skeptical when stories appeared about how Putin had put agents to work in a campaign to influence the 2016
election in the United States. As is their wont, however, the Democrats have
twisted the narrative to suit their political agenda and made themselves out to
be the victims. Far from having any affinity with Trump, the Russians have
simply weaponized him as a wrecking ball
for taking down what remains of America's
political establishment. Having humiliated both the Bush and Cruz wings of
the Republican Party during the 2016 primaries, he did the same to the Clinton
wing of the Democratic Party during the general election. To both parties'
discredit, they looked on happily while the other was being savaged. Both are
now without coherent ideologies, and both are drifting into the hands of people
who make up in hateful energy what they lack in serious purpose. Most of the
current leaders will soon be gone to make way for this hostile rabble.
The
impeachment drive that is slowly gaining momentum will be the final act in the
campaign to humiliate America. Thus have the Democrats become Putin's
witless collaborators every bit as much as the President they so despise.
In an
era of endlessly compounding ironies, perhaps the most telling of all is the
fact that we would be in much the same boat right now had the 2016 election
broken the other way. Like the Democrats, the Republicans too were laying the
groundwork for impeachment in the event, actually expected in their case, that
the other side won. There is certainly plenty of material for tactical planners in both camps to work from. Scandals and conspiracy theories abound, fed by a reckless media
and, so it now appears, disinformation agents from abroad.
The
hallmark of democracy is the capacity for a peaceful transfer of power between bitterly
opposing factions. And while America hasn't quite lost this yet, the lack of
grace now apparent everywhere seems a bad omen.
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