Five Ways Russiagate Poisoned the Democratic Campaign

Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)

I get no pleasure from saying “I told ya so!,” but here’s what I was posting (and getting hammered for) in the midst of the Russiagate frenzy (from my Facebook page, June 19, 2017):

Trump is right, about 1 thing. The Dems grope at Russia as an excuse for an election they should have won.

Those IN DENIAL can stop reading. The far more disastrous and documented Iran-Contra scandal failed to take down Reagan, when there was proven collusion with a real enemy.

Meanwhile, because Dems are so fixated on Russia, they virtually ignore Trump’s far more scandalous relationship with Saudi Arabia, his unconstitutional conflicts of interest, as well as the fossil fuel industry that controls him: all documented scandals…which get lost in the shuffle because of the New-Cold-War-Advocates, where the Dems’ best friend is Quick-Draw McCain.

Even if Russians did try to influence our election, our government has been influencing and even buying foreign elections around the world. The USA paid for the Yeltsin election in…RUSSIA!

War crimes rage in Yemen with US support.

Nobody cares because everybody’s attention is fixated on the Russia soap opera. The Dems have descended to the level of the anti-Obama birthers, engaging in dead-end hysteria, squandering chances to go after Trump on real issues.

As with the “weapons of mass destruction” fabrication, the media fell for Russiagate because “our intelligence agencies have told us it is true.” When will journalism schools begin to expose this as classic malpractice? A trained journalist who knows the documented history of CIA lies has the responsibility to validate claims with objective documentation.

I made the effort to read the abbreviated intelligence report about Russian meddling, which I got from the NY Times, and I discovered the report made suppositions based on probabilities, but with no forensic evidence. I pleaded with those who verbally assaulted me to “read the report and show me the evidence,” which they did not do.

Now Trump is poised to benefit from the Russiagate conspiracy theory in the following five ways:

• Anti-Trump media discredited. The cable news networks that oppose Trump, CNN and MSNBC, have been discredited. Especially outlandish has been CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program, in which host Brian Selter accepts Russiagate because our intelligence agencies have told us so. Amazing…the same conveyors of lies who brought us the false Gulf of Tonkin incident that legitimized the Vietnam war, who served as stenographers for rationale supporting military coups against democratically-elected governments and who swallowed the WMD rationale for the Iraq war, pontificate about “reliable sources.” Result: Trump has been provided ammunition for calling out “fake news.”
• Intelligence agencies caught colluding with Dems. These Russiagate- peddling intelligence agencies and their neocon allies are now directly or indirectly supporting the Democratic Party, poisoning the party’s liberal reputation. This motley crew includes former national intelligence director, James Clapper, who lied to Congress on domestic spying. If Clapper can get a gig on CNN, Pete Rose should be in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Result: Trump gets to link the Dems with the “Deep State,” and for once he’s not lying.
• Anti-Trump late-night comedians discredited. Fueled in large part by Russiagate, late-night comedians engaged in 3+ years of “The Trump Show,” as if the president were their script writer, feeding his insatiable masochistic-narcissism. Result: The bully Trump can wear a badge of victimhood.
• Bernie Sanders kneecapped. Sanders always looked uncomfortable when pushed to validate the Russia conspiracy. And his efforts to back it up did him little good. Once he took the lead in the 2020 primaries, the Russia conspiracy peddlers accused HIS campaign of being aided by Russia. This charge came from “people familiar with the matter” (a code word for intelligence agencies), according to the New York Times (21 Feb 2020), the “newspaper of record” that also brought us WMDs and the Iraq war. Result: The cost to the Sanders campaign is a legitimate question for pollsters.
• Discouraged Anti-Trump forces. Many potential allies in a progressive Democratic election campaign relied so heavily on the Trump-Russia collusion case destroying him that their tires immediately deflated when the Mueller Report found there was no collusion. Result: Some dropped out of supporting Democrats, while others decided to take the safe route, abandoning bold proposals like Medicare for All and settling for a pathetic lesser of evils.

Sometime before the November election, all the evidence will coalesce into a cogent case showing that Russiagate was a danse macabre between cold-warrior Dems and McCarthyite military “experts.”

Russiagate was an anachronistic cold-war conspiracy theory created by Democrats in denial about why they lost in 2016, settling on Russia as scapegoat. They ended up attacking Trump from the right, preventing him from fulfilling his promise of improving relations with the Russians, and thus made the world a more dangerous place.

Even if Bernie Sanders had become the candidate, the Russia soap opera would have exposed him as representing a deceitful political party.

Independent journalists risked their reputations and livelihoods to expose the lie known as Russiagate. A few exceptional articles that support the opinions in this piece:

• Michael Tracey “I Warned Early On Russiagate Would Help Trump. Now You Can See Why”
• Matt Taibbi “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD”
• Jonathan Turley “James Clapper’s perjury and why DC made men don’t get charged with lying to Congress”

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