The Chris Moeller Archives

Baltic eyes are smiling

7/18/17 update: Right on cue, Glenn Greenwald reports on the new alliance between the most militant neocons on the planet, the men that led us into Iraq, and the Cold Warriors of the Democratic Party. Both groups love Israel, the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, and war, and they despise Donald Trump and Russia. You know some of the names: Michael Chertoff, Bill Kristol. The group is proudly "bipartisan" so what is there for us to fear. A money quote from Glenn: "Even if Trump could be brought into line with neocon orthodoxy-- which has largely happened-- his ineptitude and instability posed a threat to their agenda."


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The Democrats are not even capable of putting their eye on the ball, let alone keeping it there. Still with this Russia nonsense. The retro-xenophobia and the attempts to escalate tension between the two countries that simply does not need to exist. We are not at war with the Russians, just as we are not at declared war with anybody else. The Russian Federation no more influenced the U.S. election in 2016 than Ukrainian nationals influenced it on behalf of Clinton.

What you’re seeing in the world right now are flailing attempts to resuscitate the Cold War, a faction of Deep State agents in the U.S. let down by the election of Donald Trump, who cares more about doing business with Russian oligarchs than declaring war on them. His motivations create their own problem, but the violence that results is less quantifiable. The electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton was a crippling blow to the plans of the U.S. Security State to get our military and our espionage agents behind Ukraine and its separatist plans for Crimea. Was it wrong for Trump’s son-in-law to meet with an attorney in Russia that represented private entities (but not the Kremlin)? I believe it was, but certainly it wasn't by the standards of Washington. Is it also wrong for Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, to serve on the board of Burisma Holdings, the largest natural gas company in the Ukraine? Trump employs his son-in-law in a capacity that clearly violates the 1967 White House nepotism statute, but Democrats have now gone limp in their opposition to Jared Kushner as a de facto member of the Trump cabinet. They have little political cover to stop it ever since Bill Clinton named his wife de facto Secretary of Health Care in 1993. The corruption is so pervasive across parties-- and across national governments-- that it all amounts to a complete blur. It’s called capitalism, and corruption is its natural state. The United States and its intertwined corporations are no more a neutral player upon the geopolitical landscape than Russia and its companies.

Now, what is this Russian BS distracting us from? Well, let’s start that discussion with what it’s designed to distract us from. Even if they are guilty of what they’re accused of, and there’s been no evidence provided to the public confirming that they are, the Russians' “hack” of the U.S. presidential election was not alleged to be a hack upon voting machines or upon the voting results. The criminals in that particular legal case are the American companies, and the politicos they’ve purchased, that have eliminated the paper trail of ballots and made our elections so vulnerable to attack. What are Democrats doing about that problem in the wake of this "scandal"? Continuing to take the money of the companies that make the electronic voting machines, that's what. Instead, the alleged “hack” was upon the internal emails of the Democratic National Committee, with no evidence existing, except in the minds of losing political consultants, that the election was swayed one way or another by their reveal, and that, more importantly, revealed the misdeeds and campaign tampering that was done by the Democratic National Committee. The more we talk about the Russians, they reason, the less we talk about the DNC's misconduct and lapse of ethics.

Next, it’s distracting progressives from the necessary restructuring of the Left and the permanent banishment of their sellout representatives. The nationwide campaign strategy of “you’re to our Right, you’re racist, you’re to our Left, you’re sexist,” and "we're going to  blame everybody but ourselves," has worked wonders to rid Washington D.C. and most of the 50 state capitols of feckless Democrats, but perhaps it’s time to select a new path. It’s also distracting from our government’s real crimes-- the supplying of arms to Saudi Arabia to help annihilate the Saudi kingdom’s slave state, Yemen; the attempts by Congress to slip major giveaways to defense contractors, the legitimate attempts by some to separate Donald Trump from his private business that keeps him in violation of federal law, the failure of anybody in Washington, outside Bernie Sanders, to push for Single Payer health care while Republican lawmakers get busy buying up health insurance stocks.

We need to start considering whether Democrats are losing on purpose. I’m being very serious about this. The Intercept reports that Clinton strategist Mark Penn, who is still pushing to steer Democrats to the right, runs an investment firm, Stagwell Media LLC, that is buying up Republican-centered consulting companies. And who is standing in the way of Trump's impeachment on any number of legitimate offenses? If you think it's Republicans, you're only half right. The DNC, internally, believes impeachment proceedings would negatively impact the mid-term elections for Democrats.

There's no end in sight to the Russian distraction, and it's worth noting for context that the attacks haven't been limited to Trump either. 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has faced innuendo and sneers for traveling to the Kremlin and meeting with the Russian president. Again, for the DNC, it's about blaming anybody but themselves for their electoral failures. The relentless media drumbeat against anybody opposed to the entrenched Democratic Party power structure makes a person wonder if there isn't something of significance to the fact that the Ukrainian-- anti-Russian-- meddling in the 2016 election has been almost completely ignored, and that America's influence upon foreign elections continues to be a perennial non-issue. By the admission of Victoria Nuland, a diplomat in the Obama State Department that also, interestingly, as a top foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the U.S. has spent more than $5 billion(!) since 1991 influencing elections-- in that's in Ukraine alone.

posted by CM @ 11:17 AM