Never Let a Serious Manufactured Crisis Go To Waste

While Trump is sending in the military, under cover of humanitarianism, to quell any incipient native unrest on Puerto Rico, his good-thinking critics in Congress are obsessively adhering to their own McCarthyite agenda.

The latest episode in RussiaGate has congress critters criticizing Twitter for, of all things, not taking the whole Cold War resurgence propaganda campaign seriously enough.

Senator Mark Warner, far from grousing to TV cameras that Puerto Rico is being criminally ignored by the White House, and that American citizens are being allowed to die for no good reason other than cruelty and greed, groused that he was very disappointed that Twitter had furnished his witch-hunting intelligence committee with only 200 accounts possibly linked to fake news trolls operating out of the Kremlin.

Never mind that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have in his own pocket the names of 200 subversives acting for Russia right within the US government, people were shocked and awed enough that McCarthy didn't even have to produce his nonexistent list. Times have changed, though, and if you can't come up with at least a million Russian operatives who sneakily forced American voters to pick Trump over Hillary, then your whole hysterical plot is in danger of completely falling apart. From the New York Times:

The company’s  presentation “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions and again begs many more questions than they offered,” Mr. Warner said, adding, “Their response was frankly inadequate on every level.”

Translation: Has Twitter now, or has it ever been, an associate of Vladimir Putin or a member the Russian Federation?

Adam Schiff went on CNN Thursday to vaguely not answer any questions about what actual evidence he might have in his own pocket regarding Twitter malfeasance. He said that his House Intelligence Committee has "only scratched the surface" of the alleged massive meddling by Russia in our democracy. He's only had almost a year to scratch, and congressional fingernails grow more slowly than we might like. And then he was caught flat-footed when, as almost an afterthought, Wolf Blitzer asked him about the Puerto Rico catastrophe. Schiff, looking perplexed, said he "thinks" that Congress might be voting on a long-term relief bill next week... or maybe it's the week after that. He's not sure, because that's not his department. But he certainly seems sure that RussiaGate is far, far more important than thousands or even millions of American citizens sickening and dying right before our eyes on national TV.

From the front-page Times article, which is handily placed above the old news that American citizens are being callously allowed by their own government to sicken and die:

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Republican chairman, would not answer questions about the briefing on Thursday, and his spokeswoman declined to comment. Mr. Warner said that he and Mr. Burr would hold a news conference as soon as next week to update the public on their investigation and try to draw attention to the continuing threat by foreign entities to the American political system.

It will be very hard to draw the attention of Americans who are faced,every single day of their lives, with such mundane threats as climate change catastrophes, lack of jobs and health care, institutionalized racism and police brutality, and rents that are too damned high. The propagandists of the Democratic/Neocon Alliance have taken on the very daunting task of making us believe in magic. Just as Trump is sending in the troops to Puerto Rico to stifle the dissent as they hand out the water bottles, our government is sending in the shock troops, trying to stifle dissent by tacitly accusing more and more people of treason. If you dare to complain about your lot in life, or to call out social and economic injustices, then you are unpatriotic and probably a dupe of the Russians. So it's best for everybody to shut up, and let American leaders get on with their gaslighting.

The modern congressional witch-hunters are very poor propagandists if they think that gullible Americans will be shocked that somebody in Russia spent a paltry $100,000 on some fake ads which proceeded, all by themselves, to magically propel Donald Trump to victory. Since this is chump change compared to the billion dollars that Hillary Clinton raised and spent on her own failed bid, it must mean that a crappy hundred thou has more clout than a billion smackeroos. This is what Mark Warner and Adam Schiff actually expect us, knowledge-impaired dupes that we are, to believe as they strive valiantly to reduce our quivering jelly brains into one great big puddle of fear and docility.

Perhaps they can get a friendly state attorney general to sue Twitter and take this all the way to the Supreme Court. After all, even the tiniest smattering of "possibly foreign" cheap fake ads is a subversive violation of the great Citizens United ruling, which equates money with speech. The very survival of all-American greed and capitalism is at stake.