Clinging To the Guns and Religion of RussiaGate

The Democrats are not so incensed about the biggest tax increase in American history that their whole raison d'être isn't still the alleged Russian meddling in our already-tainted electoral process.

Just as Barack Obama once derided generic Heartland voters for "clinging to their guns and religion," the affluent and willfully ignorant liberal class are still clinging to #RussiaGate while they also half-heartedly exert themselves to jump on the #MeToo bandwagon.

I say half-heartedly, because Al Franken is still sitting in the Senate despite that sophomoric photo of his 55-year-old self pretending to grope the breasts of a sleeping fellow entertainer, and despite several other complaints about his Russian rushin' hands and roamin' fingers doing their slimy work at more mundane photo-ops.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did a Party-serving 180 last week, pivoting from praising reputed predator Rep. John Conyers as a Democratic "icon" into demanding his resignation just days later. Perhaps the ease of her about-face had something to do with him being the creator of H.R. 676, the original Medicare for All legislation. His proposed bill, which had been moldering in the House for many years, had recently gotten new life and sponsorship on the resurgent wave of left-wing populism. What better way to kill a bill than for its author to be exposed as a creep?

Professional victim Hillary Clinton, seeing an opening, is also co-opting #MeToo in her perpetual Blame Game Tour. Thank goodness, there are now so many more creeps to pretend to kick around besides just her good pal Harvey Weinstein and her hubby Bill Clinton. It has finally become safe for her to take a stand. Of course, she is making this brave stand all about herself.  

Jill Filopovic, who's run loyal feminist interference for Hillary Clinton in the past, has a new piece up in Sunday's New York Times asserting that, besides the mythical BernieBros, it was Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer and other male journalists who actually cost Clinton the election by constantly bringing up that whole trustworthiness and likeability thing. It makes you wonder: had Hillary been victorious, would Filopovic have written a similar column congratulating Rose and Lauer for carrying Hillary over the finish line?

It also makes you wonder why Barack Obama, who'd demeaned Hillary in a 2008 primary debate by snidely calling her "likeable enough," is not also being called to task for his own sexism. Oh, I forgot -  as the spiritual leader of a soul-less party which lost nearly a thousand seats during his White House tenure, he is immune. As a matter of fact, the liberal class maintains an absolute hunger for him. They're so smitten, they've even been sadly reduced to fawning over fawning coffee table books about him.

The most valuable aspect of #RussiaGate, and selective Me-Tooism, and #HillaryWuzRobbed, and #BarackHunger for the establishment Democrats is that they deflect the public's attention from the recent clamoring, by the majority of US citizens, for true universal health care and other socialist things like free college tuition and debt jubilees. The party elders aim to take the public's attention away from Bernie Sanders and his railing against the same "billionaire class"  which continues to enrich the party while it robs the rest of us blind. Sanders, the most popular politician in America, is already threatening  to usurp the presidential nomination from their preferred roster of "rising stars," including centrists Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

  Other than opportunistic fund-raising appeals from party veal pen clicktivist organizations, you aren't seeing an inordinate number of Tweets from the usual outraged liberal suspects about the GOP's blatant theft of the public purse in the dead of night. And that's for a very good and pragmatic reason. The millionaires and billionaires who run the Democratic Party will themselves benefit very nicely from the package, and thus they'll have more spare cash to donate to the liberal politicians who give them such cozy, discreet cover. These politicians, if they do win back power next year, will likely claw back only a portion of the GOP's tax cuts for the rich, just as Obama delayed letting the Bush tax cuts expire for his own re-election purposes. And they'll call it a victory.

 It's so much more lucrative to confine one's outrage to Donald Trump's misogyny, to slimy sex predators, and to Vladimir Putin's reputed personal placement of $100,000 worth of cheesy ads on Facebook. Heaven forbid that Democrats speak out against their own wealth-serving neoliberal policies, which have so graciously ushered in a de facto oligarchy.

Of course, they would have preferred to cut Medicare and Social Security and other people-friendly programs under their own smokescreen of "fiscal responsibility" and "shared sacrifice" rather than having the whole rotten can of worms exposed by the ultra-right wing of the Uniparty for all of us to see. They would have preferred a more gradual immersion of the frogs into the slowly boiling water rather than tossing hundreds of millions of lesser critters off the gangplank in one fell swoop. They need the bad things they allow to happen to good people to be gradual, because that is the only thing that keeps their false, futuristic message of hope alive, and most importantly, keeps some people still  fooled enough to vote an ever-dwindling number of them into political office.

So, look over there, voters! - it's Michael Flynn, pleading guilty to lying to the federal cops about talking to "the Russians" as if they were space aliens fixing to blow us all up in our beds. In case you'd forgotten, it is as much a crime to lie to G-men in America as it is to lie to the police in a totalitarian society. You are considered to be under oath in a federal police interrogation as much as you are under oath in an official court proceeding. And if you happen to lie to the inquisitors, either by commission or by omission, the FBI always has surveillance data furnished by other branches of the Intelligence Community and the secret FISA court to catch you out.

So let what happened to Michael Flynn be a lesson to us all.

Naturally, the powers-that-be try to cover themselves by inventing a few sacrificial lambs to show the public just how above-board their ongoing palace coup is. One "highly regarded" FBI agent was yanked off the RussiaGate investigation after some of his personal emails criticizing Donald Trump were exposed. ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross was suspended for four weeks without pay for falsely reporting that Trump had ordered Flynn to contact the Russians while still only a candidate. He was, in fact, the president-elect when he issued the order. That's quite a difference. Oops. But since Trump obliged his critics by unleashing his usual tweet-storm in defense of Flynn and railing against "fake news", that's all the proof you should need that Trump is a traitor to his country as well as a financial swindler who serendipitously wound up in the White House.

And lest Democrats still be accused of clinging as insanely to their Russophobia  as the right-wing yahoos cling to their guns and religion, the New York Times has even published a gossipy piece about how the NRA itself might be involved in Russian collusion.

A conservative operative trumpeting his close ties to the National Rifle Association and Russia told a Trump campaign adviser last year that he could arrange a back-channel meeting between Donald J. Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, according to an email sent to the Trump campaign.

A May 2016 email to the campaign adviser, Rick Dearborn, bore the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” In it, the N.R.A. member said he wanted the advice of Mr. Dearborn and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, then a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump and Mr. Dearborn’s longtime boss, about how to proceed in connecting the two leaders.

This might sound like an disingenuous question, but what conservative operative doesn't have close ties to the money provided by the National Rifle Association? The fact that such an email even bears the title "Kremlin Connection" sounds suspiciously... oh, I don't know - suspicious? 

Also suspicious is that the Times doesn't even possess this alleged email; rather, its "contents" were merely described to the newspaper by an anonymous source "close to the investigation." To further cement the Narrative, it seems that the email was also forwarded to certain evangelical leaders. Thus are guns and religion so neatly tied up into one propaganda package.

Only at the very end of the piece, written by Nicholas Fandos, do we off-handedly learn that the Russian mafia might have ties to the NRA. And why not, given the impunity with which the international weapons cartel has long operated? There is truly nothing like burying the lede when one has a specific agenda. In other words, this whole #RussiaGate brouhaha is really nothing more than a mob war among a bunch of crime families vying for power.

The modern-day mobs euphemistically call themselves "public-private partnerships" and "Congress." And they essentially run the world. Donald Trump is too much of a loudmouth Tweety Bird for the tastes of the more discreet Dons, whose own political prestige and protection rackets and front organizations he so seriously endangers with his big, fat, unfiltered mouth. A pretender to the Godfather throne, he threatens to ruin the whole Racket. The neoliberal fat cats are desperate to swallow this demented, off-key canary. Not for the greater public good, of course, but to save their own feral skins.

Eat Me