Monday, January 22, 2018

Neocon Democrats Already Blaming Russia For Shutdown Mess

If When the Democrats are pressured into striking a deal with the bad guys to keep the government chugging along for awhile longer, they want you to know it was all the Russians' fault. David Leonhardt (see previous post) will be so disappointed when he finds out that that his scolding had little to do with "the big cave."

The Democratic veal pen now known as HuffPo has collaborated with the new neocon think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy, to spread the word that the criticism of hapless Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is emanating not just from American constituents, but from Kremlin "bots" using the hashtag #SchumerShutdown on social media.

Despite all the best algorithmic and human censorship efforts of Twitter, Google and Facebook, Russian-trolled anti-Schumer messages are "blowing up" the Internet. You see, The Alliance has devised its own copyrighted "Gizmo" measuring tool to prove it! The attack on Wall Street stooge Schumer is getting so bad it's even surpassed the nefarious #ReleaseTheMemo campaign. The Alliance would have you believe that no actual Americans ever had the intellectual wherewithal to be curious about much of anything before the Russians went on the Internet and infiltrated all their brains. You'd think that the all-American right-wing propaganda mill known as Fox News was just sitting around and twiddling its pudgy little thumbs.

HuffPo reporter Jennifer Bendery writes:
#SchumerShutdown has surpassed #ReleaseTheMemo as the highest trending hashtag among Russian influence campaigns. They seized on that hashtag earlier this month in an effort to pressure Republican lawmakers to release a classified memo written by House GOP aides that allegedly describes abuses in FBI surveillance practices. Conservative organizations like Breitbart and the Daily Caller have given major coverage to the memo, but Democratic lawmakers have denounced it as deeply misleading.
Alliance for Securing Democracy tracks activity from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations. It has found that Russian bots and trolls frequently amplify content attacking the United States, conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Coincidentally (of course) Twitter has just sent emails to 677,775 users informing them that they were being monitored for the thought-less crime of having read and/or shared tweets from Kremlin propaganda mills.

Also, totally coincidentally, HuffPo has just sent its own emails to its entire stable of unpaid freelance contributors informing them that their "content" would no longer be accepted. This  includes all content from writers like Joe Lauria who dare to express healthy skepticism that RussiaGate has any basis in reality, or that endless war might not be in the best interests of humanity.

  HuffPo editor Lydia Polgreen, late of the New York Times, told the New York Times that she's banned the messy, noisy, free-thinking bloggers so as to "declutter" the site and give more room to quality journalism, such as, presumably, the pro-war propaganda provided by neocon think tanks.

HuffPo certainly did not see fit to inform its readers that the Alliance for Securing Democracy (which it approvingly describes as a "bipartisan" outfit led by former national security officials) is top-heavy with discredited extremist Bush-era neocons who thought it was a dandy idea to invade Iraq and destabilize the entire Middle East and beyond to make the world safe for greedy oil companies and bankers and "defense" contractors.

As a matter of fact, the head honcho of the Alliance is Michael Chertoff, Bush's Homeland Security director. The paranoia-for-profit industry has been very good to him, his private security firm having raked in big bucks from its no-contract Orwellian RapiScan machines used at airports all over the world to humiliate travelers on the pretext of thwarting terrorism. Chertoff has a nice supplemental gig working alongside Obama's former attorney general, Eric Holder, at the Covington and Burling white shoe law firm in Washington, D.C.

Also serving on the Alliance board are neocon columnist Bill Kristol; former acting CIA Director Mike Morell; CNN fear-monger, Harvard professor and former congressman Mike Rogers; Jamie Fly, foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio; and Clinton campaign operative and Obama administration official Jake Sullivan.

Glenn Greenwald called this power hub of Democratic-Neocon propagandists  "one of the most consequential but under-discussed changes in the American political landscape."

He wrote last summer:
The song Democrats are now singing about Russia and Putin is one the neocons wrote many years ago, and all of the accompanying rhetorical tactics — accusing those who seek better relations with Moscow of being Putin’s stooges, unpatriotic, of suspect loyalties, etc. — are the ones that have defined the neocons smear campaigns for decades.
The union of Democrats and neocons is far more than a temporary marriage of convenience designed to bring down a common enemy. As this new policy group illustrates, the union is grounded in widespread ideological agreement on a broad array of foreign policy debates: from Israel to Syria to the Gulf States to Ukraine to Russia. And the narrow differences that exist between the two groups — on the wisdom of the Iran deal, the nobility of the Iraq War, the justifiability of torture — are more relics of past debates than current, live controversies. These two groups have found common cause because, with rare and limited exception, they share common policy beliefs and foreign policy mentalities.
One bright note: from what I can tell, the nationwide women's marches over the weekend were not centered on Russia fear-mongering despite the best co-opting efforts of the Democratic Party. They were not even exclusively centered on "resisting" Trump, but rather on women running for office in the interests of social and economic justice, and people joining together in solidarity across class, race and gender lines.  

They'd better watch out, or next time the politicians (even the trolling Trump) and police might not be so friendly about the protests which they now find so convenient to encourage. They still seem to have no doubts that the marches are anything more than a get-out-the-vote effort for the establishment party.

2 comments:

  1. Btw, former Congressman Mike Rogers is also a former FBI agent.

    That was a quick shift by the Dems. They just issued talking points to the media who dutifully regurgitated. The official line is placing the blame for the shutdown on the Democratic base by repeating "the base demanded it". It's all our fault, not theirs. Sounds like Team Hillary is still running the show. Not surprising that the message changed already. That's what her campaign kept doing too.

    Since when do the Dem bigwigs listen to anything we ask for or demand anyway? Someone (with money) must have clued the Dem leaders in that people in the heartland weren't accepting the blame for putting Dreamers above their own needs. Voters clearly care a lot more about affordable health care, affordable housing, living wages, etc. - the usual topics Dem leaders ignore in favor of stoking up fear and loathing against Trump, the Republicans, and Russia. Are the Dems now going to blame Dem voters by saying "the base demands" that we go to war with Russia?

    That's exactly where we're heading according to Secretary of War Mattis. He was on the network news the other night declaring that the American Empire was now shifting focus from GWOT, the Global War on Terror (we won I guess), to Russia AND China. As justification, the news report showed photos of new Chinese facilities IN CHINA and compared them to U.S. facilities that looked identical operating in Japan and South Korea. How dare the Chinese do something so aggressive and warlike in their own country! They also pointed out that Chinese military expenditures are rising (the US Empire still spends more on 'defense' than all other countries combined), so they're clearly preparing to become a rival global superpower and we should be alarmed. This means War!

    The Dem elite appear to be totally on board for Operation WWIII. It's a good thing we're pushing that with our demands, people. Keep banging those war drums and the Dems might win a majority so they can bring back the draft in the form of mandatory national service. Sign those Dreamers up first in exchange for legal status!

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  2. Those crazy Democrats, they blame Russia for everything! It's 50 shades of Hillary.

    Now it's about a classified memo. Their reaction suggests that it must implicate Hillary and Obama directly or they wouldn't be having a relapse of delirium-inducing Russia Fever.

    This is reminiscent of how they went about discrediting the Podesta/DNC/Hillary email leaks, even going so far as to say the Russians made them up out of whole cloth until they were asked to point out what was fabricated, then *crickets* Next thing you know, they'll be pointing at the sky and yelling 'Look, there's Haley's Russian comet! And it's coming straight at us! Don't look or you'll go blind!' This is War!

    From WaPo: Top Democrats Warn Of ‘Ongoing Attack By The Russian Government’ Amid Push To Publish Classified Memo

    "Top Democrats on Tuesday called on Facebook and Twitter to investigate what lawmakers said are Russian efforts to promote the release of a classified Republican memo criticizing the FBI probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 campaign."

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/conservative-gop-caucus-talked-to-trump-about-releasing-surveillance-memo-before-launching-campaign/2018/01/23/7ff2a198-0037-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html

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