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.
There's a method to the madness of Hillary Clinton's sordid embrace of the discredited Neocons who dragged us into wars, killed/maimed thousands of American troops and millions of Middle East residents, and who now hope to drag us into new wars with Iran and Russia. And that method is the anti-left propaganda being disseminated by mainstream "liberal" media outlets.
The core message is that if you are a progressive who refuses to vote for Hillary, then you just have to be a cheerleader of Donald J. Trump, and by extension, totally in the bag for Vladimir Putin. If you dare to criticize Hillary, then you are essentially a deluded traitor to your own country.
As I've written before, Donald J. Trump is the perfect strawman-in-the-flesh foil for Hillary Clinton.
He is so polarizing that the entire media establishment has been affected to the point of abandoning its erstwhile core mission of informing the public. As Matt Taibbi observes, "we have no credible news media left. Apart from a few brave islands of resistance, virtually all the major news organizations are now fully in the tank for one side or the other."
The last month or so of Trump-Hillary coverage may have been the worst stretch of pure journo-shilling we've seen since the run-up to the Iraq war. In terms of political media, there’s basically nothing left on the air except Trump-bashing or Hillary-bashing.
Take last week's news cycle:
Red-state media obsessed over a series of emails about the Clinton Foundation obtained by Judicial Watch (a charter member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy") as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit. The emails hinted that Foundation donors might have had special access to Hillary Clinton's State Department.
Meanwhile, the cable-news channels consumed by Democrat-leaning audiences, MSNBC and CNN, spent most of last week hammering Donald Trump's latest outrages, especially the "the Second Amendment people" comments seeming to incite violence against Hillary Clinton or her judicial appointments.
Enter the Neocons, who are unabashedly co-opting corporate "liberal" outlets by denouncing Trump and endorsing Clinton and using some pretty slimy scare/smear tactics of their own while they're at it.
Take this prime example of the new McCarthyesque journalistic genre, just published in The Daily Beast:
"Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left" shrills reporter James Kirchick, claiming with sparse evidence that hordes of progressives are rushing to the side of Donald Trump out of the misguided notion that American adventurism abroad is a really bad thing. If we don't support Hillary Clinton then we are no better than the Weimar-era German communists who, he says, enabled Hitler. Kirchick asserts that anybody postulating that a President Trump would simply allow the "revolution" to proceed more quickly falls right into this category. He cites Bernie Sanders supporter Susan Sarandon as an example of this new breed of lefty fascist-enabler, adding:
Today in America, the stakes may not be as great as they were 80 years ago, but the political strategy is similarly irresponsible. Exultant in their moral narcissism, these lefties for Trump display no concern whatsoever for the consequences of their juvenile behavior. It shouldn’t surprise us that the vast majority of them are white and upper middle class, precisely the sort of people most insulated from the ravages of a potential Trump regime.
But it is the second group of progressive Trump fans, subtler in their sympathies, who warrant the most concern. These are the so-called anti-imperialists who harbor deep revulsion at the idea of American power being used for good in the world. America, they believe, is more often than not a source of evil and disorder—a jaundiced view of our global role that they share with the Republican nominee. Unlike the aforementioned wannabe revolutionaries, most of these progressives haven’t endorsed Trump. But they nonetheless embrace the radical departure in American foreign policy that his presidency promises.
Got that, all you disaffected Progs and hippies? If you don't support Clinton, then you are not only an immature narcissist and a snooty racist, you are an anti-American heretical disbeliever in the innate goodness of American hegemony. Shame, shame, shame on you!
Of course, author James Kirchick does not disclose that besides being a "journalist," he is also a fellow of the neoconservative think tank, Foreign Policy Initiative. He gained notoriety a few years ago when he called for the execution of whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Foreign Policy Initiative's founders and Board of Directors include Eric S. Edelman, former undersecretary of defense and national security aide to Dick Cheney; leading Neocon and Clinton supporter/fund raiser Robert Kagan, whose wife Victoria Nuland has been both an aide to Cheney and an undersecretary of State for Hillary Clinton; William Kristol, called by David Corn "the No. 1 cheerleader for the Iraq War"; and Dan Senor, Fox News contributor, AIPAC lobbyist, and foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney.
According to Right Web,
FPI promotes its policy agenda in a number of ways, including producing policy briefings and issue memos, publishing op-eds in major newspapers, and teaming up with like-minded groups to co-host events with lawmakers and other government officials. For instance, in July 2014, FPI co-hosted a “public forum” with the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to address ongoing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Among the participants at the forum were several members of Congress, including Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). Shortly after the event, FPI’s policy director Robert Zarate published an op-ed in USA Today calling for increased sanctions on Iran, claiming that "Iran retains substantial illicit nuclear infrastructure and could potentially produce explosive nuclear material for a weapon in two months."[7]
Like other neoconservative groups, FPI also appears to seek out alliances that extend across ideological lines using the mechanism of sign-on letters. Reprising a role PNAC played in the run-up to the Iraq War, for instance, FPI released a letter in August 2013 calling for the U.S. government to consider "direct military strikes" on Syria and to provide more arms for "moderate elements of Syria’s armed opposition,” with the aim of tipping the balance of Syria's civil war against the Assad regime. Alongside FPI’s Kristol, Edelman, Kagan, and Senor, signatories included prominent figures from the George W. Bush administration like Elliott Abrams, John Hannah, Douglas Feith, and Karl Rove; neoconservative writers like Eliot Cohen, James Kirchick, and Reuel Marc Gerecht; prominent Republicans like Gary Bauer, Norm Coleman, and Tim Pawlenty; and Democratic hawks like former Sen. Joe Lieberman and New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier.[8]
The Daily Beast, which did not see fit to inform its readers of Kirchick's primary function as a paid propagandist for a war-mongering think tank, is owned by IAC, which describes itself as "a leading media and Internet company with more than 150 brands and products serving loyal consumer audiences."
(Hear that, all you Hillary-hating, non-consuming disloyalists out there in Hippieville?)
IAC's chairman and chief executive is Hillary Clinton mega-donor/billionaire Barry Diller. And guess who sits on its Board of Directors?
Chelsea Clinton.
It's very hard work being both a mogul and a director, as evidenced by Barry, Chelsea and their spouses slaving away and snorkeling off the coast of Sardinia last year:
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