The Russians are not our friends, to be sure. They have their own interests, to be sure. They violated the sovereignty of an allied and friendly nation, Georgia, when they seized south Ossetia. Georgia's army was unable to resist in part because a large portion of it was deployed in Iraq alongside American forces at the time. At some point, we owe both the Georgians and the Russians a debt over that.
On the other hand, Russia is not formally our enemy. The Communists meant to destroy America, and indeed the whole capitalist world. The Russians want a regional hegemony. There are plenty of things that are in Russia's interests that are also in our own, such as encouraging energy development and trying to figure out how to tamp down Islamist terrorism.
Watching people go after Jeff Sessions for being a Russian agent today -- Jeff Sessions! -- is like watching the Red Scare play itself out again, only without an Evil Empire that really does intend to destroy the United States.
It's not just that the accusation is contrived, as the written context for the oral questions clearly established that Sessions wasn't being asked about his work with Senate Armed Services. It's not just that the Hillary Clinton State Department played the same games with Putin that Putin was playing with Hillary. It's not just that Russian intelligence collection efforts aimed at the Trump campaign mirror CIA collection efforts aimed at the Socialists in France, which the CIA did for perfectly legitimate reasons of national interest.
No, this is chasing after Russian spooks even where it is completely implausible that they exist. Sessions may have moderated his tone on Russia in order to align himself with the Presidential campaign he was supporting, but that doesn't change the fact that he's been one of the biggest Russia hawks in DC forever and a day.
Meanwhile, as W.R. Mead was recommending recently, why not look at the actions of the Trump administration to see how friendly it really is to Russia?
Is all this paranoia indicative of self-medication by the defeated elite?
6 comments:
Is it really paranoia? I suspect it's merely targets of convenience.
It's paranoia, but they're paranoid about Trump, rather than Russians. (No one fretted about Hillary's contacts with Russians.)
If they could manage to construct a frame in which Trump was friendly with Britain, the British would become The Great Menace of Our Times, and conspiracy theories about the queen would become common parlance, discussed seriously in our nation's premier journals, and that lizard aliens guy would get strange new respect. On the other hand, if Democrats have friendly contact with Russians, then Russia will once again become a rising power with whom it's essential to have friendly relations, and questioning such contact will once more become latter-day McCarthyism and xenophobia. It's always who/whom with these people.
Whatever, they managed to get Sessions to agree to recuse himself from all investigations of Trump and last year's election. But they're calling for him to resign.
Yeah, never mind that McCaskill lied about her claimed lack of content with Russian ambassadors.
Eric Hines
The administrative state is striking back.
The charges are ludicrouse.
When crap like this explodes remember some one some where is hoping another big story does not get noticed.....
Lsay ike this one.
https://www.thenation.com/article/amazon-washington-post-and-600-million-cia-contract/
-Mississippi
Mississippi, that it precious. Talk about conflicts of interest!
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