John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY GARETH PORTER IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“33 Trillion More Reasons Why The New York Times Gets it Wrong on Russia-gate
“Further research shows The New York Times was even further off the mark in blaming Russian social media for Trump’s win”
The entire noise and effort around Russia-gate has been just bizarre from the beginning, and that includes all the parties who have joined in for various reasons.
It all makes the United States look just plain dumb, but I guess that doesn’t register because there are so many other things going on which make the United States look dumb. A gigantic muscle-bound beach boy strutting around with just the look on his face telling you there’s not a whole lot going on behind the eyes.
Of course, the real origin for all of this is the American establishment’s current aggressive effort all over the planet to reassert its authority, in light of its coming to fully appreciate America’s relative decline in the world.
It is the effort to substitute military might and bullying in gaining advantages in place of traditional routes of trade and economic competition, and in any effort of that nature, Russia just automatically takes on the appearance of an opponent, if not an outright enemy.
This effort is brought to you largely through the influence of Washington’s Neocons, the good folks who have championed fifteen years of bloody, unproductive war in the Middle East and who help keep America bound, hand and foot, to the rotting values of Israel, a country which has, since its inception, practiced nothing else than what America is now attempting.
The Washington establishment, of course, is interested in real stuff, not just silly Russia-gate name-calling. Real stuff like the paid-for coup in Ukraine and the monstrous and threatening efforts by NATO on Russia’s borders and quitting the INF Treaty, but they’ll take anything that comes along which helps sell the line about the dangers of Russia.
Americans in general have not proved themselves very discerning over the years in many such matters – from drunken old senator McCarthy with his 200 “commies” in the State Department to the Warren Commission total rubbish on the Kennedy assassination – so there seems to be no floor-level for stupidities about Russia.
Russia is hated, and that’s all there is to it, and if you are hated in America, well, pretty much anything goes. You have a galaxy of stars who’ve made their fame and fortune through stupidities and hatreds. There’s enough of them to create a new kind of Walk of the Stars, perhaps to be located in Washington. Ann Coulter. Rush Limbaugh. Thomas Friedman. Pat Robertson. Franklin Graham. Newt Gingrich. Etc, etc, etc.
Vociferous stupidities and hatreds do seem to be an integral part of America’s national culture of complaint.
The noise and activity keep Americans occupied and doing things that keep them emotionally hyped, and if there is one thing a good many Americans like, it is being hyped, whether on junky notions about the terrors of football players kneeling or the terrors of seeing poor broken refugee families approach the border from places like Honduras, where people have suffered miserably from America’s violent interference with their government.
Meanwhile, infrastructure all over America rots, Americans still have no national health-care worth mentioning, poverty and degradation are to be found in a thousand places, racism and various hatreds flourish, and schools in countless places are a national shame.
Meanwhile also, we have America’s genuine interference in other countries’ affair, as in Honduras, going on around the clock and on a grand scale. You have a monstrous and unaccountable agency whose job it is, full-time, to interfere, bribe, threaten, pay-off, and kill. It enjoys unlimited budgets and doesn’t even have to recognize American laws, much less those of other lands.
I guess Putin is just too timid to adopt the same tactics in overturning America’s democracy, so he sticks to stuff like buying the odd ad on Facebook, sort of the international-affairs equivalent to chalking up a few dirty words on a wall in an alley.
But, my God, this is America, and just let there be one word about some Russian who may have bought a totally inconsequential ad on Facebook, and there will be hell to pay.
See what I mean by ridiculous? And you are, America, ridiculous, and the whole world would be laughing out loud at you, if it weren’t for the armies of heavily-armed knuckle-draggers at the Pentagon and the CIA and your politicians’ readily-hurled tyrannies of sanctions and threats of every kind.
As for what the New York Times says about this or almost anything else, it is almost a bad joke to quote it or to bother to disagree with it. After all, disagreeing with a publication of that nature should almost be taken for granted amongst thinking people. Its record, on consequential matters of international affairs and war, is startlingly clear:
And there are still other consequences of the giant fraud called Russia-gate. These are longer-term but even more dangerous in their effect upon American democracy and Americans’ trust in the integrity of their own government, and they are nicely enumerated by the distinguished American academic expert on Russia, Stephen F. Cohen:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/442943-russia-midterms-meddling-democracy-cohen/
CHUCKMAN'S WORDS ON WORDPRESS: COMMENTS FROM THE WORLD'S PRESS 
LEAVE A COMMENT