Russia’s blatant meddling in November’s U.S. presidential election, as confirmed by a plethora of U.S. intelligence agencies, is at last being treated with the seriousness that it deserves. It is being called “an act of war” by U.S. lawmakers of both parties.
This represents a bigger crisis for the U.S. perhaps in it history, because never has there been such a level of clear complicity in “an act of war” against the U.S. by leading members of the U.S. Republican Party and by the U.S. president-elect, no less.
If you are talking war, you have to also be talking treason.
None of this is metaphor or hyperbole. It is all too frighteningly real, and if there’s any honest commitment in Congress to get to the bottom of this, well, hold your hats!
One thing is for certain right now, we have an illegitimate president-elect, at best.
Has America as a culture become so detached from reality that all the way to the top, image counts for more than facts? All the explanations for why these things were allowed to happen, including from the Obama White House, have been based in a perception of the image that blowing the whistle would create in the midst of a campaign. A perception!
It’s like those who accuse people of a “perceived” conflict of interest, for example. If it’s only “perceived,” so what? Has our reality truly been reduced to a video game, or reality TV show?
So, to a degree everyone who knew about the Russian meddling can be considered culpable so far. But there is a clear difference. On the one hand, people who should have known better decided to place their own or their party’s expediency ahead of national security. That’s pretty serious.
But on the other hand, there are those who actively suppressed and lied about the information for the sake of personal gain, such as Sen. Mitch McConnell, other Republican leaders and, of course, Donald Trump.
The best evidence of Trump’s guilt was his recent reaction when the claims were again made by the intelligence community. Any ordinary person would want evidence. But not Trump, he categorically denied it, like the stooge who reacts when a cop mentions a death exclaims, “I wasn’t anywhere near the murder!” (“Who said anything about a murder?” the cop replies. “Uh…I read about it in the papers!” And so on).
Trump declared his guilt along with an obsessive need to cover it up in his initial knee jerk reaction to the news. He’s guilty as sin of aiding and abetting an enemy of the U.S. in an act of war against our sovereign nation.
Trump’s “freak out” over moves to do recounts of the ballots in four states was a similarly guilty reveal. (Among the fall out from that was the claim by former CIA Chief James Woolsey on CNN that a third of U.S. ballots do not have a “paper trail” is “foolish.”)
Now, we’re discovering what kind of an overlord Putin will be for us with the ruthless slaughter of innocents now going on in Aleppo.
This investigation that is hopefully going to unfold will not stop short of exploring the decisive role of FBI Chief James Comey, whose unprecedented intervention into the election is believed to have made the decisive difference in the view of many top Clinton advisers.
Comey can no longer be left out of this probe. He can no longer be assumed to have been operating only from impeccable personal integrity. Hardly.
Then there is the role of the white supremacist lunatic fringe, which is now roaming the inner corridors of the Trump camp.
Are they not potentially, at least, also culpable in aiding and abetting the enemy? How thoroughly is their role going to be explored?
I’m confident that if it’s examined thoroughly, it will be found that much of the so-called alt-right was a Russian fifth column in the U.S. all along, at least since the 1970s when under “detente,” the Russian mafia made its big move into the U.S., stiffed the “Old Left” and took over the fringe Right.
