The Party of Putin has an awful lot to answer for.
Few foreign world leaders—let alone any murderous
—have received more solicitous treatment from the Republican Party during the last five years than Vladimir Putin. Imagine if Democrats so warmly and fulsomely embraced someone who now threatens to rain destruction down on our country (Osama Bin Laden comes to mind). Or if they had gleefully sent delegations to kowtow to that person’s criminal syndicate, thugs, and cronies (on the 4th of July, no less). Or what if they, along with their media mouthpieces, sung his praises and echoed his talking points for literally years, obsequiously groveling before him and marveling at his prowess and “toughness.” Well, you could expect that the Democratic Party would be awash in shame and humiliation right about now, pilloried at every turn for its treachery.
News Roundup: Ukraine; Biden begins leaning toward immigration action; GOP hypocrisyUkraine update: The price of 'we need to do more' is much higher than most people realizeEven Russian state TV appears to be souring on Putin's warThe Party of Putin has an awful lot to answer for, but don't hold your breath
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From one alleged spy to another? Tulsi Gabbard received donations from an alleged Russian agentSmall-donor Trump fundraiser event promised a meet-and-greet. Guess who didn’t get to meet Trump?
The Party of Putin has an awful lot to answer for, but don't hold your breath! But “borderline treasonous” doesn’t do justice to what occurred. The offender here was a major U.S. political party whose titular leader had, through his shadowy colleagues and family members, enlisted the assistance of Russian nationals and intelligence in order to help get himself elected. Those same Russian intelligence operatives reported to and were directly answerable to Vladimir Putin. The previously unimaginable, insidious scope of that effort aside, what was truly mind-boggling was its excusal by the political organization that spawned it. As Kirchick observed, “What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”
As Kirchick explains, Putin’s deliberate cultivation of the American right-wing—and ultimately most of the Republican Party—through the efforts of Russian intelligence, began in earnest in 2013: They made a keen study of the American political scene and realized that, during the Obama years, the conservative movement had become ripe for manipulation. Long gone was its principled opposition to the “evil empire.” What was left was an intellectually and morally desiccated carcass populated by con artists, opportunists, entertainers and grifters operating massively profitable book publishers, radio empires, websites, and a TV network whose stock-in-trade are not ideas but resentments.
At that time the Russian leader’s tactic was to reinvent his corrupt, kleptocratic, mafia state’s image as a paragon of “traditional values.” Not coincidentally, these sentiments were highlighted in propaganda designed to target and cultivate the approval of right-wing organizations in this country. Anti-gay, pro-masculine, and pro-gun rhetoric proved to be catnip to an American right nurturing its grievances about cultural shifts occurring in the U.S., while Kremlin spies and propagandists carefully targeted and infiltrated American “institutions” like the NRA and the U.S. military.
The Kremlin’s influence was once again on display in the run-up to Trump’s 2016 victory. As pointed out by Mike Vasca for the Seattle Times:
Putin set out to turn the Republican Party before Trump was elected. Trump’s campaign led by Paul Manafort asked to delete from the party platform language that called for “lethal aid” for Ukraine. Manafort had been a political consultant to Putin stooge and former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed by the Ukrainian people for his anti-Western views.
Vasca also reminds us that upon attaining the Oval Office, Trump, now fully indebted to Putin, repeatedly disparaged American intelligence in favor of Russian propaganda, siding “against his own U.S. intelligence agency findings that Russia had directed cyberattacks against members of the Democrat[ic] party, saying, “President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. … I don’t see any reason why it would be.” If that wasn’t treachery nicely wrapped in a bow and ostentatiously placed before the Republican Party, it’s difficult to fathom what could be.
Fox News, of course, amplified Russian interests and propaganda, constantly minimizing accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and spinning disinformation and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and other Democrats through its willing tools, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, the latter who instituted a (now familiar pattern) of supporting Russian interests by “ridicul[ing] the entire Russian meddling scandal and portray Putin critics as bloodthirsty warmongers.” The moral rot of supporting a proven, unquestionable enemy of our country was wholly disregarded, not only by the right’s media outlets but by its “think-tanks” such as the Heritage Foundation, which, as Kirchick notes, suddenly began to echo Putin’s and other autocrats’ talking points in their policy framing:
[T]he Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s most influential conservative think tanks and a former bastion of Cold War hawkishness, has enlisted itself in the campaign against George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist whose work promoting democracy and good governance in the former Soviet space has made him one of the Kremlin’s main whipping boys.
With Trump, Fox News, the NRA, and the Heritage Foundation safely turned, Putin’s oligarchs began to fund Republican campaigns. Republican operatives had already created opaque conduits to funnel Russian money to Trump for his 2016 election effort. By any objective measure, the interests of the Republican party and the Russian Federation (including, ultimately, Vladimir Putin) had become mutually supportive: “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”
Dailykos.com
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