Democrats betray their principles & embrace the Deep State

Summary: In the 1960s the Republicans betrayed their principles and embraced racism for political gain. Now the Democrats are betraying their principles for the same reason. We missed the opportunity to prevent the first betrayal. But we can still fight to prevent this second act, otherwise our politics wil become a tragedy.

 

On 19 June 1964 the Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This began his party’s decade-long process of betraying its core tradition. Slowly, making the GOP into a new party.

President Clinton began a similar process for the Democrats when he embraced Wall Street, tapping its vast resources in exchange for embracing some of America’s most powerful plutocrats. Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders took the party one step further, embracing Bush Jr.’s militarization of America’s foreign policy. Now the Democrats’ leaders have completed their journey — their betrayal of the Left’s principles — by embracing the new Cold War program of the military and intelligence agencies.

Simple measure ensure that that you do not see this. A continuous series of two minute hate sessions, fed by increasingly exaggerated claims of Trump’s evil, keep emotions high and minds clouded. As a distraction, the election of a few socialists get saturation media coverage – chaff masking the Democrat’s alliance with some of the darkest elements of America’s ruling institutions.

But the truth is out there, if you listen to the few people challenging the narrative. Here are two examples, articles by two of our keenest political observers.

“Summitgate and the Campaign vs. ‘Peace’.”

By Stephen F. Cohen at The Nation.
“Trump’s meetings with NATO and Putin are being portrayed as ominous events by Russiagaters.”
Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton.

US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits are a long tradition going back to FDR’s wartime meeting with Stalin in Yalta in 1943. Every American president since FDR met with a Kremlin leader in a summit-style format at least once, several doing so multiple times. The purpose was always to resolve conflicts and enhance cooperation in relations between the two countries. Some summits succeeded, some did not, but all were thought to be an essential aspect of White House-Kremlin relations.

As a rule, American presidents have departed for summits with bipartisan support and well-wishes. Trump’s upcoming meeting with Russian President Putin, in Helsinki on July 16, is profoundly different in two respects. US-Russian relations have rarely, if ever, been more dangerous. And never before has a president’s departure – in Trump’s case, first for a NATO summit and then the one with Putin – been accompanied by allegations that he is disloyal to the United States and thus cannot be trusted, defamations once issued only by extremist fringe elements in American politics.

Now, however, we are told this daily by mainstream publications, broadcasts, and “think tanks.” According to a representative of the Clintons’ Center for American Progress, “Trump is going to sell out America and its allies.” The New York Times and The Washington Post also feature “experts” – they are chosen accordingly – who “worry” and “fear” that Trump and Putin “will get along.” The Times of London, a bastion of Russophobic Cold War advocacy, captures the mainstream perspective in a single headline: “Fears Grow Over Prospect of Trump ‘Peace Deal’ with Putin.”

An anti-“peace” Washington establishment is, of course, what still-unproven Russiagate allegations have wrought, as summed up by a New York magazine writer who advises us that the Trump-Putin summit may well be “less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.” …

{I}t is hard not to conclude that much of the American political establishment, particularly the Democratic Party, would prefer trying to impeach Trump to averting war with Russia, the other nuclear superpower. For this too, there is no precedent in American history. …

Cold War without diplomacy is a recipe for actual war. We should …hope that the Democratic Party’s reaction to the summit, in its pursuit of Trump, does not make it the party of unrelenting Cold War, as it may be already becoming. …

———————————–

“Two big ‘Russia! Russia!’ stories released days before Trump-Putin summit“

By Caitlin Johnstone.

Lo and behold, right before the summit we are seeing two major news stories loudly promoting Russia hysteria blasted onto the front pages on the very same day.

An indictment of 12 Russians has finally been issued by the Robert Mueller Special Counsel on various charges of conspiracy against the United States, an action the counsel has been sitting on for months. The indictment contains no evidence and will likely never be defended in any court of law …

The complete absence of evidence has of course failed to deter establishment propagandists and Capitol Hill war whores from loudly and aggressively advancing the galaxy-brained narrative that these new claims ought to either cancel peace talks between two nuclear superpowers, or at least make them much more hostile and contentious.

“President Trump must be willing to confront Putin from a position of strength and demonstrate that there will be a serious price to pay for his ongoing aggression towards the United States and democracies around the world,” said Senator John McCain in a statement, more determined than ever to start World War Three before he finally f**king dies. “If President Trump is not prepared to hold Putin accountable, the summit in Helsinki should not move forward.”

“POTUS should either publicly demand extradition of these 12 Russian officials to stand trial or call off his summit,” tweeted Congressman Joe Kennedy III. “@realDonaldTrump should not lend legitimacy to an adversary that attacks our democracy.” …

These and many other pleas against peace have been emanating at maximum volume from both sides of the political aisle in DC, and by both sides of the political divide in the mass media as well. Fox News has been just as busy promoting the hawkish demands of neoconservative Republicans like McCain and Lindsey Graham as outlets like MSNBC and the Washington Post have been promoting the same demands from Democrats. As we learned in the lead up to the Iraq invasion, whenever you see all mass media outlets converge upon a single narrative, it’s time to crank your skepticism levels up to eleven. …

On the same day as all this drama erupted, Dan Coats (who replaced the lying, Russophobic Russiagate architect James Clapper as America’s top intelligence officer at the beginning of this administration) has declared that the warning signs of future Russian cyberattacks are akin to the warnings received prior to the September 11 attacks. Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about when US government officials start invoking 9/11 to warn us about a nation that had nothing to do with it. …

So once again Trump is being pressured by all his political enemies, and even his ostensible allies in conservative media, to escalate tensions with Russia in a way that just so happens to advance intelligence community agendas against that nation which have been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union. And all of the evidence being used to substantiate the claims used to create that pressure? Why, they just so happen to come from that same intelligence community.

These headlines include this one from London’s The Times, which I swear I am not making up: “Fears grow over prospect of Trump ‘peace deal’ with Putin”. …

This notion that we should all be worried, terrified and literally shaking that two nuclear superpowers might ease tensions between one another is so Rick and Morty alternate dimension bass ackwards it’s amazing that it’s been able to stick to the extent that it has, but that just shows you the power of mass media propaganda. The social engineers are so adept that self-identified progressives can be made to cheer for the FBI, self-identified nationalists can be made to cheer for neoconservative regime change agendas against Iran, and self-identified liberals can literally be made to fear a movement away from the possibility of nuclear holocaust. …

————————————–

Conclusion

For examples of journalists’ abandonment of any objectivity, see Slate’s response to Mueller’s indictments of Russian “hackers.” A flow of articles like this one. The charges are treated as gospel — the standard conservative’s “they wouldn’t be on trial if they weren’t guilty.” Plus elaborate guessing about Trump’s involvement, and no mention of the US government officials’ long history of lying about key national security matters (see The Big List of Lies).

This could be an inflection point in history, both in terms of America’s internal politics and in our relations with the world. This could be another dark chapter in our story But there is still time to change. Doing so will require us to develop greater skepticism about government officials, and becoming more willing to take the reins — as citizens. That require more wisdom and resolution, and less hatred of each other.

“Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny.”
— Honoré de Balzac in The Muse of the Department (1843).

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. …The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr. in Strength to Love (1963).

“Good. I can feel your anger. Take your weapon! Strike Trump down with all your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!”
— Emperor Palpatine, helping the Deep State recruit more servants.

For More Information

An excellent summary by Caitlin Johnstone: “Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable.” It is bizarre that these simple things need to be said, and that many or most Democratic Party leaders disagree.

Ideas! For shopping ideas see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about our Cold Wars, about RussiaGate, and especially these…

1. We ended the Cold War by lying to Russia. They remember.
2. Learning from the Cold War to prevent war with Russia today.
3. The good news: America’s politics are neither polarized nor dysfunctional. That’s also the bad news.
4. The secret reason for America’s white-hot political rhetoric.