The Politics Of Russia-Gate

Here is a great assessment by Robert Parry:

There may be a turn-about-is-fair-play element to Democrats parsing the words of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Trump administration officials to hang them on possible “perjury” charges. After all, the Republicans made “lock her up” a popular chant citing Hillary Clinton’s arguably illegal use of a private email server as Secretary of State and her allegedly false claim under oath that her lawyers had hand-checked each of her 30,000 or so emails that were deleted as personal.

But there is a grave danger in playing partisan “gotcha” over U.S. relations with the world’s other major nuclear superpower. If, for instance, President Trump finds himself having to demonstrate how tough he can be on Russia - to save his political skin - he could easily make a miscalculation that could push the two countries into a war that could truly be the war to end all wars - along with ending human civilization. But Democrats, liberals and the mainstream news media seem to hate Trump so much they will take that risk.

Official Washington’s Russia hysteria has reached such proportions that New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has even compared the alleged Russian hacking of Democratic emails to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, two incidents that led the United States into violent warfare. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show, Friedman demanded that the hacking allegations be taken with the utmost seriousness: “That was a 9/11 scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event. … This goes to the very core of our democracy.”

But what really goes to “the very core of our democracy” is the failure to deal with this issue - or pretty much any recent issue - with the sobriety and the seriousness that should accompany a question of war or peace. Just as Friedman and other “star” journalists failed to ask the necessary questions about Iraq’s WMD or to show professional skepticism in the face of U.S. propaganda campaigns around the conflicts in Libya, Syria or Ukraine, they have not demanded any actual evidence from the Obama administration for its lurid claims about Russian “hacking.”

You can read the rest @
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/03/04/the-politics-behind-russia-gate/

Thomas Friedman epitomizes the worthlessness of today's US "journalism". I still read The New York Times, but only to discover the latest trends in "fake news".

The crusade to overthrow AG Sessions and then President Trump, if successful, will restore US support for the terrorists in Syria, making it extremely difficult for Russia to keep Assad from being toppled.

There is absolutely no "upside" for the US in what we are doing in Syria. It serves the interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia, neither of which sees us as anything other than a piggy bank for their evil aspirations.