Russiagate Redux - Falling Into the Trap

In February 2018, I made the case that Russia-gate is overblown. It's now a year later, and the Mueller investigation has concluded that there was no Trump collusion with Russia. This has not been well received by many elitist Democrats such as Adam Schiff, chairman of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Schiff defended his assessment that there exists “significant evidence of collusion” between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Kremlin".

Schiff's track record on this sort of thing is not good:

Schiff voted in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[11] In February 2015, discussing how or whether to tailor Bush-era plans from 2001 and 2002 to fight ISIS, Schiff was asked if he regretted voting to invade. He said, "Absolutely. Unfortunately, our intelligence was dead wrong on that, on Saddam at that time. [The vote] set in motion a cascading series of events which have [had] disastrous consequences."

I prefer the track record of Matt Taibbi -- Russiagate is this generation's WMD.

Despite David Remnick’s post-invasion protestations that “nobody got [WMD] completely right,” the Iraq war was launched against the objections of the 6 million or more people who did get it right, and protested on the streets.

Trump is an obvious liar and general idiot, in my humble opinion.  Republicans in general have been disreputable my entire life -- from the Vietnam War to Iran-Contra and supply side economics to Whitewater and the Iraq War in 2003 with the bogus weapons of mass destruction and Al-Qaeda ties.  Newt Gingrich is a fraud and the 2008 economic crash was a refutation of Reaganomics.

So Democrats are responding to Republican idiocy, which has been remarkably successful, with idiocy of their own.  Trump is on the right side of Russiagate, by all objective measures including the Mueller report which made use of the full powers of the 17 US intelligence agencies.

The Democratic hypocrisy is obvious.  The U.S. has been involved in many "color revolutions", seeking to affect political affairs in other countries.  But when the Russians do something similar, at a much smaller and less invasive scale, this is beyond the pale?  Imagine the Russians supporting a coup by the Confederate states and their white nationalist (Nazi) leaders, and you have a comparable situation to that in Ukraine.

Matt Taibbi describes our current predicament in It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD.  He actually wrote this before it was official, because he has known for sometime where this has been headed.  In contrast, others have been warning us not to jump to conclusions.  That's generally a good idea but, in this case, Taibbi had it right way ahead of others.   He's written a book on the subject - Hate Inc.

The premise of Taibbi's book is that modern media corporations have gotten people addicted to hating each other.  Journalists have been selling anger. The modern news consumer tunes into news that confirms his or her prejudices about whatever the villain of the day happened to be: foreigners, minorities, terrorists, the Clintons, Republicans, even corporations.  I've created a diagram which shows the major groups that are angry with one another:  Political / Economic Quadrants.

I'm mad at the neoliberal and conservative groups for reviving the Cold War and making Trump (libertarian group) stronger by putting him on the truthful side of the Russiagate narrative. They fell into the blind hatred trap.  This is the same trap we fell into after 9/11 when our blind rage with regard to Islamic terrorists led us into an ill advised war in Iraq.  Once again we have been misled by neoconservatives exploiting a bad situation (9/11, Trump presidency) for their warlike purposes.