JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: FURTHER THOUGHTS ON RUSSIA-GATE - INSPIRED BY A RE-PRINTED ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY - RUSSIA-GATE HAD AT LEAST TWO MAJOR PURPOSES - AMERICA'S PAST ANTI-RUSSIAN HYSTERIA PROVIDED FERTILE GROUND - AMERICANS AS CONDITIONED AS PAVLOV'S DOGS - HILLARY CLINTON OBAMA AND TRUMP - THE DISHONESTY OF BOTH MAJOR PARTIES WHO DO NOT WANT TO EXAMINE MANY MATTERS - TREATMENT OF ASSANGE IS VERY TELLING ABOUT THE REALITIES OF WANTING TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF ANYTHING

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS


The Foundering Russia-gate ‘Scandal’


https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/13/the-foundering-russia-gate-scandal/


Thanks for re-publishing another honest and insightful piece from Robert Parry, honesty and insight being pretty rare qualities in American journalism. It inspires some thoughts.

Russia-gate arose from at least two impulses. Both of them are political, and no one in the establishment, which includes the important people of both parties, really wants to investigate either of them thoroughly.

It is important to say that America’s nearly ancient hostility (a good century old) towards the Soviet Union with all the propaganda and vehement rhetoric inspired by it provides even now a fertile medium for any negative accusation touching Russia. Americans are as conditioned as Pavlov’s dogs to have a certain response at just the mention of Russia.

The major impulse was a top-level, yet undisclosed effort to either stop or destroy Trump. There is no other way for senior officials of CIA and FBI to have worked and spoken in public about such matters without the support of President Obama, a fact which again demonstrates – again, as in Neocon Wars, the coup in Ukraine, and rolling tanks up to Russia’s borders – what a destructive leader Obama actually was, destructive even to his own country’s election principles.

And a very secretive leader, a president with an almost unparalleled drive for secrecy and a fierce enemy of all whistle-blowers and the truth. After all, he sent people to prison - Chelsea Manning, just one of several - and consigned others to a life of hell on earth - as we see in the case of Julian Assange.

By the way, Trump’s and the Republican Party’s attitudes and actions towards Julian Assange, a man who could clarify instantly so many controversial matters, screams at us about the true nature of America’s establishment. At a certain level in both political parties, all desire for truth and openness simply evaporates. It is at that level that they all effectively work together to keep America’s creaky sham of democracy going. Plutocracy, privilege, and empire come first for both parties, urgently and without question.

I think we will never get to the bottom of Obama’s scheme. He and his associates made sure he was well insulated, and the operation involved so many very high-level people, including of course Hillary Clinton - a politician with a different style, but a match for Obama’s secrecy and destructiveness in every way – that there is no way America’s establishment today will ever seriously dig into it.

Just the thought of damage to the reputation and security of the United States would prevent that from occurring. And Hillary Clinton’s name serves as a mighty defensive fortress because the Clintons have been one of the Democratic Party’s major conduits for immense campaign funds for over a quarter of a century. In American politics, you do not cross the big-money people.

Look at all the (appropriately) bad publicity in Britain around Prince Andrew’s association with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Even Buckingham Palace has not been able to protect him completely. Compare its extent and impact to that around Bill and Hillary Clinton. We know Bill Clinton was at least as important an associate of Epstein as the Prince. He made 26 flights on “the Lolita Express” according to the plane’s co-pilot and logs, and Epstein contributed to the Clinton Foundation and to other Clinton “causes.” Epstein even claimed a role in creating the Foundation that has served the Clintons’ personal interests so handsomely.

The American establishment is not inclined to attack the Clintons in the way they deserve. And just so, Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Obama administration plots against Trump.

The notion is further supported by the fact that Hillary never was held accountable for the embarrassing disaster at Benghazi, Libya, which involved the killing of an American Ambassador, a side-effect of a dark program she oversaw as Secretary of State.

That program related to America’s involvement in destroying Libya’s government and in working to do the same to Syria’s. Benghazi was an unintended result of a State Department plan to scoop up weapons and thugs and have them transshipped through Turkey or Saudi Arabia for their final destination in Syria.

The weapons and thugs were everywhere in the collapsed ruins of Libya because the United States had worked hard to put them there for its hybrid attack on Gadhafi. No member of either establishment party wants to “open that can of worms” to public scrutiny.

That’s just how it works when you have an empire instead of a country.

So, people like the Clintons and Obama, having faithfully served imperial interests for years of dark and violent activity, effectively have “get out of jail free” cards good for all their shady pasts.

I read the other day that the Obamas just bought another home, one in prestigious Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, for nearly $12 million. This follows the small castle in Washington for which they paid over 8 million dollars when they left the White House, a small castle which received many costly upgrades.

Not bad financial results for a man who was an undistinguished, untenured university lecturer and who served about half a term as a United States Senator. The establishment takes care of you, handsomely, if you have served it well.

The topic of Hillary brings us to another motive for Russia-gate, and that is covering up the scandal of her behavior in the Democratic Party’s 2016 campaign for a presidential candidate. We know that Hillary’s forces cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination. They approached that goal in many different ways, and we have the best evidence in the Wikileaks documents released before the election and in the testimony of various people.

So, there already was an effort to “undermine American democracy” (don’t you just love that hollow phrase?) before there was Russia-gate operating against Trump. Russia-gate represents, in addition to its intent against Trump, kicking lots of dust into everyone’s eyes concerning Hillary Clinton’s political crimes in her own party, and “political crimes” is not too strong an expression for elaborate efforts to steal the nomination of a major political party, efforts which included every imaginable dirty trick right down to seeing huge numbers of ballots trashed.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not a defender of Trump. He is an appalling man by every measure, from his rudeness to his to his aggression, dishonesty, and ignorance. So many of the people bellowing on the Internet about the Constitution-violating treatment of Trump are his supporters. Unfortunately in America, political dialogue can almost never be subtle or sophisticated. It’s always black or white, for or against, when discussing the two political parties. That fact also helps disguise the most fundamental problems at work here.

Yes, Trump is appalling, but Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are equally so. A sense of Hillary’s violence and crudity long ago reached a good portion of the public’s awareness. She has a reputation, but her crudities are different in nature than Trump’s.

Trump is a man who can take pride and even smirk about law-breaking, whether stealing Syrian oil or giving away parts of Palestine. Hillary is no less a law-breaker, but she doesn’t usually boast about it. She likes wearing the platitudes of old-fashioned democratic principles, much as one of her favorite lipsticks.

Obama represents a different case. We see and hear no crudity, a nice smile, and a fairly pleasant voice, but he is a devious and secretive and murderous man.

Americans seem never to ask themselves, if they carry on abroad with covert wars, interventions, coups, all kinds of interference in the governments of others, even democratic governments, and hold no respect for the rule of law, what’s to prevent the same approach being applied inside their own country?

Well, the clearest answer is, nothing. Habits of mind long-set by practice, arrogance, lack of real accountability, immensely powerful agencies at your disposal, secrecy as a way of life, unlimited access to money – these conspire to give you what we see in American government.

It really should not surprise. The last President who actually tried to make the authority of elected high office prevail over an entrenched establishment left half of his head splattered in the streets of Dallas. You’ll perhaps note the fact that no President since has tried that again. Faithful to the establishment, every one of them.

There is no better study of the contemporary American state than the events of the last few years. The ugliness of America’s renewed aggression in the world is apparent to tens of millions in many lands, but the ugliness of America’s internal politics is less well understood. Plutocracy, money-saturated elections, establishment privilege, secrecy, lack of accountability, and behind-the-scenes plotting conspire to make the high school civics textbook version of Washington politics a parody.

It is all comparable to the sense of the Roman Empire going into its decline, yet a great many Americans remain able to conjure a mental image of their country as a modest Eighteenth-century Republic with a well-defined Constitution and Rights and a pervasive respect for law. Many of Washington’s privileged establishment are themselves able to lapse into such fantasies in the course of speeches.

In the deadly accurate words of the 1980s Cyndi Lauper song, money changes everything.

It may all be too complicated to explain to the general public, and America’s dog-loyal corporate press would never even attempt the job. Only here or there on some detail, from which a temporary political advantage might be extracted, do they genuinely report and analyze. They will never conduct an operation which reveals the putrescence inside the body politic of America because their own corporations are indeed part of it.