Source: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/10/the-democrats-russia-did-it-dodge/
January 10, 2017
To avoid facing up to why Hillary Clinton’s pro-corporatist
candidacy really lost key Rust Belt states, national Democrats are finding it
easier to blame Russia, a dangerous and self-defeating game, says Norman
Solomon at The Hill.
By Norman Solomon
Two months after the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the most
cohesive message from congressional Democrats is: blame Russia. The party
leaders have doubled down on an approach that got nowhere during the
presidential campaign — trying to tie the Kremlin around Donald Trump’s neck.
Still more interested in playing to the press gallery than
speaking directly to the economic distress of voters in the Rust Belt and
elsewhere who handed the presidency to Trump, top Democrats would much rather
scapegoat Vladimir Putin than scrutinize how they’ve lost touch with
working-class voters.
Meanwhile, the emerging incendiary rhetoric against Russia is
extremely dangerous. It could lead to a military confrontation between two
countries that have thousands of nuclear weapons each.
At the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Thursday on
foreign cyber threats, ranking member Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island,
denounced “Russia’s
rejection of the post-Cold War international order and aggressive actions
against its neighbors,” and he condemned “a regime with values and
interests so antithetical to our own.” It was the kind of oratory that would
have made John Foster Dulles or Barry Goldwater proud.
Like so many other senators on the committee, Reed seemed eager
for a new Cold War while accusing Russia of digital aggression. “In addition to
stealing information from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton
campaign,” he said, “and cherry-picking what information it leaked to the
media, the Russian government also created and spread fake news and
conspiracies across the vast social media landscape.’’
The Russia-Did-It Conspiracy Theory
The Russian government may have hacked the DNC and Clinton
campaign emails, and it may have given those emails to WikiLeaks. But that’s
hardly a slam dunk.
Over the weekend, after Friday’s release of a much-ballyhooed
report from the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the
report underwent a cogent critique
by former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter Robert Parry. Stripping the
25-page DNI report down to its essence, Parry pointed out that it “contained no
direct evidence that Russia delivered hacked emails from the Democratic
National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta to
WikiLeaks.”
Parry added: “The DNI report amounted to a compendium of reasons
to suspect that Russia was the source of the information — built largely on the
argument that Russia had a motive for doing so because of its disdain for
Democratic nominee Clinton and the potential for friendlier relations with
Republican nominee Trump. But the case, as presented, is one-sided and lacks
any actual proof.”
While stenographic accounts of official claims have dominated
coverage of the Jan. 6 report, major flaws are coming to light in mainstream
media. For instance, a piece that appeared on Saturday in the New York Times,
by Scott Shane, reported
in its ninth paragraph: “What is missing from the public report is what many
Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’
claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack.”
The article reported: “Under the circumstances, many in
Washington expected the agencies to make a strong public case to erase any
uncertainty. Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to
‘trust us.’ There is no discussion of the forensics used to recognize the
handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of intercepted communications
between the Kremlin and the hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside
Moscow’s propaganda machinery.”
No Doubts
But Democratic lawmakers aren’t interested in doubts or caveats.
They believe the Russian hacking issue is a political winner. Whether or not
that’s true, it’s certainly a convenient way to evade the sobering lessons that
should have been learned from the last election about the Democratic Party’s
lack of authenticity in its claims to be fighting for the interests of working
people.
At the same time, enthusiasm for banging the drum against Putin
is fast becoming a big part of the Democratic Party’s public identity in 2017.
And — insidiously — that’s apt to give the party a long-term political stake in
further demonizing the Russian government.
The reality is grim, and potentially catastrophic beyond
comprehension. By pushing to further polarize with the Kremlin, congressional
Democrats are increasing the chances of a military confrontation with Russia.
By teaming up with the likes of Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to exert
bipartisan pressure for escalation, Democrats could help stampede the Trump
administration in reckless directions.
This approach is already underway. It is worse than
irresponsible. It is madness that could lead to a nuclear holocaust.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of the online activist group
RootsAction.org, which has 750,000 members. He is executive director of the
Institute for Public Accuracy. [This article originally appeared as a column at
The Hill, at http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/foreign-policy/313295-democrats-are-playing-with-fire-on-russia
]
