Chasing red squirrels in DC: Dems Doom 2018 Chances by Labeling Trump a Russian Puppet, not Just Another Sleazy Plutocrat

By Dave Lindorff

            Democratic politicians, aided and abetted by their journalist supporters in publications like the Washington Post, New York Times and at electronic news organizations like CNN, MSNBC and NPR, are playing a dangerous game focusing their anti-Trump “resistance” energies on trying to revivify the moribund Cold War with Russia and China.

            You hear almost nothing out of Democratic Party establishment figures about the continuing economic crisis facing most average and poor Americans, who continue to struggle trying to get by on lower paying jobs than what they had before the Great Recession (supposedly ended!), or working at part-time jobs, living from paycheck to paycheck while the rich get richer, and having the traditional tickets out of their family’s predicament -- a quality public school education and then college for their kids, a home they can finance and ultimately own, and a secure support system for their parents, and eventually themselves when they reach retirement age -- undermined and threatened with death by a thousand cuts -- all taken from them.

            Instead, they hear how President Trump is in some kind of conspiracy with the evil Russians, who we’re told insidiously helped destroy America’s election system, handing the presidency to Trump instead of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

            There are so many things wrong with this picture.

            First off, Russia these days, almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is not America’s enemy -- something that at least half of Americans understand instinctively, including most of those who voted for Trump in November.  86,000 US tourists and business people visited Russia in 2015, part of some 33 million who visited the country from around the globe to make it the ninth-most-visited country in the world.

            Forbes magazine, when tensions between the US and Russia were high amid Democratic Party charges that Russia was trying to throw the election to Trump last August, published an article reporting that billions of investment dollars were flowing from the US into Russia from a Fortune 500 list of America’s biggest firms, including PepsiCo, Procter&Gamble, McDonald's, Mondelez International, General Motors,  Johnson & Johnson as well as resource companies like Cargill, Alcoa, and General Electric.

            Russia, let us not forget, has been keeping the primarily US-owned and funded ISS space station staffed with its Soyuz rocket ferries, while the US flounders, trying to find the funding to develop a reliable transport system of its own following the forced retirement of the ill-conceived space shuttle.

            Sure Russia has land and submarine-based missiles targeting the US, but remember these are in response to even more US missiles that are targeting Russia (and China), and it has been the US that has been blocking efforts to stand down those missiles, and to renounce the using them in a first strike, and that has been working to install anti-missile batteries on Russia’s western and eastern borders designed to make such a first strike conceivable...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to:www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3548