Why Russia?
by Justin Raimondo, via Ron Paul Liberty Report

I once had an online conversation with a journalist whose name you would instantly recognize that started with a question for me: “Why Russia?” Why, this person wanted to know, are we witnessing a hate campaign aimed at Moscow, decades after the implosion of international communism and the breakup of the USSR?

I tried to give him a coherent and comprehensive answer, but Twitter is not conducive to in-depth discussions of that sort, and so I filed it away as a question to be answered at a later date. And certainly now is the time to answer it: the Democratic party and its media minions are demanding an “investigation” (i.e. a fishing expedition) into the burning question of whether the President of the United States is the Manchurian Candidate: “Putin’s puppet,” as Hillary Clinton infamously averred. Our out-of-control intelligence agencies are furiously pushing the same line.

This echo of the 2016 presidential campaign is surely one major reason why the anti-Russsian hysteria has reached such a fever pitch. As Glenn Greenwald writes in a recent piece in The Intercept:

“[I]t’s used to avoid confronting the fact that Trump is a by-product of the extraordinary and systemic failure of the Democratic Party. As long as the Russia story enables pervasive avoidance of self-critique – one of the things humans least like to do – it will continue to resonate no matter its actual substance and value.” Continue reading →