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Many have noted the irony that the GOP so hawkish on Russia just a few years ago-remember all the scorn for Obama and Hillary’s ‘reset?’ have now fully embraced it with little reservation. But with their trip-on our Independence Day!- to meet with Lavrov and friends-Putin much to his delight got the chance to spurn them-they have now become the party of Putin. Many are very surprised by this turn of events.

“Republican lawmakers who went to Russia seeking a thaw in relations received an icy reception from Democrats and Kremlin watchers for spending the Fourth of July in a country that interfered in the U.S. presidential election and continues to deny it.”

“Cannot believe GOP, once the party that stood strong against Soviets & only a decade ago sought to democratize the Middle East, is now surrendering so foolishly to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Kremlin’s kleptocracy — only two years ­after Russia interfered in U.S. election,” tweeted Clint Watts, an information warfare specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and frequent featured expert before congressional panels examining Russian influence operations.

“Russians wooing with a shopworn song — repugnant as nails on a blackboard,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a Twitter post in response to the delegation’s trip. “They are enemies and adversaries, attacking us.”

Can’t believe it-right? I mean the party of Reagan, even the party of Romney who was so hawkish on Putin and the Russian bear are now going hat in hand to Russia on our own nation’s birthday to beg for a moment with the Russian dictator-who stood them up much as he did Trump himself on his 2013 trip to the Moscow beauty pageant.

“Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) led the eight-member delegation on a multiday tour of St. Petersburg and Moscow, a trip that included meetings with Russia’s foreign minister and parliamentarians. It did not include a session that senators had been hoping for: a meeting with Putin, whom President Trump is scheduled to meet at a summit this month.”

Only the Republicans went-as only they were invited. They claimed they’d be tough but seemed to forgot all that once they got there.

“Members of the delegation set off on their trip late last week promising to be tough with Russian officials ahead of the president’s visit, especially on matters of election interference. But they struck a conciliatory tone once there: The point of their visit, Shelby stressed to the Duma leader, was to “strive for a better relationship” with Moscow, not “accuse Russia of this or that or so forth.”

“We sent a very strong message and a direct message to the Russian government,” he said, ticking off four items he said they pressed while there: Don’t interfere in U.S. elections, respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, work with us toward peace in Syria, and uphold obligations under nuclear arms treaties.

“That message did not appear to have much impact, though.”

“We heard things we’d heard before, and I think our guests heard rather clearly and distinctly an answer that they already knew — we don’t interfere in American elections,” said Sergey Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador to the United States and now a member of Russia’s upper house of parliament.

That these dismissive words came from Kisylak made the salt in the wounds sting even more as did the fact that the GOP met with Russian foreign minister Lavrov; the two Russians Trump had met with in the Oval Office the morning after firing Comey were: Kisylak and Lavrov. At that meeting Trump bragged that firing Comey ‘released great pressure on me’ and for good measure he leaked vital Israeli intelligence to Putin’s men.

The GOP’s no strings attacked embrace of Putin’s Russia got a lot of justified criticism here but was hailed in Russia. Which is not to say the Russians now respect us more.

“On Russian state television, presenters and guests mocked the U.S. congressional delegation for appearing to put a weak foot forward, noting how the message of tough talk they promised in Washington “changed a bit” by the time they got to Moscow.”

“We need to look down at them and say: You came because you needed to, not because we did,” Igor Korotchenko, a Russian military expert, said on a talk show on state-run television.

We need to look down on them a bit. Clearly this GOP only field trip to see Putin raised our status!

It certainly is amazing how the party of extreme hawkishness towards Russia has become the party of extreme conciliation towards it though it’s not so hard to understand really. The GOP is the party of Trump. Anything that Trump says immediately becomes the party line. Even if some GOP Congressmen have misgivings  about this they know as for as their base is concerned the truth is whatever illegitimate ‘President Trump, Manchurian President Trump says it is.

Then on another level from a historical perspective this is not as surprising as you might think. Yes, going back to Reagan the GOP was the party of extreme anti Kremlin sentiment but on the other hand there is a long history of the GOP willing to use any means necessary to win elections. This is because in the post New Deal era the GOP has been-in Nietzsche’s terms-the ‘party with a bad conscience.‘

If you look at the history it goes back to the rise of FDR and the New Deal. The GOP realized that most Americans accepted and embraced the New Deal and its reorganization-and expansion-of public services and the safety net. Yet rather than adapt they continued to fight it even realizing that most Americans supported it and this continues to this day.

As they don’t have issues on their side they have to win in other ways-like lawyers say ‘If you don’t have the truth, pound the facts, if you don’t have the facts, pound the table.’

The GOP has gotten very good at pounding the table. They have been willing to use any means necessary to win. They long since became Nixon’s party. After FDR won 4 straight terms they were desperate-they sincerely wondered if they’d ever win the WH again. One measure they took was term limits on the Presidency so there could never be another FDR again.

As for winning the WH despite opposing public opinion, they figured out one way to do it-run a WWII war hero who is beloved across party lines and the public-no one even knew that Ike was a Republican until the 1952 election.

But, while this worked very well-Ike won two major landslides this was not really a repeatable way to win elections-it’s not as if WWII heroes who are seen as above partisanship are turned out on an assembly line.

Ultimately it would be Ike’s running mate, Richard Nixon-ole Tricky Dick-whose Spirit would infuse the post FDR GOP; he provided the blueprint for the modern-post FDR-GOP on how to win elections(while opposing public opinion on the New Deal).

What Nixon believed is ‘you have to win’ by any means. Slandering your opponent as a Communist as he did to win his first House race in 1946 and against the ‘Pink Lady’ to win the Senate in 1950, cheating and, yes, colluding with a hostile foreign power.

His collusion with the North Vietnamese to sabotage LBJ’s peace talks in the run up to the 1968 election was suspected for years but only really conclusively proven a few years ago-the smoking gun being, you guessed it, Haldeman’s diary.

Then there is the sainted Reagan. When his name is invoked as a part of a Republican party of a simpler more virtuous time-as Clint Watts did in the quote above-I normally don’t argue. What for? I welcome all the recovering Republicans who are supporting a Democratic Congress in November-so why alienate them? You know-Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Steve Schmidt-even George Will… The most recent is Max Boot. 

I’m not going to argue with them over Reagan. But the fact is that Reagan’s campaign also colluded with a hostile foreign power-the Ayatollah’s Iran to win the 1980 election-and this, too, is very well supported by the facts.

The Reagan campaign worked to delay the release of the Iranian hostages until after the election. Surely you didn’t think that the fact that the hostages were finally released literally to the day Reagan was inaugurated was a coincidence?

As Malcolm Nance says coincidences take a lot of planning so how much planning do you think that took?

Much of the later scandal of Iran-Contra makes much more sense in light of the 1980 collusion with the Iranian Ayatollah.

Every time news of another Trump campaign meeting with the Russians emerges you hear ‘Well nothing came out of it but you have to take the meeting.’

This is how Donald Jr rationalized his June, 2016 meeting with Kremlin connected Russians in Trump Tower. It’s how Roger Stone-who for 20 months had been insisting he never met with any Russians-rationalized his own recently uncovered meeting with Russian nationals: it would have been political malpractice not to meet with Russian nationals for dirt on Hillary Clinton. 

Just so. Roger Stone, remember, is a Nixon man-he literally has Tricky Dick’s tattoo on his back. In the 1972 campaign, Stone was the youngest member of CREEP. Nor did he see no action-Stone was the driver who hand delivered the infamous Canucks letter. 

The Canucks letter was the proximate cause of Democratic Presidential candidate Ed Muskie-who Nixon saw as his toughest potential competitor for the Presidency 1972-abruptly leaving the race.

“It would eventually be established with certainty that the man who’d written the “Canucks” letter, the man who’d hired the black protesters in front of Muskie’s hotel room, was Donald Segretti, who handled a secret, separate black ops campaign team for CREEP. The man who’d actually sent the letter to McCloskey, who’d hired the Sedan Chair II mole, was a nineteen year old operative named Roger Stone. It was because of this that he makes a brief appearance in the Watergate testimony.”

Segretti went to prison for the Canucks letter and the black mark on his character was so deep that even in the 1990s his campaign for office proved stillborn. Stone escaped prison thanks to his young years.

He’s not so young now and acknowledges that this time he may be indicted. But Stone’s part in Russia collusion is quite appropriate considering he’s a Nixon CREEP alum and it underscores the extent to which this is the same old GOP, Nixon’s GOP willing to do anything to win an election, up to and including treason.

UPDATE: While Stone’s young years saved him last time he’s not having such luck this time as he awaits his trial in November 2019-his flack Andrew Miller-just gave up his challenge to the Mueller investigation-Emptywheel suggests Miller’s dropping the case could be connected with the timing Mueller chose for his press conference.

Meanwhile Speaker Pelosi still seems not to be taking the hint.

As for Segretti while his reputation was destroyed and his Congressional campaign had no chance Papadopoulos is now allegedly running for Congress and becoming something of a celebrity. 

Is this what accountability looks like in Stupid Watergate? As we speak Trump’s best hope is that Pelosi will protect him from accountability.

Despite the MSM canard-shared by Pelosi itself it seems-that the best way to reelect Trump is to impeach him-Alan Litchman -the man who predicted Trump’s ‘win’ in 2016 argues the opposite.

https://twitter.com/mcspocky/status/1133848489711030274?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1133848489711030274&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fevilsax.pressbooks.com%2Fwp%2Fwp-admin%2Fpost.php%3Fpost%3D7752%26action%3Dedit

Trump actually seems to agree with Litchman-he has tweeted that the Democrats ‘know they can’t win in 2020 with this great economy’-that allegedly he alone is responsible for-and so their only hope is to throw out all this dirt on him with investigations and impeachment.

But his tendency to throw the chess pieces around the board seems to have successfully psyched them out into believing he’s playing 11 dimensional chess and actually wants them to impeach him-wrongly believing that impeachment without conviction means a ‘win’ for him.

But I tend to agree with Litchman-though the real case for impeachment is principle we have to draw a line at such conduct and not allow it to go unpunished-if Pelosi successfully smothers impeachment it will demoralize the Democratic base.

 

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