Russia-gate, the Democrats’ over-the-top attempt to blame the Kremlin for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous campaign, has become the party’s go-to excuse to avoid confronting how it lost touch with average Americans, says Norman Solomon.
By Norman Solomon
A new book about Hillary Clinton’s last campaign for president — Shattered by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes — has gotten a lot of publicity since it appeared two weeks ago. But major media have ignored a revealing passage near the end of the book.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
Soon after Clinton’s defeat, top strategists decided where to place the blame. “Within 24 hours of her concession speech,” the authors report, campaign manager Robby Mook and campaign chair John Podesta “assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
Six months later, that centerpiece of the argument is rampant — with claims often lurching from unsubstantiated overreach to outright demagoguery. A lavishly-funded example is the “Moscow Project,” a mega-spin effort that surfaced in midwinter as a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s led by Neera Tanden, a self-described “loyal solider” for Clinton who also runs the Center for American Progress (where she succeeded Podesta as president). The Center’s board includes several billionaires.
The “Moscow Project” is expressly inclined to go over the top, aiming to help normalize ultra-partisan conjectures as supposedly factual. And so, the homepage of the “Moscow Project” prominently declares: “Given Trump’s obedience to Vladimir Putin and the deep ties between his advisers and the Kremlin, Russia’s actions are a significant and ongoing cause for concern.”
Let’s freeze-frame how that sentence begins: “Given Trump’s obedience to Vladimir Putin.” It’s a jaw-dropping claim; a preposterous smear.
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