The New York Times has finally detected some modern-day McCarthyism, but not in the anti-Russia hysteria that the newspaper has fueled for several years amid the smearing of American skeptics as “useful idiots” and the like. No, the Times editors are accusing a Long Island Republican of McCarthyism for linking his Democratic rival to “New York City special interest groups.” As the Times laments, “It’s the old guilt by association.”
Yet, the Times sees no McCarthyism in the frenzy of Russia-bashing and guilt by association for any American who can be linked even indirectly to any Russian who might have some ill-defined links to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Monday, in the same edition that expressed editorial outrage over that Long Island political ad’s McCarthyism, the Times ran two front-page articles under the headline: “A Complex Paper Trail: Blurring Kremlin’s Ties to Key U.S. Businesses.”
The two subheads read: “Shipping Firm Links Commerce Chief to Putin ‘Cronies’” and “Millions in Facebook Shares Rooted in Russian Cash.” The latter story, which meshes nicely with the current U.S. political pressure on Facebook and Twitter to get in line behind the New Cold War against Russia, cites investments by Russian Yuri Milner that date back to the start of the decade.
Buried in the story’s “jump” is the acknowledgement that Milner’s “companies sold those holdings several years ago.” But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one articleentitled, “9 in Trump’s orbit had contacts with Russians.”
The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that’s obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading “Russian propaganda.”...
This is way beyond only McCarthyism. Once the US media realized that Rupert Murdoch's tabloid "news" business plan was a goldmine, the race to the bottom began. Now it is cesspool of bottom feeders.
Parry relates the history of the US government and other governments that greatly offset anything that "the Russians" might have been able to mount in the US to influence US politics and the 2016 election.
Indeed, one argument for believing that Putin and the Kremlin might have “meddled” in last year’s U.S. election is that they could have felt it was time to give the United States a taste of its own medicine.
I admit to having that thought myself. "The Russians" spent in the thousands, for example, while the US dropped 5 billion into Ukraine alone in the lead up to the coup that unseated a democratically elected president. Let's get some perspective here.
In addition, just who "the Russians" were has not been satisfactorily established based on evidence, let alone any direct connection to the Russian intel services or the Kremlin as the puppet master. Rather, the flimsiest evidence is being adduced, making a mockery of the process.
Moreover, those that "doth protest too much" don't seem to realize that they are cooperating with the trolls, whoever they are and whatever their purpose, in showing up the US as a deeply divided banana republic.
All this in addition to the McCarthyism, which is bad enough.
Most importantly, this isn't even to mention the intimidation being used to impose de facto censorship of alternative media and social media, which is what McCarthyism is about and why it is anti-American, while masquerading as patriotism. In the long run this is the most serious problem since it threatens the foundation of liberal representative democracy in free thought and free expression.
