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   From: deathfortreason@gmail.com   
      
   How the GOP became the party of Putin   
      
      
      
   Would somebody please help me out here: I’m confused,” read the email to   
   me from a conservative Republican activist and donor. “The Russians are   
   alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by hacking into Dem party   
   servers that were inadequately protected, some being kept in Hillary’s   
   basement and finding emails that were actually written by members of the   
   Clinton campaign and releasing those emails so that they could be read by   
   the American people who what, didn’t have the right to read these emails?   
   And this is bad? Shouldn’t we be thanking the Russians for making the   
   election more transparent?”   
      
      
   Put aside the factual inaccuracies in this missive (it was not Hillary   
   Clinton’s controversial private server the Russians are alleged to have   
   hacked, despite Donald Trump’s explicit pleading with them to do so, but   
   rather those of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign   
   chairman, John Podesta). Here, laid bare, are the impulses of a large   
   swathe of today’s Republican Party. In any other era, our political   
   leaders would be aghast at the rank opportunism, moral flippancy and   
   borderline treasonous instincts on display.   
      
   Instead, we get   
   this from the president of the United States, explaining away his son’s   
   encounter with Russian operatives who were advertised as working on behalf   
   of the Kremlin: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the   
   one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”   
   And from elected Republicans, we get mostly silence—or embarrassing   
   excuses.   
      
   Never mind that Trump Jr. initially said the meeting was about adoption,   
   not a Russian offer of “ultra sensitive” dirt on Hillary Clinton. We’ve   
   gone from the Trump team saying they never even met with Russians to the   
   president himself now essentially saying: So what if we did?   
      
   None of this should surprise anyone who paid attention during last year’s   
   campaign. Trump Sr., after all, explicitly implored Russia to hack   
   Clinton’s private email server. He ran as the most pro-Russian candidate   
   for president since Henry Wallace helmed the Soviet fellow-traveling   
   Progressive Party ticket in 1948, extolling Vladimir Putin’s manly virtues   
   at every opportunity while bringing Kremlin-style moral relativism to the   
   campaign trail. Worst of all, GOP voters never punished him for it. This   
   is what they voted for.   
      
   Nor was Trump Jr. the only Republican to seek Russian assistance against   
   Clinton. In May, the Wall Street Journal   
   reported that a Florida Republican operative sought and received hacked   
   Democratic Party voter-turnout analyses from “Guccifer 2.0,” a hacker the   
   U.S. government has said is working for Russia’s intelligence services.   
   The Journal has also reported that Republican operative Peter W. Smith,   
   who is now deceased, “mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he   
   believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by   
   Russian hackers.”   
      
   Amid a raft of congressional and law enforcement probes into Russian   
   meddling during the 2016 presidential election, it’s still unclear whether   
   members of Trump’s campaign actively colluded with Moscow. But we now know   
   that they had no problem accepting the Kremlin’s help—in fact, Trump Jr.   
   professes disappointment that his Russian interlocutors didn’t deliver the   
   goods. Forty-eight percent of Republicans, meanwhile,   
   think Don Jr. was right to take the meeting. During the campaign, as   
   operatives linked to Russian intelligence dumped hacked emails onto the   
   internet, few Republicans stood on principle, like Florida Senator Marco   
   Rubio, and condemned their provenance. “I will not discuss any issue that   
   has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks,” Rubio said at the   
   time. And he issued a stark warning to members of his party who were   
   looking to take advantage of Clinton’s misfortune: “Today it is the   
   Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us.”   
      
   Unfortunately, the vast majority of Rubio’s GOP colleagues completely   
   ignored his counsel. Suddenly, Republican leaders and conservative media   
   figures who not long ago were demanding prison time (or worse) for Julian   
   Assange were praising the Australian anarchist to the skies. Every morsel   
   in the DNC and Podesta emails, no matter how innocuous, was pored over and   
   exaggerated to maximum effect. Republican politicians and their allies in   
   the conservative media behaved exactly as the Kremlin intended. The   
   derivation of the emails (stolen by Russian hackers) and the purpose of   
   their dissemination (to sow dissension among the American body politic)   
   have either been ignored, or, in the case of my conservative interlocutor,   
   ludicrously held up as an example of Russian altruism meant to save   
   American democracy from the perfidious Clinton clan.   
   Related   
      
       Special Counsel Robert Mueller departs after briefing the U.S. House   
   Intelligence Committee on his investigation of potential collusion between   
   Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June   
   20, 2017. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein - RC12129F9790	   
       Focus on actual U.S.-Russia relations, not the hysteria of Russia-gate   
       Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Foreign Minister Sergey   
   Lavrov stand while waiting for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan prior to   
   their talks at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany July 8, 2017.   
   REUTERS/Alexander Zemlianichenko/Pool - RTX3ALS4	   
       Why it’s hard to take Democrats seriously on Russia   
       Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the commemoration of 100   
   years of the Russian chapel in Vrsic, Slovenia, July, 30, 2016. The   
   Russian chapel was built in 1916 in memory of 250 Russian prisoners of war   
   who were caught in an avalanche while building the road over the Vrsic.   
   REUTERS/Srdjan Zivulovic - RTSKDNR	   
       3 reasons Russia’s Vladimir Putin might want to interfere in the U.S.   
   presidential elections   
      
   Contrast Rubio’s principled stand with that of current CIA Director Mike   
   Pompeo, who, while now appropriately calling WikiLeaks a “hostile   
   intelligence service” that “overwhelmingly focuses on the United States   
   while seeking support from antidemocratic countries,” was more than happy   
   to retail its ill-gotten gains during the campaign. Today, just one-third   
   of Republican voters   
   even believe the intelligence community findings that Russia interfered in   
   the 2016 election, no doubt influenced by the president’s equivocations on   
   the matter.   
      
   I was no fan of Barack Obama’s foreign policy.   
   I criticized his Russian “reset,”   
   his Iran nuclear deal,   
   his opening to Cuba, even his handling of   
   political conflict in Honduras. For the past four years, I worked at a   
   think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative, that was bankrolled by   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)