Rolling Stone: The Speculation Over Trump-Russia Ties Is Becoming A Case Of Mass Hysteria

[Buzzsaw Checkerling]

by Matt Vespa
Apr 10, 2017
townhall.com

Rolling Stone has had its ups and downs. It’s still reeling from its
trainwreck “A Rape On Campus” story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely that
embroiled the magazine in controversy over a gang rape that allegedly
happened at the University of Virginia. It didn’t. The Washington
Post’s T. Rees Shapiromostly did the work that should’ve been done by
the music magazine, which could have saved Erdely and the magazine a
lot of pain.

She was recently found guilty of defamation with actual malice against
one of the administrators featured in the piece. Yet, out of the ashes,
there’s Matt Taibbi, who while he’s probably no fan of Donald Trump,
finds that the Left (and some on the anti-Trump Right) has gone insane
over the Russia-Trump collusion narrative that has yet to produce any
solid shred of evidence suggesting such coordination occurred during
the 2016 election. It’s taken a life of its own to the point where
writers who either question or hang back on this subject are accused of
being Putin plants. The speculation game has devolved into mass
hysteria, which could have an impact on future discourse in elections.

One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who
doesn't believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going
on virtually unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent
weeks.

The aforementioned Mensch, a noted loon who thinks Putin murdered
Andrew Breitbart but has somehow been put front and center by The Times
and HBO's Real Time, has denounced an extraordinary list of Kremlin
plants.
She's tabbed everyone from Jeff Sessions ("a Russian partisan") to Rudy
Giuliani and former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom ("agents of
influence") to Glenn Greenwald ("Russian shill") to ProPublica and
Democracy Now! (also "Russian shills"), tothe 15-year-old girl with
whom Anthony Weiner sexted (really, she says, a Russian hacker group
called "Crackas With Attitudes") to an unnamed number of FBI agents in
the New York field office ("moles"). And that's just for starters.
[…]
Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, upon seeing the strange behavior of
Republican Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes, asked "what kind of
dossier" the Kremlin has on Nunes.

Dem-friendly pollster Matt McDermott wondered why reporters Michael
Tracey and Zaid Jilani aren't on board with the conspiracy stories
(they might be "unwitting" agents!) and noted, without irony, that
Russian bots mysteriously appear every time he tweets negatively about
them.
Think about that last one. Does McDermott think Tracey and Jilani call
their handlers at the sight of a scary Matt McDermott tweet and have
the FSB send waves of Russian bots at him on command? Or does he think
it's an automated process? What goes through the heads of such people?
I've written a few articles on the Russia subject that have been very
tame, basically arguing that it might be a good idea to wait for
evidence of collusion before those of us in the media jump in the story
with both feet. But even I've gotten the treatment.

I've been "outed" as a possible paid Putin plant by the infamous
"PropOrNot" group, which is supposedly dedicated to rooting out Russian
"agents of influence." You might remember PropOrNot as the illustrious
research team the Washington Post once relied on for a report that
accused 200 alternative websites of being "routine peddlers of Russian
propaganda during the election season."

Taibbi further takes us down into wackoland, where Sen. Mark Warner
(D-VA) says that he’s brushed up on his Tolstoy and Nabakov, while
reading a book about the Romanov family as the Senate Intelligence
Committee starts its probe into the possible ties between the Trump
campaign and Russian intelligence; Warner is the vice chairman of the
committee. That’s nuts—and Taibbi makes a note of that.

He also notes how outlets, like Salon, now have a new theory on the
“Bernie bros,” and how they were in on the Russian plot to foil Hillary
Clinton’s presidential ambitions. Taibbi noted that 13.2 million people
voted for Bernie Sanders. They were all in on it?

“If the party's leaders really believe that Russian intervention is
anywhere in the top 100 list of reasons why some 155 million eligible
voters (out of 231 million) chose not to pull a lever for Hillary
Clinton last year, they're farther along down the Purity of Essence
nut-hole than Mark Warner,” wrote Taibbi.

Here’s why he thinks this mass hysteria is also dangerous:

Moreover, even those who detest Trump with every fiber of their being
must see the dangerous endgame implicit in this entire line of
thinking. If the Democrats succeed in spreading the idea that straying
from the DNC-approved candidate – in either the past or the future –
is/was an act of "unwitting" cooperation with the evil Putin regime,
then the entire idea of legitimate dissent is going to be in trouble.

Imagine it's four years from now (if indeed that's when we have our
next election). A Democratic candidate stands before the stump, and
announces that a consortium of intelligence experts has concluded that
Putin is backing the hippie/anti-war/anti-corporate opposition
candidate.
Or, even better: that same candidate reminds us "what happened last
time" when people decided to vote their consciences during primary
season. It will be argued, in seriousness, that true Americans will owe
their votes to the non-Putin candidate. It would be a shock if some
version of this didn't become an effective political trope going
forward.

And yet, we have Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking member of the
House Intelligence Committee, saying that there’s circumstantial
evidence of collusion and direct evidence of deception. Now, he says
there’s still no definitive proof of collusion. Senate Democrats on the
Intelligence Committee have also made similar admissions: that they
doubt they will find a smoking gun to link the two camps. Still, the
news media jumps on every new meeting Trump surrogates and officials
have with the Russians. The ring of fire encircled Jeff Sessions
without the liberal media even stopping to think (I know -- a rare
occasion) that the now-attorney general served on the Senate Armed
Services Committee. Meeting with foreign officials was common, as it is
with most members of Congress. Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was
doing his job reaching out to Trump’s team during the 2016 election, as
it was possible he could be the next president of the United States.

There was nothing wrong with any meeting that took place between Trump
officials and the Russians during the 2016 cycle. None. It was just a
vanilla aspect of government relations that was never reported on
because the news media thought that Trump would lose. When he won in
arguable the greatest upset in American political history, it was a mad
dash to discredit Trump. Even mere run-ins at a Starbucks between a
Trump official and a Russian foreign staffer could be viewed as an act
of treason in the eyes of the Left and the liberal media.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of the left wing Nation
magazine—a person with whom I disagree on everything—was right when she
wrote that the Democrats are engaged in a “neo-McCarthyite furor” over
Russia.

“The Times editorial board and others suggest that mere contact with
Russian officials is somehow nefarious, if not criminal — and that to
suggest better relations are in the offing with a new president is
virtual treason,” she wrote.

And now you have Matt Taibbi, who is no friend of Trump or the Right,
saying that this road the Left is traveling on with these Trump-Russia
allegations is nothing short of a clown car trip into delirium. Folks,
Clinton lost the election. Russia didn’t cause it. It was Clinton’s own
incompetence than sunk her. She sucked and the fact you can’t admit
that I feel contributed to this acid trip ride you decided to take in
an effort to discredit the president.

______________
"Known fact that Leftists hate the President of the United States;
what's not known is why they hate The United States of America."