By Caitlin Johnstone
January 10, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - Democratic Party royal family member Chris
Cuomo delivered a
pearl-clutching, hand-wringing monologue
on CNN last night about how appalling and
outrageous it is for Republicans to accuse
Democrats of having covert loyalties to a
foreign government.
Cuomo, who is the son
of a Democratic New York Governor and the
brother of another Democratic New York
Governor, began his “Closing Argument”
segment rationally enough, berating the 194
Representatives who
voted against opposing Trump’s ability
to initiate an Iran war without
congressional approval. Obviously the more
resistance there is to Mike Pompeo
manipulating the highly suggestible
Commander-in-Chief into any more
reckless warmongering against Tehran, the
better.
But then, without any coherent segue,
Prince Fredo began babbling about
Republicans leveling baseless accusations
about Democrats having loyalties to Iran.
“They’re in love with terrorists,” we see
Republican Representative Doug Collins
saying in Cuomo’s clip. “They mourn Soleimani
more than they mourn our Gold Star families,
who are the ones who suffered under
Soleimani. That’s a problem.”
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Cuomo made some sputtering outraged face
noises about Collins’ comments, then
highlighted Republican Representative John
Rutherford’s
tweet accusing Democratic Representative
Pramila Jayapal of belonging to a “squad of
Ayatollah sympathizers” for
her condemnation of Trump’s indefensible
assassination of Iranian General Qassem
Soleimani. Democrats were quick to
condemn Rutherford’s obnoxious accusation
on Twitter.
Cuomo also highlighted a
tweet by Republican Representative Mark
Meadows claiming that “Democrats are falling
all over themselves equivocating about a
terrorist” (which also
drew angry Democratic backlash on the
platform), and expressed astonishment at war
crime fetishist Nikki Haley’s ridiculous
claim that “The only ones that are
mourning the loss of Soleimani are our
Democrat leadership, and our Democrat
presidential candidates.”
“So on the right, stop spreading toxic
gossip about who likes terrorists,” Cuomo
bloviated in a long-winded conclusion,
making no mention at any time of the fact
that Democrats have been spouting this exact
same sort of “toxic gossip” for more than
three years now.
President Trump and House Minority Leader
Kevin McCarthy kicked it up even further
than Cuomo’s examples, on Thursday openly
accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of
“defending Soleimani” with criticisms of
Trump’s drone strike assassination.
“I never thought there would be a moment
in time that the Speaker of the House of
Representatives would actually be defending
Soleimani,” McCarthy
said, adding, “Did you listen to what
the Speaker just said? ‘Soleimani was a bad
person, but…’ There is no ‘but.'”
“If only we had a word for this —
something-ism,”
quipped notorious Russiagater Jonathan
Chait of McCarthy’s comments. The joke,
obviously, being that [Kevin] McCarthy was
practicing [Joe] McCarthyism by accusing
political rivals of having loyalties to a
hostile foreign government.
This would be the same Jonathan Chait who
authored what was arguably the single
most bat shit insane Trump-Russia conspiracy
article that ever made it past the editors
of the mainstream press in a 2018 New
York Magazine masterpiece titled “What
If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since
1987?”, which was just as crazy and full of
baseless speculation as the headline
suggests. McCarthyite Russia hysteria was
being mainlined into the veins of
rank-and-file Democrats so aggressively at
the time that Chait was subsequently granted
a (serious, non-mocking)
interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC to
expound upon his fact-free conspiracy
theory.
None of this, of course, is to defend any
of the vile Republican comments listed
above. Accusing political adversaries of
being soft toward a targeted government in
order to shut down dissent and pressure them
to espouse a more militaristic position is
absolutely despicable. It’s a
very typical right-wing tactic which is
designed to
shrink the Overton window of acceptable
debate into the most hawkish and jingoistic
ideological corner of political discourse
possible. Which was why anyone to the left
of Hillary Clinton found it extremely
shocking and creepy when Democrats began
making it their entire political strategy
after their loss in 2016.
Democrats’ baseless yet relentless
accusations of Kremlin loyalty against
political opponents, from “Moscow Mitch”
McConnell to “Putin Puppet” Trump, have
sucked all oxygen out of the room for
progressive reform and created political
cover for this administration to freely escalate
cold war tensions with Russia more
aggressively than any president since the
fall of the Berlin Wall. So it has been a
relief to see Democrats and liberal pundits
like Cuomo
and Brian Stelter set aside the jingoism
and McCarthyism to actively protest the
warmongering of this Republican
administration.
But I’ll make you a bet right now, and I
doubt anyone will take me up on it: I bet
you it won’t last.
I bet you that in the coming weeks, after
the dust settles from this past week’s
horrifying ordeal with Iran, that the
Democratic establishment and its allied
media narrative managers will pace their
herd into forgetting all about opposing the
US war machine and set them right back on
track with impotent nonsense about Russia,
Ukraine, and impeachment proceedings that
will never remove Trump from office
Mark my words, and mark your memory. Hold
on to your memory of how scary this past
week was and what a big deal it’s been, and
then watch carefully as the narrative
managers
memory hole the entire thing like it
never happened, even as the military
situation between the US and Iran
remains as precarious as ever. Let the
contrast between your memory of what
happened and their subsequent behavior
inform you of what these people really are,
and what they really stand for.
Don’t believe their sudden espousal of
anti-war values and skepticism toward
establishment war narratives. Ignore their
stories about themselves and what they
value, and watch their actions instead. It
is a very safe bet that their words right
now and their actions in the coming weeks
will tell two very, very different stories.
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