Who Ever Would Have Believed That It Would Be The Republicans Who Ran A KGB Assett For President

As the news is full of the stories of women who are coming forward to say that Donald Trump grabbed at their genitals, kissed them full on the lips without warning and otherwise did pretty much what he said on the now universally known recording with Billy Bush, the other serious charge, that he and his campaign are taking information directly from the Putin regime to use against Hillary Clinton is going largely unreported. 

In Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald points out that there is a smoking gun to be found in the incompetent reports from the Putin regime of the contents of the stolen e-mails from John Podesta.  They incompetently misidentified a piece by Eichenwald that Sidney Blumenthal sent to Podesta as being the words of Sidney Blumenthal.

An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.

The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya....
 
The documents that Wikileaks unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the Wikileaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.

The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.

Eichenwald identifies the part of his article which Sputnik attributed to Blumenthal a misattribution that appeared only in that source from the Putin government but which almost immediately was coming out of the mouth of Donald Trump who, forgive me for suspecting, is unlikely to read any news services but seems to get his knowledge of the world from what he gets told by people he listens to.  

This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?

At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.”

“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article.  

“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.”

The crowd booed and chanted, “Lock her up!”

This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?

Those seem to me to be at least as important as what we're finding out about the extent of Donald Trump's sexual abuse and possibly worse treatment of women.  

It is amazing to me that we have a situation in which the leader of Russia, a former Communist Party member and a high up member of the KGB is running the conservative, right wing - no make that neo-fascist Republican candidate for president, a man who some people believe will, despite all of that get a majority of Republican and conservative votes and who is taking talking points directly from the Putin regime to use against her.   If someone told me at any period from the 1950s through the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russians would be running a presidential candidate which was the asset of the same people who ran the Soviet Union, I'd have though it was outlandish fiction.  But the corruption of the American right, its media, the media which has created the conditions that produced both Donald Trump AND THE SOCIAL-POLITICAL MOVEMENT THAT CHOSE HIM AS THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE is so complete that even with this, large parts of it will still choose Putin's man over Hillary Clinton.  

The media is the source of the mind-deadening gullibility of those who mistook the CEO of "reality" TV as presidential material.  Ever stupider network entertainment, the cabloid "news" operations, right-wing hate talk-radio, the "free speech-free press" legal theorists and Supreme Court justices who either bought into their theories of media libertarianism or cynically used their wordings to forge rulings like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United - if anyone ever asks how we got this far in handing our presidency to, effectively, a KGB apparatchik, that's who did it.   

As to how the Republicans went from the political use of accusations of the State Department being riddled with Soviet agents to running a TV star who is one, himself, as their presidential candidate, when you make money and wealth acquisition your one and only value you're eventually going to buy the rope that hangs you.  It would certainly be interesting to know the extent to which Russian oligarchs, many of them former members of the Soviet ruling class, stand as Donald Trump's creditors.  Though I doubt you'll ever have FOX news raise that question.  Or most of the American media.  I suspect they wouldn't think such issues would be as good for their ratings as a sex scandal.   Though they seemed pretty slow to latch onto one when it involved a Republican nominee who has had decades of public exposure as a sex as well as a business sleaze.  Imagine if he'd been a Kennedy or Clinton, there would have been no proof necessary as they ran with it "being said" by.....