Clearer and Clearer.....

I have been rather silent over the past three weeks, mostly as a result of my inability to type fast enough since my shoulder surgery.  It's getting better every day, and so much better than before! It’s a blessing. Anyway, it has given me lots of time to think about stuff as it unfolds….and for sure the past three weeks have been momentous!

I have two areas that concern me most, so I will start with the ever clearer picture of what has been going on in our country for the past two years. The Russia conspiracy is coming together like a giant jigsaw puzzle---a piece here, a piece there, and suddenly the overall picture begins to take shape and the results are unsettling to say the least and horrifying to say the worst.

I am a journalist by trade, but foremost a citizen of this country. As a concerned citizen I have always been cognizant of the values that propel our democracy and tried to live by those tenets as much as I can. I have always believed in the purity of truth and the rule of law. The picture that has emerged concerning our recent political condition seems to reject those fundamental propositions that undergird our democracy. When Donald Trump and the Republican party came to power in 2016 we all had great concern about where the country was headed, and enormous anxiety about the behavior of our new President and the seeming inability of the Republicans to control his impulsiveness, not to mention his mendacity.

Over the course of the last 18 months as we all became aware of the sinister machinations of the Russians in tampering with our democracy and elections, we tried to understand how this foreign power managed to mobilize the various forces to accomplish their goals. Now it is clearer just how they did it and the forces active behind the effort.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances inherent in our Constitution presupposes that all the players in our government are men of honor and truth, and guided by the rule of law. I think the biggest revelation for many of us is that that is simply not the case in the current governmental structure of America right now. We all watch in amazement at the Republican majority in Congress that seems not to be interested in the Constitutional oversight responsibility that comes with the position. The newest ‘report’ issued by the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee is a prime example of the abrogation of responsibility in that regard. While Trump trumpets the ‘findings’ in this report that he says clears him of any collusion or obstruction of justice, the actual reality is that the Republican majority of that committee refused to investigate clearly disturbing facts that would point to exactly the opposite conclusion. The question must be asked, “Why??”

I think I have a possible answer. You’re not going to like it!

We are beginning to see the outlines of a vast conspiracy that started several years ago when the Russians and the FSB realized that they had a malleable proxy in Donald Trump that might enable them to gain control over our democracy. This was a big plan and wide ranging strategy that had many fronts of action and was brilliantly conceived. The Russians saw the advantage they would have with a society that was becoming more and more economically unequal and, based on their own history, saw the opportunity to use their tools of propaganda and misinformation to steer public perception in ways to maximize their advantage.

There were also many accomplices to this plan….let me name a few….Nunes, Flynn, Page, Papadapoulis, Manafort, Lewandowski, and others. These people were suggestible because of their greed and hunger for power. Who knows if they were witting or unwitting? The Russians were masterful at appealing to their lust for greed and power. So over the past several years they supported the Republican’s growing metamorphosis into a party that favored the rich and fooled the poor. Their policy positions became increasingly focused on self-aggrandizement, special interest appeasement, and disregarding the middle class. It worked so well, that what we have now is a Republican party that seems to have eschewed the fundamental obligations of oversight, truth and the rule of law. Republican members of Congress have acquiesced in the attack on our judicial institutions, the FBI, and the Justice Department. They let President Trump attack these institutions without any objection….in fact they are the Greek Chorus shouting their support for these actions.

All the while, the Russians were busy planning their attack on our 2016 elections. They planned and executed a very sophisticated social media campaign to flood our social media platforms with fake news, lies and propaganda. They hacked into the DNC servers and planned campaigns of distraction by releasing stolen data that would undermine and destroy the Clinton campaign. They bred a cadre of supplicants that would blindly support Trump and his campaign to disrupt our institutions. The Russians were astute in realizing that Trump was exactly the kind of personality that was corruptible. Doesn’t it seem unusual that with all the things that our President thinks are ‘disgraceful’ about our government and the Democrats, somehow ‘disgraceful’ does not apply to the Russians and Vladimir Putin?

Trump continues to accuse the media of being the ‘enemy of the people’. The media is, in fact, the only institution that is doing any revealing of this conspiracy, with the possible exception of Mueller’s investigative unit, but those findings remain to be revealed. Trump insults the media constantly, he relentlessly and vociferously demands that people who criticize him be locked up: Clinton, Comey, McCabe, various judges, and anyone else who raises his ire. That kind of behavior is disturbingly similar to what the Russians do in their own country.

One could almost believe that all of this has come about without the active participation of the major players in the Republican party. However, what if they are all complicit and actually knew what the plan was, and are bent on exercising this slow rolling takeover of our government….all the while screaming, “No collusion, no obstruction, blah blah blah!”

What roles are McConnell and Ryan playing? Why are all the Republicans silent about what is happening to the rule of law and the truth? Think about it…..!

The most powerful tool we have to fight this takeover of our system of government and our democratic society built on respect for the truth and the rule of law is the vote. Each one of you must identify what your own true values are. It is your responsibility to find people that agree with your world-view and value system and support them this fall. It is only through our ability to elect like minded patriots to Congress that we can reverse this path we are on and bring back to full measure the institutional values our country was founded on.

If we don’t manage to change this slide toward autocracy, we will continue to diminish as a global example of freedom and democracy. America will not be a pretty place to live anymore…..