Every four years Americans are faced with a serious affront to their collective vanity and national honor: Should they acknowledge their nation’s rather dark, precarious situation, and demand substantive political platforms from those who wish to lead them, or should they allow presidential hopefuls to pander to their lowest common denominator, and their deepest, rancid prejudices?
You already know the answer to this rhetorical question.
In 2008, Barack Obama rode a wave of manic enthusiasm, landing him in the White House. After eight mind-melting years, the aftermath of Hope and Change hysteria now resembles the Dancing Plague of 1518. “So it goes”.
Faced with growing economic woes, endless war, and an ever-expanding surveillance state, not to mention an increasingly feudal-like society controlled by a culture of fear and paranoia, Americans have never been more in need of real solutions to real problems. Even Bloomberg has felt compelled to point out that “Trump has a point about American decline.”
Hillary Clinton – the “responsible” choice for president – has a comprehensive plan to tackle America’s seemingly insoluble problems: It’s Russia’s fault, and also, Donald Trump is a racist neo-fascist. Better together?
And since it has been well-established by the Daily Beast and other organs of upstanding political discourse that Donald Trump is a Manchurian Candidate groomed by Moscow and controlled, via KGB brain chip implant, by Vladimir Putin himself, one can sum up the entirety of Hillary Clinton’s platform with two simple words: Blame Russia.
Attempting to divert attention from growing evidence of pay-to-play corruption, via “charitable donations” to the Clinton Foundation – among other embarrassing revelations from her e-mails, including the fact that the Democratic primaries were, for lack of a better term, rigged – Clinton and her close associates have reverted to the tried and true tactic of blaming their own misdeeds on the dastardly Russians. Anti-Russian hysteria of such magnitude has not been seen since the height of the Cold War.
Honestly, the Clinton camp isn’t even trying to be subtle anymore. Last month, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told Real Clear Politics:
Sources are saying the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump...I don’t think it is coincidental that these emails are released on the eve of the [Democratic National] Convention...And that is disturbing, I think we need to be concerned about that. We also saw last week at the Republican convention that Trump and his allies made changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian.
Holy guacamole. Thank God for Russia – otherwise Hillary Clinton would have to address insensitive questions about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and her bankrupt foreign policy.
But it’s really getting out of hand. Even Hillary’s wrinkly, blood-stained man crush Henry Kissinger thinks that the Russian Sasquatch campfire ghost stories have gone too far. As he wrote in the Washington Post, “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.”
Dear Hillary Clinton: Blaming Russia for everything is not a presidential platform; it is a convenient alibi for the absence of one. Even your war criminal boyfriend understands that.
Good grief. 2016.
