MATT TAIBBI:
“…The latest act in the comedy began Friday, just before voting opened in the Nevada Democratic caucus. The Washington Post ran a story — sourced, I’m not joking, to “people familiar with the matter” — explaining that Bernie Sanders had been briefed that “Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest.”
Sanders was quick to see through the gambit. “I’ll let you guess about one day before the Nevada caucus. Why do you think it came out?” He pointed to a Post reporter: “It was The Washington Post? Good friends.” The Post after all has spent years dumping on Sanders, a fervent critic of the paper’s billionaire creep of an owner, Jeff Bezos.
Intelligence officials and pundits have been screeching for years that patriotism demands voters reject the foreign agent Donald Trump and the Russian asset Bernie Sanders, and support a conventional establishment politician. Voters responded by moving toward Trump in national approval surveys and speeding Sanders to the top of the Democratic Party ticket. A more thorough disavowal of official propaganda would be difficult to imagine…
…The extraordinary thing about this campaign to identify basically the entire universe of political thought outside of establishment Democrats in the U.S. as Russian assets has been the obvious projection involved.
The plot running through all of these stories has been the idea that Russia is trying to “undermine our democracy” by “sowing division.” But these charges are coming from the same people who spent the last four years describing Republicans as deplorable fascists, and progressives on the other side as racist, sexist, Nazis, and “digital brownshirts.”
This has resulted in a four-year parade of official cranks muttering about Russian efforts to “divide” us, when their own relentless message has been that America is besieged by a pair of Hitlerian movements on the left and right that must be put down at all costs. The only vision of “unity” they promote is one of obedience to the crackpot anti-utopia of neoliberalism that populations around the world are currently rejecting at the ballot box…”