Seeking Political Asylum in Moscow?
On his return from Helsinki, I was expecting President Trump to be perp-walked into Riker’s Island, placed in solitary, and denied all but Big Macs and Coke and then water boarded by the CIA ‘til he confessed. In fact the only elected Republicans showing a semblance of backbone were Senator John McCain and several colleagues who were retiring from electoral life. Senator Rand Paul’s stirring defense of the President and denunciation of Senator McCain should be a must listen for any aspiring Iago or wanna-be Richard III.
I’m left with the inescapable impression that Trump must be in league with Putin. How else do you explain his behavior, his mannerisms, his body language, his words? He can readily and serially insult war heroes and Gold Star parents, the Presidents of Canada and Mexico, France and Germany, NATO, the EU and the Prime Minister of England, yet he is obsequious to the point of clownish ridiculousness with Putin. Trump can tear apart immigrant families, separate babies from their mothers without a second thought, yet he cannot even begin to doubt the word of a man who has lied bald-facedly about his incursions into Crimea, the Ukraine, and Georgia, who has threatened small independent nations in the Baltics, the Balkans and the Caucasus, and who has had his many enemies murdered with poison in England, and killed in Russia. Russia is not the Bolshevik Communist menace of the Cold War anymore; it has morphed into a right wing kleptocracy with nuclear weapons. It operates under a democratic veneer, but it is not safe to be Putin’s political opposition either at home or abroad. Putin’s Russia still has aggressive imperial designs in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and Central Asia. It is oil and gas rich but an otherwise economically impoverished nation. It is nourishing ultra right wing parties in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and England.
I think it's a good thing for President Trump to sit down face to face with America’s foes, but why become their poodle before, during and afterwards? Why parrot all the Russian lines? Why attack our European allies? Why attack US intelligence? Why excuse President Putin’s malevolent behaviors? Why not be forceful in standing up for America against the man who ordered meddling in the 2016 elections and why not support those who seek to prevent a repeat? Why is the twittering bully of the Republican primaries and general election suddenly a pussycat for Putin?
I suppose one obvious reason is that the President was the direct beneficiary of that meddling and he knows it, and he expects his party to similarly benefit in 2018 and himself to benefit again in 2020. I increasingly fear either that America may have unwittingly elected a Manchurian candidate or that Trump recognizes in Putin the type of leader he aspires to become and that the abject behaviors of too many of his own party’s elected politicians and their dedicated electorates are smoothing the path towards a nation enshrined in Trump/Putin’s image. We are seeing far too much of that already in Republican primaries, on the streets, in the parks and on social media sites.
In my opinion impeachment is a false, dead end road. We must organize massive voter turnout in November and then again in 2020 if we are to salvage our own nation and help protect the best ideals of Western democracy in Europe.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 7/18/18