Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair
Whatever might come of the remaining details of the Mueller probe, lessons ‘learned’ by the American press won’t be among them. The story was never about truth, so exposing bits and pieces as untrue won’t undo its success. And the government officials and pundits who put it forward largely got what they wanted from the effort. The national security and surveillance establishments were rehabilitated, the ‘press’ was shown once again to be a reliable mouth-piece for official interests and the 2016 electoral outcome was successfully portrayed as an accident of history made worse by the moral depravity of voters.
Given that Russia’s economy today is smaller than Italy’s and its military budget wouldn’t buy a toilet seat or hammer in the U.S. military procurement system, the question of why Russia would seem a great mystery outside of history. And left unstated is that the U.S. defense industry needs enemies to survive. ‘Radical Islam,’ an invention of oil and gas industry flacks that turned out to be serviceable for marketing Tomahawk missiles and stealth fighter jets as well, lost some of its luster when ISIS and Al Qaeda came over to ‘our side.’ And humanitarian intervention ain’t what it used to be with Libya reduced to rubble and open-air slave markets now dotting the landscape.
From 1948 through the early 1990s Russia was Pennywise the evil clown, helping to sell bananas, nuclear weapons and cut-rate underwear…