Indeed, wild accusations, unproved claims, and complete LIES have been the basis of the nonstop Fake News/Lying Left/Demleft attacks on this President....
What Explains the Ferocity of the Attack Against Donald Trump
Standards of evidence have gone out the window when it comes to attacking President Trump.
TO WHAT extent does the two-year political investigation into Donald Trump and his top aides and family members, based on suspicions of treacherous “collusion” with the Russian government, represent a kind of McCarthyism? Most people involved in that investigation no doubt would be aghast at the question. After all, they might say, they were only trying to save the country from an obviously bad man who had both motive and opportunity to scheme with the Russians for his own nefarious purposes. Even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller made clear that his two-year investigation could find no evidence of collusion to justify any legal action, many on the anti-Trump Left continued to insist that it had happened and they would continue the assault.
But Mueller’s finding of no collusion does raise questions about the propriety of an inquiry based on suspicions and fragments of evidence that never added up to any serious proof of such cravenness. That was a frequent complaint about McCarthyism back in the days of its greatest menacing influence. And, just as Senator Joseph McCarthy sought to leverage his allegations of communist collusion into partisan political advantage, so too did Trump’s accusers seek to bring down a president and curtail his range of executive action.
The motive of suppressing communism no longer applies, of course, as the primary sources of anticommunist anxiety in McCarthy’s day—the expansionist Soviet empire and its Chinese counterpart—no longer exist. But today’s obsession with Russia as a threat, although it represents hardly a fragment of the old postwar capacity for menace, could be considered a stand-in for the anti-Soviet obsession of old.
What about “indiscriminate, often unfounded, accusations”? The Russia collusion episode certainly qualifies on that count. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee (now chairman), said he had “plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy”—and, he added, this was “more than circumstantial evidence.” Given Mueller’s ultimate conclusion on the same question, with all of the investigative resources at his command, one has to wonder what evidence Schiff was talking about. Meanwhile, another California Democrat, Eric Swalwell, accused Trump of being an “agent” of Russia. He added, by way of elaboration, “he certainly acts on Russia’s behalf.”
These accusations also comport with Webster’s definitional element of “sensationalism.” But it’s even more sensational and damaging when coming from former top-level intelligence officials, such as James Clapper and John Brennan. Brennan said that “Watergate pales really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting now.” He described Trump’s claim of no collusion as “hogwash,” which was a roundabout accusation of treason. He dispensed with the circumlocution when he called Trump’s performance in Helsinki, Finland, following a summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin, “nothing short of treasonous.”
Clapper, meanwhile, invoked the constitutional definition of treason when he said Trump was “essentially aiding and abetting the Russians” though he later said he used the term “only in a...colloquial sense,” whatever that means. Asked if Trump was a Russian asset, as former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe had suggested was possible, Clapper said, “I completely agree with the way Andy characterized it.” He added a “caveat” that it could have been “witting or unwitting.”
Here we get to a fundamental element of McCarthyism, which can be illustrated by an exploration of the real McCarthy and his followers back in the early 1950s. These days we often see, in Hollywood movies and intellectual history, a view of the Wisconsin senator as coming out of the blue, roiling a serene nation with utterly false and brutal accusations of communist activity when there was no such threat at all.
Clapper, it seems, was seeking to expand the definition of official wrongdoing to ensnare Trump even without any evidence of corrupt intent—in other words, unwitting wrongdoing, like, say, suggesting that it would be good if America and Russia could have cordial relations. We know, based on Clapper’s public pronouncements, what he thinks of that idea. He abhors it because he considers Russia to be a clear and present threat to America. Trump, by contrast, thinks whatever threat Russia poses could possibly be mitigated through efforts to assuage tensions between the two countries.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature...ld-trump-62547
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Originally Posted by Grokmaster
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