A Pox On All Their Houses

Keep in mind The Daily Beast has been very much like that one mean girl who is kinda the champion mean girl, pretending not to be a mean girl at all, while constantly stirring the shit between rival cliques of mean girls, in order to assert her supremacy as Queen O' The Mean, even as she operates from a position of stealthy independence. 

They are less so now that Tina Brown is gone - but still - this could easily be an exercise in cat-fighting, which seems altogether fitting since that was pretty much the main objective of Russian Fuckery last year.

I've had this whole thing rattling around in my head for quite a while, and much of it fits with everybody's suspicions that The Bernie Bros and The HillBots and The Evil Duopoly crowd (and and and) were all stoked by the Russian rat-fuckers working overtime just to disrupt the process. 

Anyway, this piece has value - I just have to remind myself to check my Confirmation Bias regularly.

The Daily Beast:

Moscow’s attempts to cultivate America’s far-left long predate the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, according to available evidence, donated more funds per capita to the U.S. Communist Party than any other communist claque during the Soviet period, when Moscow’s intelligence operations against the “main adversary” involved recruiting agents of influence and spies of a progressive background who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But the past 18 months have seen a noted spike in information warfare aimed at gulling the Bernie Bros and Occupy-besotted alternative-media set, which saw Clinton as more of a political danger than it did Trump.

Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein’s trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.’s “disastrous militarism.” Afterward, straddling Moscow’s Red Square, Stein described the panel as “inspiring,” going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he “agree[d]” with her “on many issues.”

Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy.