Lame duck House speaker Paul Ryan, the Ayn Rand cultist who would kill Social Security and Medicare, said, "there is no question that Russia interfered in our election and continues attempts to undermine democracy here and around the world."
But will all that uproar shake Trump's fascist grassroots/corporatist support? The New York Times reports he's already raised $88 million for a 2020 re-election campaign. His ceaseless outrages seem to bounce off the armor of an iron-clad constituency. Having "joked" he could kill someone in public and not drop in the polls, he now seems set to prove the same thing about stabbing the whole country in the back.
On the left, the Times ran a rare full-banner page one headline: "Trump, at Putin's Side, Questions U.S. Intelligence on 2016 Election."
Liberal columnist Charles Blow wrote, "Trump is a traitor."
Even the milquetoasty columnist Thomas L. Friedman accused Trump of "treasonous behavior."
More importantly, a recent open letter in The Nation, signed by an all-star cast of progressive notables, rightly warns against increased hostility between Russia and the US. Had Helsinki been a meet-up between Putin and Hillary Clinton, we might well be on the brink of nuclear war.
But the Putin-Trump mafioso bromance is less about geopolitical rivalries than the foreign ownership of an incompetent interloper by a master manipulator, and the overall vulnerability of our rickety, corrupted electoral system, no matter who is on the attack.
Predictably, the Corporate Democrat money machine has seized on the image of a wig-wearing Benedict Arnold trashing US intelligence in the presence of a foreign dictator. The endless flow of outraged fundraising emails now features this latest Trump infamy.
But the party itself remains as visionless as ever. It's yet to endorse Medicare for All, a real push to end poverty, a moratorium on student loan payments, a genuine effort to regulate Wall Street, an end to Empire, real resistance to the Koch/Putin fossil/nuke juggernaut, a Solartopian vision for a green-powered earth, a genuine attempt to protect our elections from being stripped and flipped by domestic operatives, or much of anything else.
The NY Congressional victory of 28-year-old democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has sent shockwaves through the party elite. Progressive California Assembly president Kevin de Leà �n has just won the state party's endorsement for US Senate over the corporatist incumbent Diane Feinstein. Feinstein won the recent primary and has a huge financial advantage. But a de Leà �n victory has become more of a possibility.
There's much more. The Progressive left has never stopped resisting Trump, and this latest treason can only deepen the effort.
Ultimately, it won't be enough to merely show how terrible this mafia underling really is. It also will take an alternative vision, which the Corporate Democrats seem incapable of presenting.
The likes of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo and Diane Feinstein need to step aside if we are ever to be rid of Trump, Putin, and their fascist Russo-American mob.
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