In any event, the Democratic Party leadership's obsessive focus on blaming the Russians for their catastrophic loss to Donald Trump and the Republicans in November is a truly stupid idea. The only people who believe it are hard-core Democrats who are going to vote for Democratic candidates no matter how corrupt and two-faced they are. Nobody else cares these days about Russia. In fact, many independents, and even many Republican voters, openly admire Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin. Most leftist Democrats and progressives in and outside the party -- the people who were the core of the Sanders movement -- aren't buying the DNC's Russia story either. Meanwhile, most of the party's base, or its erstwhile base -- workers of all races, unemployed or underemployed blacks and hispanics, struggling single mothers, financially strapped college students and the like, could care less about Russia and what it did or didn't do during the campaign. A common refrain one hears is, "If the Russians exposed Hillary Clinton's emails and her secret paid speeches to the big Wall Street banks, good for them! Someone had to do it!"
So what is the DNC accomplishing through this silly attempt to revive the kind of Russia-bashing we haven't seen since the McCarthyism of the '50s and early '60s? Worse than nothing. The party and its top elected officials look ridiculous, and the people that the party needs so desperately to win back are left wondering why they should care about the Democratic Party at all, since it's not rallying them with a call to arms for expanding and defending Social Security and establishing Medicare for All, not (except for Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard) standing with the Standing Rock Sioux against a dangerous and craven pipeline, not refusing to accept another Scalia clone as Supreme Court Justice, and not even demanding an end to US military involvement in the Middle East and provocations of Russia along that country's western border and of China in the South China Sea, and certainly not vowing to sever its corrupt tie to large corporate interests.
A party that is that detached from the wishes and demands of the electorate, and of its own discouraged and angry base, is not a party that's going to be around much longer.
At least one can hope.
DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative new site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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