The Post and its editors have on their hands the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died as a result of that illegal aggressive war, but those editors have not suffered a whit for their participation in war crimes. Instead, exactly the same senior editorial-page editors -- Fred Hiatt and Jackson Diehl -- are still there, touted on the newspaper's masthead, still misleading the Post's readers.
By contrast, The Wall Street Journal (of all places) did some serious reporting on the key question of "moderate" rebels allied with Al Qaeda. The Journal reported on Sept. 29: "Some of Syria's largest rebel factions are doubling down on their alliance with an al Qaeda-linked group, despite a U.S. warning to split from the extremists or risk being targeted in airstrikes. The rebel gambit is complicating American counter-terrorism efforts in the country at a time the U.S. is contemplating cooperation with Russia to fight extremist groups."
If even Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal can acknowledge this important context, why can't The Washington Post?
Dangerous Terrain
But the whipping up of a New Cold War with Russia and the demonizing of Vladimir Putin extend beyond The Washington Post to virtually the entire U.S. political/media establishment which has plunged into this dangerous terrain without any more serious thought and analysis than preceded the Iraq invasion, except now the target for "regime change" is nuclear-armed Russia and this adventurism risks the extermination of life on the planet.
Despite these grave dangers, the Democrats and the Clinton campaign have settled on a strategy of exploiting the New McCarthyism of the New Cold War to discredit Trump through "guilt by association" to Putin even though the two men have apparently never met.
Mostly this New McCarthyism has been used to divert attention from developments threatening to Hillary Clinton's electoral chances, such as the release of embarrassing emails among Democratic insiders hacked from the personal account of Clinton adviser John Podesta and, since last Friday, the statement by FBI Director James Comey that he has reopened the investigation into Clinton's use of an unsecured email server because of emails found on a computer in the home of Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner.
In the first instance, the Clinton campaign sought to redirect attention from the content of the emails, including the text of speeches that Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs and other financial interests, to the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia was probably behind the hack.
"A Witch Hunt"
In the Comey situation, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, has sought to counter Comey's stunning announcement last Friday by calling on the FBI director to also disclose whatever the FBI may have discovered about links between Trump's aides and the Kremlin.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Democrats have raised suspicions about Carter Page, an early-on Trump adviser and former Merrill Lynch banker who gave a speech last summer criticizing the United States and other Western nations for a "hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change" in Russia and other parts of the old Soviet Union.
Page termed Reid's efforts to transform a political disagreement into a criminal case "a witch hunt," a phrase familiar from Sen. Joe McCarthy's Red-scare investigations of the late 1940s and early 1950s into the loyalty of Americans.
Another Trump adviser caught up in the Democrats' attempts to smear the Trump campaign over alleged ties to Moscow is Roger Stone. The Times reported that Democrats have accused Stone "of being a conduit between the Russian hackers and WikiLeaks," which published Podesta's hacked emails, because Stone has said he had contacts with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and seemed to anticipate the damaging disclosures, though Stone has denied any prior knowledge.
An irony from this case of "trading places" -- with the Democrats now darkly suggesting Republican ties to Moscow rather than the opposite during the McCarthy era -- is that Roger Stone was a longtime associate of the late Roy Cohn, who was the controversial counsel on Sen. McCarthy's Red-hunting investigations.
Stone derided the Democratic attempts to discredit Trump and himself with claims of ties to Moscow as "the new McCarthyism."
Despite the irony, Stone is not wrong in his assessment. Rarely in American politics since the dark days of Joe McCarthy have so many unsubstantiated accusations of disloyalty been directed at any major political figure as the Democrats have done to Donald Trump.
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