It’s still happening
If you wonder why so many Republicans are now backing Vladimir Putin and are hostile to Ukraine in its fight to remain a free sovereign country, you don’t have to look much farther than the fact that they are members of a cult that worships a man who seems to have an unusual affinity for Valdimir Putin. That certainly informs the cultists’ beliefs. But just as important is the right wing media’s eager dissemination of Russian talking points. Even some Republicans are becoming alarmed:
The most striking example came this week. In an interview with Puck News’s Julia Ioffe, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) — none other than the GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — flat-out said that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”
McCaul suggested conservative media was to blame.
“There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it’s almost identical [to what they’re saying on Russian state television] — on our airwaves,” McCaul said.
He also cited “these people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda.”
Asked which Republicans specifically he was talking about, McCaul said it was “obvious,” before staff intervened and asked that the conversation go off the record.
These comments are the most significant to date, but they’re not the only ones.
A GOP impasse over additional funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia — combined recently with Tucker Carlson’s deeply weird promotion of Russia and Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies from Moscow — has apparently occasioned some self-reflection among Republicans about their colleagues and allies:
Former vice president Mike Pence, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and a top aide to Sen. Todd Young (R-Ill.) have warned their party against serving as apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Recent presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies, among others, “empower Putin.”
And Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) shot back at criticism from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) about Cornyn’s support for Ukraine, urging Paxton to “spend less time pushing Russian propaganda.”
Around the same time, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said there is now “a Putin wing of the Republican Party.”
Of course, they’ve known about this for a long time, haven’t they?
House GOP leaders in 2016 privately joked about Trump being compromised by Russia, as later reported by The Washington Post.
The day after The Post broke the news that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) quipped that perhaps Russia had gotten Democrats’ opposition research about Trump.
“There’s two people, I think, Putin pays,” McCarthy added, “[Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” (Rohrabacher was an openly pro-Russian Republican from California.)
Then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) quickly tried to steer the conversation in another direction and urged people to be discreet.
Trump managed to convince most of the country that there really wasn’t anything wrong with Russia helping his campaign because the Mueller investigation didn’t find that Trump directly conspired with them. The fact that one of his campaign managers, a man in hock to Russian oligarchs who had been working for Russian puppets for years, was handing campaign information to a Russian agent, never really penetrated because he managed to flood the zone with BS. It’s still one of the most shocking examples of campaign treachery in American history. And you can bet that it’s being repeated in dozens of different ways.
Half the world’s dictators are doing everything they can to get that half-wit back in power because they know that he’s completely incompetent and subject to flattery. Republicans know this too and they’re going along with it.