What is transpiring now in the House of Representatives in the setting of the House Intelligence Committee is truly astounding. The Pontificatorium that is now "examining" "Russian Active Interference with the 2016 presidential election" has raised irony to the power of ten. FBI Director James Comey cautioned the members of the committee that he would be unable to comment on the details of any ongoing investigations that may involve classified material. And yet he has no problem with overstepping his self-limited description as a law enforcement official by offering astute foreign policy opinions such as "Putin hated Hillary Clinton so much." The Intelligence Committee proceedings have descended into political theater, shamelessly top billed by Democrat Adam Schiff in his opening remarks replete with innuendo, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and "possibilities" of "coincidences" all designed to indict the Trump administration as a coconspirator with Putin's Russia in defeating Hillary Clinton.
Until 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight of corruption, terror, and the dismal failure of socialist economics, the Kremlin was the promised land of proletarian revolution. Following that demise, the American Left suffered the greatest crise de foi in its history. For decades, American "progressives" carried water for Soviet leaders from Lenin to Andropov, cynically decrying the "witch hunts" and "McCarthyism" aimed at their ranks beginning in 1919. For the Left, the Soviet Union was the standard bearer of the world's suffering Proletariat, foreign and domestic. For decades, the American Left ignored Stalin's engineered famine, the Holodomor, in the Ukraine which murdered over five million men, women and children. For decades, the American Left ignored the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s. For decades the American Left defended Stalin and his autocratic successors both actively -- by invoking the "right-wing fear mongering" virago -- and passively -- by utterly ignoring the manifold human rights abuses of successive Soviet regimes.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the American left, its longtime ally and apologist, was left in disarray, disbelief, and in crisis. Like dinghies left alone on a rough and open sea, abandoned by their mother ship that has slipped beneath the waves, the Communist Party of the United States of America and its affiliated progressive groups became embittered, confused, and enraged.
How astounding and ironic it is that American Progressives, so long the intersectionalists with anti-American groups like The War Resisters League, The American Friends Service Committee, countless "fair play for Russia" organizations are now the saber rattlers, the "waving the bloody shirt" faction. Listening to politicians of the left like Andre Carson level the charge of "a new iron curtain" falling over Eastern Europe and Jackie Speier calling alleged Russian election interference "an act of war" goes beyond any utterances of Martin Dies or J. Parnell Thomas.
Of course, the allegations of Soviet espionage penetrating into the highest reaches of American government from the 1930s on have long been substantiated by the opening of Soviet secret archives while the current innuendos and conspiracy theories aimed at Putin remain vaporous. The allegations may yet be proven accurate, but the clear intent of progressives at the moment is to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump through raising the specter of a Tsarist revival in the form of Vladimir Putin and, if necessary, to precipitate an incredibly dangerous military response, if the rhetoric of Democrats can be believed. Exactly how should the United States respond to "an act of war?" In another era, anyone rattling this saber would have been branded an "adventurist" in the then popular "Sovietspeak." Had a Republican invoked this phrase in the 1950s in response to the actual instances of espionage that resulted in Stalin developing atomic weapons or the real, engineering of a presidential candidacy, that of Henry Wallace in 1948, led by convicted traitor, Eugene Dennis of the CPUSA, progressive cries of "witchhunt" would have been never ending.
In its deep feeling of abandonment by the Soviet Union's demise, American progressives will stop at nothing in overturning the presidential election results -- including provoking a military confrontation with the second most powerful nuclear power in the world.
Beneath all of this irony, I believe, is the deep-seated desire of Progressives not only to overthrow a democratic election, but to restore the Russian Revolution. The Left has seen socialist state after socialist state sink beneath the waves, leaving only a moribund Cuba, a lunatic North Korea, and -- for all appearances -- a wildly successful capitalist "communist" China to carry on the class struggle. Embittered and lost, American progressives have morphed into what they ostensibly have traditionally despised: the party of War.
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