Article Analysis: Bad Grandma's Bircher Bromide Bungle and Further Thoughts

Editor's note: this article originally appeared as a two part series over the course of October 22nd on Facebook; for my latest piece "Screw Yoo: the Turtle, the War Criminal and the Mutant who would be King" please click here.

All analysis by Nina Illingworth unless otherwise indicated.

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"Everyone Is a Russian Asset" 

As those of you who read my writing regularly already know, I'm a big fan of Matt Taibbi's work over at Rolling Stone, even if I don't always agree with him on every issue and I question some of the relationships he maintains online. In this October 21st opinion piece, Taibbi dissects the unhinged neo-McCarthyist attack former Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton recently unleashed on both 2020 presidential nomination candidate Tulsi Garbard and 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein. 

According to Clinton (and her numerous defenders in the liberal mainstream discourse) those dastardly Russians are planning on pushing Tulsi Gabbard into a third party candidacy (which Gabbard has already ruled out on multiple occasions by the way) and Jill Stein is legitimately a Russian asset - which conveniently means pretty much everyone who has directly pointed out that Hillary wanted to start a real as f*ck hot war in Syria if she won the presidency in 2016, is now supposedly working for Vladdy Putin.

While I strongly recommend you read the whole article, it would be harder to come up with a better summation of Taibbi's thesis than the one the author clearly articulates on his own:

"Hillary Clinton is nuts. She’s also not far from the Democratic Party mainstream, which has been pushing the same line for years."

Obviously it will come as a surprise to no one that I agree with Taibbi when he says Clinton is nuts, but it's the latter half of his argument that I feel has become largely lost in the chaos and shuffle of Trump's deranged fascist presidency and the lukewarm opposition to that fascism the Democratic Party has offered up in response. As Taibbi thoroughly documents, the most bonkers thing about a former U.S. Secretary of State blaming her 2016 loss on Putin and accusing everyone she feels crossed her of being a secret Russian sleeper agent is the fact that none of the crazy sh*t Hillary just spewed out is really any different than the wild conspiracy theories moving throughout liberal mainstream political discourse and the mainstream, Democratic Party-friendly side of American corporate media.

There is no, let me repeat that, *no* credible evidence whatsoever that either Tulsi Gabbard or Jill Stein are working for Russia; there never has been and if such evidence actually existed one would think that Robert Mueller's months and months long investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election might have turned some up. While I'm certainly not a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard as a politician or as a potential presidential nominee, the fact is she's a sitting U.S. Congresswoman and an active officer of the American military reserves - if merely half of what the liberal establishment claimed about Gabbard were true, you can bet your backside the goddamn NSA would have found out by now and we'd be talking about a trial for high treason. All of this is bullsh*t and plenty of people know it, including fellow 2020 Democratic Party nomination candidates Robert O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders as well as mainstream, Clinton-friendly media observers like Noah Schachtman (editor of the Daily Beast) and analyst Van Jones. Even the Washington Post has noted that Clinton has provided no evidence to back up these accusations, which in turn obviously implies that she should have to because there is no public evidence that either Stein or Gabbard are working for Vladimir Putin!

Frankly the mainstream media outlets and political mercenaries pushing this line of dogsh*t ALSO know it's malicious garbage; as anyone who read "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" can tell you, the entire "Russian asset" smear that has become the go to political attack for neoliberal establishment minions was cooked up over Shake Shack takeout by Clinton, John Podesta, Bobby Mook and various other campaign lackeys to explain away Hillary's shocking (but still entirely predictable) election night loss - check it out on page 395 of the 1st print hardcover.

Hell even a little basic deductive reasoning should lead any rational observer to question these claims, even if you buy into the weird neo-McCarthyist, New Cold War logic the liberal establishment is selling here. If Donald Trump was working for Russia, then why did Hillary Clinton's campaign purposely try (successfully, apparently) to "elevate" Downmarket Mussolini to the GOP nomination? Wouldn't that be both extremely dangerous and also "helping Russia" influence an American election? I mean using that rational, should we be asking if *Hillary Clinton* is a "Russian asset" - after all it was Hillary Clinton and her campaign's 100% real emails "zee Russians" supposedly leaked and if everyone who doesn't like Hillary Clinton is working for the KGB, I'd say those completely unaltered emails were a pretty big "asset" in terms of getting Trump into the White House, wouldn't you?

This is of course ridiculous because neither Hillary Clinton nor her campaign are, or were working for Russia but the fact that you can use the exact same logic to publicly indict Clinton, as Clinton is using to publicly indict Gabbard and Stein, goes a long way towards demonstrating what an utter pile of bullsh*t this entire "Russia" saga in American politics has turned out to be. 

The simple truth is that Trump's a crook, Clinton was a terrible candidate and the "Russia" part of "Russiagate" has always been about making sure nobody in the Democratic Party or elite liberal establishment was ever head accountable for punting a winnable election to a bloviating, moronic, billionaire rapist, fascist reality TV show host whose catch phrase was seriously "you're fired." Bad Grandma can point the finger all she likes but the facts of the matter are that nobody can stop reality, from being real and there's nothing real about the endlessly intimated Russian sleeper plot to destroy American neoliberalism at all.

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"Hillary Clinton slanders Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Green Party candidate Jill Stein as Russian spies" 

In my previous post I talked a bit about Matt Taibbi's new article and elaborated on the origins as well as the purpose of the liberal mainstream's "Russian asset" smear; despite being firmly able to debunk Bad Grandma's preposterous Bircher smears however, we're still no closer to understanding precisely why Hillary Clinton attacked Gabbard and Stein without prompting. After all the simple truth is that Clinton, her campaign staff and the elite Democratic Party establishment already got away with blaming their 2016 election loss on mysterious Russian spies and collaborators - nobody in the party was fired after losing to Donald Trump and nothing inside the Dem Party's leadership structure changed at all.

In this October 19th piece at the World Socialist Web Site, Andre Damon makes a fairly compelling argument that this is, in the end, all about Pig Empire imperialism in Syria. Along the way Damon also drops a number of delightfully true and objectively damning observations like:

"Clinton’s attacks on Gabbard and Stein make clear once again that the Democrats’ assertions of “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election were primarily aimed not at Trump, but at the anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiments that led millions of people to refuse to vote for her in 2016."

"As a central part of their anti-Russia campaign, Clinton and the Democrats promoted the media effort to poison public opinion against journalist Julian Assange by slandering him as a “Russian agent,” preparing the way for the Trump administration to indict him on bogus espionage charges and secure his imprisonment in London under conditions that threaten his life. At the same time, in the name of countering the supposed menace of Russian “fake news,” the Democrats pressured Google to slash search traffic to left-wing political websites and insisted that Facebook and Twitter delete left-wing accounts with millions of followers."

Finally Damon ties up the article by pointing out Hillary Clinton's fairly explicit and largely unreported calls for more media censorship; an issue that is no doubt dear to his heart as the World Socialist Web Site is one of the online outlets that have been most damaged by the Google de-ranking shenanigans we talked about in my "cone of silence" piece earlier here on Facebook:

"I think it’s a lot harder for Americans to know what they’re supposed to believe,” she said. In the 1970s, with only three major national newspapers, “It was a much more controllable environment.” 

This is all great stuff and at the end of the day, it's hard to argue with Andre Damon's central thesis here - but if there's one thing I've learned from years of studying the political machine known as "Clinton, Inc" it's that these folks use the whole damn cow. It seems unlikely to me that Clinton's only reason for going full Q-Anon here is her unbridled love for horrific forever wars in the Middle East. If so, what else might be behind Hillary Clinton's decision to appear on former Obama campaign manager David Plouff's mainstream liberal political podcast and go completely frothing Bircher nutjob on Gabbard and Stein?

Former Democratic Party operative turned liberal commentator Van Jones thinks it's a question of simple revenge. After all, Gabbard's decision to resign her high-ranking position in the DNC and then endorse Bernie Sanders 2016 Democratic Party nomination campaign was considered highly disrespectful by the Clinton campaign - a fact we know because Wikileaks released an email from Clinton go-between Michael Kives to Tulsi Gabbard that directly said as much (see below.)

While many internet commentators have wondered if Hillary is just trying to keep herself in the news as part of a secret plot to jump into the 2020 Democratic Party nomination sometime in the very near future, I'm less certain that's what is going on here. While I have no doubt that Clinton's accusations were both personal and strategic, I have a hard time imagining someone with Hillary's fragile ego being prepared to risk losing a third Presidential run - putting up a sixth place finish in New Hampshire and dropping out isn't much of a plan for protecting your political legacy.

What about a possible deflection strategy? As Chapo Trap House pod-caster extraordinaire has noted in relation to another controversy, Clinton's accusations came awful close on the heels of Ronan Farrow's new book - a book which implicated Hillary in helping to protect now-exposed Hollywood rapist (and former Clinton donor/surrogate) Harvey Weinstein. If that's not tactically ruthless and politically Machiavellian enough for you, how about the fact that news that Bernie Sanders was going to pick up 3 key endorsements (including AOC's endorsement) on October 16th and the very next day, October 17th, Clinton came along to drop some Alex Jones-style nonsense about Gabbard, Stein and Russia - effectively driving the good tidings for Sanders out of the headlines in a media environment already dead set on ignoring his campaign? Was this part of the liberal mainstream's quixotic fight to destroy Bernie Sanders and push Joe Biden or Liz Warren across the finish line in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest?

Frankly, I don't know the answer to these questions any more than the next person who is not Hillary Clinton or one of her numerous in-the-know minions. What I can say after years of tracking the twists and turns of Clintonite and Democratic Party internal politics under the influence of the Third Way philosophy, is that there is a non-zero percent chance the real answer here is "all of the above."

Say what you will about Clinton, her husband and the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party they've spent decades nurturing, none of these folks has ever had a problem coming up with new ways to punish their enemies and game the system.

- nina illingworth


Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

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