The left has gone ballistic, crying foul, pounding the table and calling President Trump everything from a Russian puppet to a traitor after his summit with Vladimir Putin. Trump’s refusal to publicly condemn the Russian strongman — and sharp criticism of his own country for a relationship with Russia which he said has “never been worse” – has led to a sudden outbreak of patriotism on the left.
But leftists who make a habit of ridiculing traditional American patriotism have long since abandoned the high ground regarding Trump in general, and the Russian Federation in particular. Their loud objections are akin to the boy who cried wolf. They sound the alarm on everything Trump has said and done to the point where few outside the hard left even pay attention anymore.
And that is before we even consider the left’s warm embrace of Russia in the days of Soviet communist tyranny.
Truth be known, when Russia was the Soviet Union, the Russians were never viewed as an enemy by American progressives. The salad days of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were accepted, even embraced, in most quarters of the left as the collectivist wave of the future. Typical of the left’s betrayal was a letter written by powerful Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1983, urging him to pay no attention to the anti-Soviet rhetoric of then-President Ronald Reagan, promising that he and his fellow left-wingers would undermine Reagan at every turn, and recommending placing Soviet officials on American TV to “appeal directly to the American people about the peaceful intentions of the USSR.”
But now that Russia has become, in their eyes, a right-wing pro-Trump oligarchy, leftists have suddenly sounded alarm bells about a threat which is, obviously, in no way comparable to what it was in the days of Soviet rule.
Indeed, the American left was famously soft on the Soviet Union, an expansionist global power almost equal to the U.S. against whom we fought a 70-year cold war – and won. But now that the communists no longer run things in Moscow, Democrats and the left proclaim its successor government as dangerous and evil.
So when John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA Director, says Trump’s statements in his joint press conference with Putin are “worse than high crimes and misdemeanors” and “treasonous,” he thinks we’ll just forget about, not only the fact that he’s a proven liar, but his own admitted vote in the 1970’s for a communist — for President of the United States. And this guy deigns to call Trump a traitor?
The great Victor Davis Hanson wrote of Brennan and his ilk:
“If there is such a thing as a dangerous ‘deep state’ of elite but unelected federal officials who feel that they are untouchable and unaccountable, then John Brennan is the poster boy…Brennan is typical of the careerist deep state.”
Victor Davis Hanson
Hanson outlines the psychological tactic known as ‘projection’:
“To square their own circles of lying, our so-called best and brightest loudly accuse others of precisely the sins that they themselves commit as a matter of habit.”
The left is banking on the nation’s short attention span and diminished understanding of history in yet another attempt to claim an imminent Trumpocalyse. Much like their hysterical predictions about imminent catastrophe caused by global warming — after similarly dire warnings about a new ice age just years earlier — the left carries on as if the nation has collective amnesia regarding their about-face on the USSR and Russia.
And Brennan is hardly alone. Leftists ranging from congressional leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), to hysterical opinion writers throughout the elite media — including the hateful Charles Blow of the New York Times, who authored a piece redundantly titled “Trump, Treasonous Traitor” — have piled on with their own projections. They have engaged in big-time virtue-signaling by condemning the President’s meeting with Putin in hopes that we have forgotten the left’s own disgraceful history regarding Soviet Russia.
We haven’t.
We might well be inclined to consider the criticism of the Trump summit leveled by the likes of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and others in the GOP because their own patriotism has never been questioned, and Trump is a fellow Republican. But when it comes to taking pseudo-patriotic leftist attacks on Trump seriously, most reasonable people have decided that Brennan, Schumer, Schiff and their leftist cohorts have become little more than the boys who cry wolf.
