How Putin Played the Far Left

[applegrove]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/13/how-putin-played-the-far-left.html

by Casey Michel at the Daily Beast

"SNIP..........


Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein’s trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.’s “disastrous militarism.” Afterward, straddling Moscow’s Red Square, Stein described the panel as “inspiring,” going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he “agree[d]” with her “on many issues.”

Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy.

Indeed, her pro-Kremlin stance wasn’t limited to merely praising Putin’s amicability. Stein joined the Russian president and Kazakhstani dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev in describing Ukraine’s 2014 EuroMaidan revolution as a “coup,” and claimed, bizarrely, that NATO is currently “fighting… enemies we invent to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff.”

For good measure, she also asserted in September that “Russia used to own Ukraine,” by way of defending its colonization. She even selected a vice-presidential candidate who, when asked whether the downing of Flight MH17—a massacre almost certainly caused by Russian-supplied separatists in eastern Ukraine—was a false flag, responded, “[T]hat’s exactly what has happened.”


............SNIP"

[Uponthegears]

1. By Casey Michel at the Jamestown Foundation

Published in the Daily Beast

[m-lekktor]

10. Thanks for pointing that out about the Jamestown Foundation.

It's formation was assisted by ex CIA director William Casey among other things, very interesting. That's all I need to know about Casey Michel to understand why he wrote such horseshit. Propaganda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown_Foundation

[synergie]

13. And these are not pure enough in your estimation? Your problems with facts

in this article, or is attacking a publication and an organization by merely stating the name the only argumetn you have?

[HassleCat]

2. There don't seem to be many Soviet style communists here anymore.

I guess the Green Party is about as sympathetic as Putin can find. They're a little more viable than the Libertarians right now, but American third parties are pretty random in their views, platform, etc. What we need to do is appeal to whatever fraction of Greens are progressives, and not just so frustrated with our party that they get goofy. What percentage is that? I have no idea, but maybe as much as half?

[applegrove]

3. Greens in Canada seem to be good eggs and sharp.

[Dems to Win]

4. I remember Gary Webb, CurveBall, Judith Miller, babies thrown out of incubators

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post so ridiculed Gary Webb's reporting that the CIA was helping import cocaine from the Central America, I concluded Pincus is a CIA asset. I have no more trust of the Washington Post now that it's owned by Jeff Bezos.

I don't trust Putin or Trump, or the CIA or the Washington Post or the New York Times. I don't want to be played by Putin or the CIA -- both are notorious for doing just that. People around here used to agree with my skepticism toward all of them.

I know that I have no idea what's going on here with this Russia hysteria. Far as I can tell, they are all lying, all for their own reasons.

If RT is the only network that will air Thom Hartmann, that's where I'll watch him. Thom is an intelligent, well-informed commentator and he says, and I believe him, that he has full editorial freedom on his show. Doesn't mean I agree with everything he says, or take his word as gospel.

I continue to respect the work done by Robert Parry and The Nation.

It does not give me warm fuzzies that American troops have now entered Poland. I don't know what's going on between the US and Russia, but I do know I don't want WWIII.

Scary times. So convenient to discredit 'the left' as Putin-lovers. An entire swath of opposition to Trump and the military industrial complex, swept off the board from 'respectable' discussion.

(this article was extensively discussed here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028468238
Including a copy of my post)

[bettyellen]

5. The people around here who are as sympathetic to Putin as

They are to the CIA - who our current POTUS and leading Dems are standing with right now, and only the GOP trying hard to discredit- have moved on and created their own site. They also cheered when Trump won.
You need their URL or are ya good?

[JCanete]

7. Thank you for posting. Totally agreed. If we love our nation, trust in our government agencies

without verification is abdication of our role as American Citizens. The trust in our government is predicated on our checks and balances on it. And we KNOW who owns our own media. Companies and individuals who are only tangentially American. They are pretty much trans-national at this point. They have no vested interest in protecting the interests of American Citizens, unless that somehow coincides with their own financial gains and stability.

The article is just a big smear job intended to put all establishment wary liberals into the same barrel...so much easier to blast us that way.

[Dems to Win]

9. Thank you

[synergie]

14. RT, the network of disinformation owned by Putin? That's what you trust?

It's not the left, that's being addressed here, its the elements that were targeted and manipulated by Putin, with the same talking points they used on the Right.

[forjusticethunders]

6. Russia's been at this for decades, they're good at it. Putin is former KGB guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation#As_KGB_tradecraft

[baldguy]

8. Anyone who fell for Russia's attacks on Clinton should be ashamed of themselves.

Especially those claiming to be liberals and progressives.

[TomCADem]

11. Putin Is Playing Both Extremes. Trump Supporters on Right...

...and the folks who follow RT's supported "liberal" hosts such Ed Shultz and company.

[Cha]

12. K&R!