(Hillary Clinton)
Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, made it clear to New Yorker writer Raffi Khachadourian
back in 2017 what he thought of claims his organization was manipulated in a
“coordinated propaganda effort” to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016
presidential elections.
Assange “has turned the official assessment—at best, a
declaration that he had been used--into a symbol of American failure, establishment
mendacity, Democratic hysteria, neo-McCarthyism, and fake news,” Khachadourian
wrote.
It was through WikiLeaks that the world learned the
Democratic Party leadership had worked to scuttle Bernie Sanders’ candidacy to
clear the way for Clinton’s nomination and path to defeat Republican Donald
Trump. We all know what happened. Trump won, and the Clinton establishment,
desperate for a scapegoat, blamed the Russians, raising the specter of
collusion with the Trump campaign.
After two long years, the Mueller Report, named after
special counsel Robert Mueller, is out and puts to rest claims that the Trump
campaign colluded with the Russians in defeating Hillary Clinton. The Russians
may have interfered in the campaign but not in direct cahoots with Trump.
Journalists like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow may never recover.
Once respected for her insightful commentary, Maddow invested herself nearly
totally in the collusion conspiracy theory and hammered away on it night after
night for more than two years. She compromised her journalistic integrity,
ignoring other important issues to obsess about this one. Once a fan, I stopped
watching her long ago.
The Democratic Party establishment deserves much of the
blame for the disaster of the Trump Administration, pushing a deeply flawed
candidate, undermining a much better one, and paving the road for the victory
of a demagogue. Even today, it doesn’t accept its complicity in this tragedy,
and that’s why its continued disconnect with reality even after the Mueller
Report dashed its conspiracy hopes.
As Khatchadourian wrote, Assange saw Clinton as “corrupt,
pathetically driven by personal ambition, a neoliberal interventionist destined
to take the United States into war—the epitome of a political establishment
that deserved to be permanently ousted.”
He was right.
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