November 25, 2017 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Russiagate: The Frenzied Ideological Assault, Based on Nothing, that Refuses to Go Away

Friends,

Once again the “Russians Did It!” canard as an instrument to “get” President Trump is front and center in the Mainstream Media, and as usual, they are salivating at the prospect that, at last, somehow, someplace, there is a “smoking gun.” Now it’s General Michael Flynn, last week it was Paul Manafort, and before that it was George Papadopoulos…. And each time this Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) among the media and their political epigones erupts, there is a frenzy of baseless speculation, unfounded hopes, and assertions based on what is essentially “fake news” reporting.

Alas, it makes literally no difference that the stated legal parameters for naming the present special counsel and his charge were to investigate, uniquely, potential “Russian collusion and/or meddling” in the 2016 election; yet nothing—absolutely nothing—has been found or even remotely detected, linking the president to any possible Russian interference. But that has not stopped Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his battery of attorneys (almost all staunch Hillary Clinton-supporting Democrats), who have broadened their “investigation” to include any infraction, real or imagined, that anyone associated with Donald Trump going back decades, may have committed, including questionable business dealings or faulty income tax reporting—none of which have to do with the specific mandate.

Thus, the latest breathless “revelations” that just possibly General Flynn may be ready to “make a deal” (Over what? His taxes, his involvement as a lobbyist for Turkey?) with Special Counsel Mueller  are met with over-the-top exuberant speculation and unbridled delight—just maybe, just maybe, this is it!  

While Democratic loyalists, diehard NeverTrumpers and Mainstream Media zealots continue pushing this effort, I think a majority of Americans are, by now, completely alienated by and disinterested in and tired of this narrative. This theme is like the Energizer Bunny: it just keep running and running and running. It’s like when we were in Middle or High School, and there was a classmate who just never stopped talking, even if he (or she) had exhausted anything useful or interesting in the first thirty seconds of a five minute spiel.

But at least those classmates usually had no ulterior (or ideological) motive and weren’t seeking to undermine or get another classmate expelled! The “Russians Did It!” canard has an ideological and sharply partisan goal. And its unbridled and feverish convulsions betray an observable form of hysteria and actual madness.

I have labeled this hysterical concentration that seems to totally dominate and control the lives of pundits on CNN, on MSNBC, and at The New York Time and Washington Post, a form of lunacy that characterizes the fanatical revolutionary. And I wrote that the program of these revolutionaries turns liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves its supporters in unrequited passions and desire, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a counter or pseudo-reality. It is to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of real lunacy. 

In his fine volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:

“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

“The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return. Now, almost before my eyes, this man had made a great stride from liberty to lunacy. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [Italics added]

Our modern revolutionaries, whether in Congress demanding the president’s impeachment, or using the Office of Special Counsel as a limitless “star chamber” medium of assault, or broadcasting nightly ideological sputum they call news, are, to use Chesterton’s parable, certifiably insane: men “already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.

The United States—a large segment of it—seems possessed by this dark demon, infected beyond repair and beyond hope by a revolutionary contagion that fits Chesterton’s definition of lunacy. For the past half century—indeed, for much longer—this virulent revolutionary bacillus has roamed almost freely, poisoning all that it comes in contact with. It respects no traditional rules of morality or standards of conduct; it seeks only to bring down, to pervert, and to destroy the culture in which it exists as a hostile and now largely dominant force. It is the forward panzer of a cultural Marxist blitzkrieg that ranges across every facet of human endeavor and which corrupts and perverts our churches, our schools, our entertainment and sports industry, our politics, and our very means of communicating with each other. It is what the Church Fathers 1,500 years ago would have termed “the triumph of the partisans of evil,” and about which they sternly warned us: “Be sober, be watchful! For your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same suffering befalls your brethren all over the world.” (I Peter 5:8-9, verses used in Compline, the ancient Evening Prayers of the Divine Office of the Church.)

Increasingly, the mad raging roar of our Social Justice Warrriors resembles the portrait in St. Peter’s Epistle.