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.
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