The American public is now experiencing mass paranoia that is called Russia-gate. Obnoxious and dangerous as this officially encouraged madness may be,
it is, alas, nothing new. As from 9/11, the same kind of group hypnosis was administered from the Nation's Capital on the body politic to serve the then agenda of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, turning back civil liberties that had accrued over generations without so much as a whimper from Congress, our political elites and the country at large.
This time the generalized paranoia started under the nominally left of center administration of Barack Obama in the closing months of his presidency. It has been
fanned ever since by the centrists in both Democratic and Republican parties who want to either remove from office or politically cripple Donald Trump and his administration, that is to say, to overturn the results at the ballot box on November 8, 2016.
Foreign policy issues are instrumentalized for domestic political objectives.
In 2001 it was the threat of Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world attacking the American homeland.
Today it is the alleged manipulation of our open political system by our enemies in the Kremlin.
Fear and alarm close minds to reason and facts. But in the case of our ongoing obsession with Russia there is more at stake than the careers of present-day victims of a McCarthyite witch-hunt.
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