© Rainer HachfeldHow to stop worrying and love the bomb.
The Russia-gate hysteria has grown stronger after President Trump's firing of FBI Director Comey, but
the bigger question is whether an American "soft coup" is in the works.Where is Stanley Kubrick when we need him? If he hadn't died in 1999, he would be the perfect director to transform today's hysteria over Russia into a theater-of-the-absurd movie reprising his Cold War classic,
Dr. Strangelove, which savagely satirized the madness of nuclear brinksmanship and the crazed ideology behind it.
To prove my point,
The Washington Post on Thursday published
a lengthy story entitled in the print editions
Alarm at Russian in White House about
a Russian photographer who was allowed into the Oval Office to photograph President Trump's meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The Post cited complaints from former U.S. intelligence officials who
criticized the presence of the Russian photographer as "a potential security breach" because of "the danger that a listening device or other surveillance equipment could have been brought into the Oval Office while hidden in cameras or other electronics."To bolster this alarm, the
Post cited a Twitter comment from President Obama's last deputy CIA director, David S. Cohen, stating "No, it was not" a sound decision to admit the Russian photographer who also works for the Russian news agency, Tass, which published the photo. One could picture Boris and Natasha, the evil spies in the Bullwinkle cartoons, disguised as photographers slipping listening devices between the cushions of the sofas.
Or we could hear how Russians are again threatening to "impurify all of our precious bodily fluids," as
Dr. Strangelove character, Gen. Jack D. Ripper, warned us in the 1964 movie. Watching that brilliant dark comedy again might actually be a good idea to remind us how crazy Americans can get when they're pumped up with anti-Russian propaganda, as is happening again now.
Comment: As the Syrian Arab Army and the Russian put the squeeze on terrorists groups of every stripe, they are now fighting amongst themselves for the last scraps of influence.