Not many have chanced to stick their neck up and yell above the corporate calliope of the Russian Red Herring Circus Show. Add Scheer to a very exclusive roll call of truthtellers.

I found this at Truthdig yesterday (published on the 11th). Here's a link to the full text, and then some blockquote excerpts:

When Resistance Becomes Capitulation: A Response to an Open Letter in The Nation

What the statement’s opening paragraph woefully ignores is the harsh reality that the U.S. political system is far less vulnerable to hacking attacks from any foreign source than the rest of the world’s nations are from such attacks by the United States—including surveillance of world leaders, such as the Obama administration’s tapping of Angela Merkel’s personal cellphone. The NSA probably gets an alert every time Putin snores.

He then reels off a string of US interference in foreign elections, including our attempts to "to undermine Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform efforts that led to the coming to power of the ever-drunk Boris Yeltsin, who in desperation later picked Vladimir Putin to be his vice president and then to succeed him."

Yes, Putin—who had the startling virtue of being a teetotaler in a nation drowning in vodka even more than in crony socialism—was back then the preferred alternative frontman for the army of liberal American advisers preaching the virtues of a crony capitalism that savaged what remained of the Russian economy.

The rape of Russian resources by a new class of billionaires was an American export conflating virulent capitalism with freedom, and it proved once again to be the devil’s bargain. Most ordinary Russians seem to think that Putin has played that bad hand as well as could be expected.

He sharpens his point to harshly call out the feckless Democratic Party for their reckless red-baiting propaganda, their pathetic pandering and its ramifications.

Not so the ever-self-righteous leaders of the Democratic Party, who offer Putin-bashing as an alternative to coming to grips with their own failure to provide sound leadership to our country.

Instead of acknowledging their own responsibility for the angst in America, the Democrats have countered the demagogue in chief’s long list of scapegoats to blame for our problems, beginning with immigrants, with an even more absurd and much shorter “list” of their own: Putin did it!

Thus was born the red-baiting revival of the Cold War—but without a Red to attack, desperately offering up Putin, a born-again Russian Orthodox and Peter the Great clone, to explain away the Democratic leadership’s own well-deserved repudiation in the last election. Trump ruthlessly exploited the pain in America; the Clintonistas blindly ignored it. End of story.

Except it isn’t. The Democrats are now the party of warmongers, and no clearer evidence is needed than the tweet from their Senate leader, Charles Schumer, issued as Donald Trump was en route for his eventual meeting with Putin, saying Trump “is more loyal to President Putin than to our NATO allies … his duty is to protect the American people from foreign threats, not to sell out our democracy to Putin.” This is bizarre behavior on the part of the top Democrat in the Senate and reason enough never to trust the Democrats to be a “lesser evil” restraining force.

The Democratic Party should be absolutely shredded by sane citizens for its dangerous and reckless attempt to run cover for $hills' self-serving, arrogant losing campaign. I keep wondering how mainstream history will recall this menacing joke years from now.

Yes, it is a wickedly dangerous development when these enablers of the unleashing of Wall Street greed and the wild neocon and neoliberal schemes for worldwide regime change now blame Putin for our nation’s political instability...Once again, Democratic Party “resistance” will prove to be abject capitulation.

Included at the end of the piece is the Nation's "open letter signed by multiple scholars, diplomats, politicians, writers and activists calling for 'secure elections and true national security.'”

But in the opening paragraph they blow it - even if their intentions are as good as they are - by even acknowledging the appearance of an inconsequential "interference," which comprised only a handful of folks with comparatively so little money and producing no discernible effect. Contrast this farcical accusation (that The Russians threw the election, or even helped, is a joke - "hacked" is an outright provable lie) with the CIA's litany of destruction of governments all over the world.

As lotlizard and CStMS were saying here, the farcical RussiaGate narrative has also been used as a blunt weapon in libeling and slandering people (i.e. Jill Stein, Glenn Greenwald, etc)

For posterity's sake, maybe we can use this thread space of this essay to fill in the rest of the roll call of those who have refused to take the bait and have instead stood up to call it out for the Clinton Cover Distraction bullshit that it is. As Bob Scheer has done just now in the Nation.