Red Scare

I've lived long enough to have experienced the "red scare"—a time when the Right considered Russia an imminent threat. At that time, the Democrats correctly counseled a softer tone (detente) and often ridiculed the right for its aggressive stance. My, oh, my, how things have changed.

In the aftermath of the Helsinki Summit, the Dems have become strong proponents of a new form of red scare and have become hysterical over the notion that Donald Trump might want to establish better relations with Vladimir Putin.

Michael Ledeen comments:

The Helsinki summit was an effort to revive détente. No one should be surprised, since Trump and Henry Kissinger have been friends for a long time, and no doubt have often discussed the possibility of a deal with Putin, with whom Kissinger has met multiple times. Do Trump’s critics oppose an effort to revive détente? If so, they are in direct conflict with the leaders of the EU and NATO, who favor better relations with the Kremlin. If it’s wrong for Trump to try to revive détente, isn’t it equally wrong for Merkel and Mogherini to promote it?

The anti-Trump-and-Russia crusade represents a fundamental change in Democratic Party foreign policy. Roger Simon has aptly termed it a political sex change transformation, since the Democrats have long called for closer cooperation with Moscow. Indeed, during the Reagan years, Senator Ted Kennedy, the de facto head of the Democratic establishment, secretly approached Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov to take an active role in American politics ...

As recently as the Obama-Romney debates, the Democratic candidate ridiculed the notion that Russia was America’s prime global enemy. The intelligence community notoriously understated the Soviet threat, as demonstrated by the Team B exercise, which demonstrated a far greater military threat, and more aggressive anti-American intentions, than official estimates had indicated. The IC supported a more benign interpretation of Soviet intentions. Today, it is astonishing to see former CIA director Brennan calling the president a traitor for failing to challenge Putin in Helsinki.

Why are the Democrats and the spooks suddenly so ferociously anti-Putin? What can account for such an enormous sea change?

That's an interesting question—one that very few of the trained hamsters in the mainstream media want to answer. Sure, no one likes Russia messing with our electoral process, but that isn't really anything new, and it certainly isn't a reason to ratchet up tensions to the edge of real conflict. Listening to Dem leaders suggest that Trump should have publicly confronted Putin, essentially calling him a liar for his pro forma denial of any electoral subversion, is laughable given that they were far more sanguine about the subject just two years ago when Barack Obama confronted Putin ... oh wait, Obama knew about Russian hacking in 2016 and did nothing at all.

But back to the underlying reason for the Dem's current hysteria. Leeden suggests one possible motivation:

... So far as we know, there is considerable information tying Democrats to the Russians, and relatively less showing Russian links to Republicans, including the Trump crowd. We can document substantial Russian and Russia-linked involvement with the Clinton Foundation, some of it directly linked to U.S. policy decisions such as the one giving Russia effective control over the U.S. company Uranium One. We know that Bill Clinton received a huge payday for a speech in Moscow, orders of magnitude greater than what General Flynn was paid. Yet there is virtually unanimous Democratic condemnation of Trump’s failure to denounce Russian “meddling” in our politics, claiming it was in support for Trump.

Not to mention the interesting use of the Russians by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to develop a phony "dossier" that we now know was used to initiate an FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016. Gosh, the Dems were working with the Russkies (through cutouts), weren't they?
Hmmm, Democrat "collusion," anyone?