It's got to be Trump. You tell me how else to read the headline of today's lead story in the Washington Post:
Russia suspected of election scheme
U.S PROBES PLAN TO SOW VOTER DISTRUST
Potential disruptions to balloting feared, officials say
If Hillary Clinton's election were really in the bag the way they keep telling us it is, I find it hard to believe that the Washington Post, anti-Trump to a Pravda-like rev of agit-prop-hysterics, would be laying down the line that Russian election tampering is to be "feared" in November.
The story opens:
U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are investigating what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions, intelligence and congressional officials said.
The aim is to understand the scope and intent of the Russian campaign, which incorporates cyber-tools to hack systems used in the political process, enhancing Russia's ability to spread disinformation.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry: Now they're worried about Russian influence?
Here's what we're looking at.
From Whittaker Chambers' day, when the Washington Post was the most implacable of the anti-Chambers papers, to Joe McCarthy's day, when the Washington Post was among the most implacably anti-McCarthy of papers; through the next half century, slogging through "the residual muck of Marxism-Leninism," as Robert Conquest called it; boosting or falling for every Russian Communist effort to sow confusion and public distrust in everything (from Moscow's disinformation campaigns of "peaceful coexistence," to "detente," to "nuclear winter," to "nuclear freeze"); racking up a string of Democratic presidential endorsements from 1976, the year the paper started endorsing presidential candidates (Carter, Carter, Mondale, Clinton, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Obama)*; the Washington Post has rarely suspected Russia of anything.
So why now?
Think of it. Whittaker Chambers revealed from the inside a "broad Russian operation in the United States," and the Washington Post deemed Chambers Public Enemy No. 1, operating as a "pro-Hiss organ," as Chambers called it.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy blasted in from the outside to reveal a "broad Russian operation in the United States," and the Washington Post targeted this great and worse (to the Left) effective patriot as Civlizational Enemy No. 1 -- and to this very day.
Not only does the WaPo have a long, long history of attacking anyone who tries to reveal "broad Russian operations in the United States," it is also reliably AWOL when it comes to reporting on Russian assets in the United States.
As recently as last week we learned that this same newspaper published 10,000 words on the life of Barack Obama in the run-up to Election '08 by top reporter David Maraniss, never mentioning that Obama's mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, an arch-Communist whose name was on the FBI's arrest list in the event of war with the USSR. (We also learned that Maraniss's parents, were both members of the Moscow-controlled-conspiracy known as the Communist Party USA.) Meanwhile, Obama's Communist mentor Davis consorted with the Communist forbears of Obama aides Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod -- another sensational Communist story the Post did not cover, getting around to it in passing long after Obama was safely elected to a second term.
But now a "covert Russian operation" and "Russia's ability to spread disinformation" gets the big WaPo frontpage treatment.
News for news' sake this ain't. How can it be? It's the Washington Post.
Some might think that this newfound focus marks the difference between the Soviet/Communist era and the supposedly post-Soviet era, but I don't. After all, it was as recently as 2010 when the FBI rolled up that network of Russian "illegals," ten (12?) Russian intelligence agents living as "ordinary Americans" under deep cover here in the States. (According to the best estimate of ex-KGB colonel and ace defector Oleg Gordievsky, some 40 to 50 Russian "illegal" couples remain in place.) The arrests and insta-deportations were said to have taken place when they did because one of Russians was reported to have been getting too close to an Obama cabinet official, whom crack intelligence reporter Bill Gertz identified as SecState Hillary Clinton.
Funny, but I don't recall any Washington Post frontpage stories sounding the alarm over Russian influence or disinformation or sowing mistrust "in U.S. political institutions" at that time.
Only now.
We better try to read between the lines.
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* The Washington Post did not endorse either Bush or Dukakis in 1992.