There is a worrying trend among America’s so-called “liberals” sweeping the country. Any computer security breach and voting irregularity is being blamed by a number of liberals who count themselves as supporters of Hillary Clinton, one-time supporters of Bernie Sanders, or neo-conservatives who abandoned the Republican Party for Clinton as being the fault of Vladimir Putin and Russia. Such fear-mongering is reminiscent of the right-wing’s “Red Scare” tactics of the late 1940s and 50s and the supporters of Wisconsin’s junior senator, the Red-baiting Joseph McCarthy.
Today, McCarthy has been replaced by such Russophobes as Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, Dianne Feinstein, Representative Adam Schiff of California, and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Propaganda material for these self-serving politicians to carry on about secret Russian plans to alter the outcome of the election is provided by FBI director James Comey, who sees an excellent opportunity to increase the bureau’s counter-intelligence and cyber operations budgets.
A major source of anti-Russia McCarthyite propaganda from the establishment liberal media is Foreign Policy magazine, which was once part of the Washington Post empire. Since the sale of the paper to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Foreign Policy remains a property of Post’s former owners, the Graham family. Along with Slate, Foreign Policy is now owned by the Graham Holdings Company, which also owns the education company Kaplan.
Foreign Policy, or “FP,” is edited by a former crony of Henry Kissinger, David Rothkopf. The magazine was founded in 1970 by the most notorious neocon of his time, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University. It was Huntington’s sincere wish that there would be a bloody “clash of civilizations” between Western Christianity and Islam, a wish that is becoming reality as a result of the Democratic Party’s support for mass international migration of Muslims into heretofore civilized nations in Europe, North America, and Australasia.
FP has become a chief source of anti-Russian propaganda. Much of it emanates from the keyboard of Julia Ioffe. In a recent article, titled “Trump Won Putin’s Focus Group,” this editor is described as being a part of the “Kremlin’s media machine.” Ioffe took issue with a statement I made to Sputnik Radio, a Russian media outlet, concerning which U.S. presidential candidate would support a peace agreement in Syria. I said a Trump presidency “is the only way we are going to see the end to the Syrian civil war.” That is a true statement, since Clinton and her team have vowed to establish a no-fly zone over Syria, shoot down Russian planes that violate it, and go to war with Russia, if necessary.
Ioffe also had to get one last dig in with her diatribe: “Who is Wayne Madsen? According to Wikipedia, ‘he has been described as a conspiracy theorist.’” Ioffe showed her lack of journalistic professionalism by quoting from the largest repository of disinformation, misinformation, and libelous material on the Internet today, Wikipedia. Use Wikipedia as a single source in any legitimate journalism school in the United States and you can be assured an instant “F.”
Ioffe’s background is germane in this instance. Ioffe’s poor journalistic skills did not deter The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Forbes, Politico, The New Republic, and, most egregiously, The Columbia Journalism Review, from publishing her articles. Ioffe has served as a senior editor for the hopelessly neocon New Republic. President Obama even granted Ioffe a private interview along with a few other select journalists, which should shed some light on Obama’s own worth as a journalist in the early 1980s for Business International Corporation.
According to CNN, Ioffe came to the United States from the Soviet Union, along with her parents, at the age of eight to escape “anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.” However, the year the family emigrated, 1990, was the year the Soviet Union began to unravel and “anti-Semitism” was hardly an issue amid the political turmoil of that time. The family settled in Columbia, Maryland, a bedroom community for the National Security Agency and Ms. Ioffe eventually attended Princeton University, a campus that had more than its share of CIA and NSA academic programs. Ioffe later returned to Russia, the land where her parents fled alleged “anti-Semitism,” on a Fulbright Scholarship.
Ioffe has not ingratiated herself to many in the establishment “literati.” She accused MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell of engaging in sexist “mansplaining” when she appeared on his program, “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell.” She criticized The Guardian’s chief Moscow correspondent Luke Harding.
While O’Donnell, the son of President John F. Kennedy’s chief adviser Kenny O’Donnell, may not have gotten in his “last word” with Ioffe, I will. Ms. Ioffe, I do not require my loyalty to the United States being questioned by someone who came to this country as an immigrant from the Soviet Union, no matter the exaggerated reason. Furthermore, while you were in elementary school in Columbia, Maryland, I was attending classified working groups at the nearby NSA dealing with protecting the country’s computer systems and networks from all sorts of malevolent players, but mostly insider threats.
I have called “bullshit” on attempts by you and your ilk to blame every hack of an American computer system on Russia. Did it ever dawn on you that the main reason these systems are hacked is because of poor to non-existent security installed by the systems’ owners and users, whether they are Mrs. Clinton; her network server provider Platte River Networks; the Democratic National Committee; or the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee? As Donald Trump correctly stated in his debate with Clinton, these hacks could have been carried out by some “guy sitting on their bed who weighs 400 pounds.”
On November 11, 2013, Ioffe wrote a piece for The New Republic in which she blamed model Jenny McCarthy, whom she described as a “former Playmate,” as being the cause for Ioffe contracting whooping cough. Of course, Ioffe never had any personal contact with McCarthy but the model was a vocal opponent of forced vaccinations. Ioffe moaned in her article about how she had to survive celebrating the “Jewish high holidays . . . hosted several out of town guests and a dinner party or two . . . the wedding celebration of a close friend . . . and a long weekend on a beach in north Florida” while suffering from a “100-day cough,” for which McCarthy was somehow responsible. This form of “drive-by journalism” appears to be a specialty of Ms. Ioffe who suffers more from “JAP syndrome” than any communicable diseases caused by opponents of vaccinations. Unfortunately, there is no known cure for “JAP syndrome” other than a week in Miami Beach or a front row ticket to “Cats” on Broadway. And they are only temporary respites from the ailment.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2016 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
Three good reasons to vote for Trump:
Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer and the Kagans.