I was just reminded by a reader that a few days ago marked the one year anniversary of Rachel Maddow announcing on MSNBC that Democratic party-aligned media outlets intended to use Russiagate and the infamous Steele Dossier to pressure the incoming Trump administration into escalating the new cold war with Russia. A year into the Trump administration and we can see plainly that this new president is already demonstrably more hawkish toward Russia than his predecessor.

Before I get into recapping Maddow’s seething neocon sleaze fest, please allow me to direct your attention to this excellent Truthdig article titled “How ‘Russiagate’ Helped Secure a Dangerous Arms Deal” by Max Blumenthal, which details the way neocons and Russia hawks on both sides of the political aisle have successfully used the Russiagate scandal to pressure this administration into selling weapons to Ukraine. As Blumenthal notes, this is an agenda these military-industrial complex lackeys have been aggressively pushing for years, and one the Obama administration refused to bow to for fear of the dangerous escalations with Moscow that it would cause.

This administration has escalated cold war tensions with Russia in various other ways beyond that, forcing first RT and then Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanding NATO with the addition of Montenegro, establishing a permanent military presence in Syria to effect regime change, assigning neoconservative Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shutting down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and throwing out Russian diplomats as part of continued back-and-forth hostile diplomatic exchanges, selling an anti-ballistic missile system to Japan in what Moscow has been calling a violation of international missile treaties, and signing the Russian sanctions bill despite loud protests from the Russian Federation.

Now back to Maddow.

Two days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rachel Maddow did one of the innumerable tinfoil hat Russiagate conspiracy segments that have become the singular distinguishing feature of her career — but this time with a little twist. In an elaborate monologue that was only believable to people who desperately wanted to believe it, Maddow paced her audience through some information about the way the Soviet Union’s KGB used to gather compromising footage of rivals in order to sabotage them politically or blackmail them. Using the hilarious argument that the FSB is only two letters different from the KGB, the fact that Vladimir Putin was in the KGB, and the incredible allegations in the Steele dossier about Trump’s erotic romp with a gaggle of well-hydrated Russian prostitutes, Maddow attempted to make it seem perfectly plausible that this same president whose alleged affair with a porn star is being dismissed with a shrug by most Americans could be blackmailed into treason with a sex tape.

She then launched into the chorus of her song.

Maddow lit up with glee when talking about how much Russia hates the fact that Obama amassed troops along its border in the final days of his administration, and then made the claim that if Trump ever withdraws those troops, it will prove that Russia “has something on” him and is using it to blackmail him into compliance.

“And here’s the question,” Maddow said. “Is the new President gonna take those troops out? After all the speculation, after all the worry, we are actually about to find out if Russia maybe has something on the new President? We’re about to find out if the new President of our country is going to do what Russia wants once he’s Commander-in-Chief of the US military starting noon on Friday. What is he gonna do with those deployments? Watch this space.”

Maddow spoke these words with an all-caps “WE’LL BE WATCHING” graphic displayed on the right side of the screen, plainly telling her audience (and the incoming administration) that if Trump doesn’t maintain Obama’s lame duck cold war escalations, it will be taken and reported as a sign that Trump is a treasonous Kremlin puppet, with no further evidence required.

A year gone by and the neocons and Russia hawks on Capitol Hill have gotten the new cold war their military-industrial complex donors have so desperately craved, as have the oligarchs who own America’s mainstream media. Stephen Cohen, renowned scholar on US-Russian relations, says that Russiagate has been used to escalate tensions with Russia to what could possibly be their most dangerous point ever due to the political pressures on the Trump administration to never back down against Moscow for any reason.

If Trump is indeed a treasonous Kremlin puppet, he is the very worst in history, and certainly not worth the billions of dollars in investment the Steele dossier alleges were spent on him. Believing the allegations of the Steele dossier (which even its MI6 author claims is 10 to 30 percent crap) is to believe that the Kremlin had the genius and foresight to predict years in advance that Trump would one day become president back when nobody else imagined such a thing was possible and invest unfathomable amounts of money and resources accordingly, but not enough genius and foresight to imagine that that investment might result in what has ultimately happened.

The US oligarchs do not believe that Donald Trump is a Kremlin asset. Rachel Maddow does not believe that Donald Trump is a Kremlin asset. The neocons on Capitol Hill do not believe that Donald Trump is a Kremlin asset. The only people who believe that are the victims of the mass media propaganda machine who have been paced into collaborating with the manufacture of public support for new cold war escalations, using a moral panic caused by that same mass media about a president they were told is somehow simultaneously a treasonous double agent, a secret Nazi, an incompetent moron, and a raving lunatic.

There is no Trump-Russia collusion. There is a world-threatening and continually escalating cold war with many unpredictable moving parts which have more and more probability of going catastrophically wrong the further things escalate.

Congratulations, Rachel.

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