Republicans Aren't the Only Ones Prone to Russia-Investigation Conspiracy Theories
Democrats and journalists routinely accuse the Trump administration of being "compromised" by a Russian government that's "attacking our Constitution"
It has been a bad couple of days for those Republicans and conservative commentators who had warned pre-#ReleaseTheMemo that not only would the FBI malfeasance against President Donald Trump be revealed as worse than Watergate, but in fact "100 times bigger" than the underlying beef colonists had against King George III. But as Nick Gillespie pointed out this morning, it's also been a pretty bad 12 months for Democrat/lefty connect-the-dots, government-aggrandizing hyperbole as well.
It's gotten so routine that people barely notice it anymore. "Is it possible that the Republican chairman of the House Intel Committee has been compromised by the Russians?" political analyst John Heilemann asked on Morning Joe this Tuesday. "Is it possible that we actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the Republican side?" Flipping on cable news Thursday it took me all of five seconds to hear the nonsense-burger phrase, "The Russians are attacking our Constitution." (Even sillier, such sentiments are usually preceded by throat-clearing about how this is the crucial underlying issue being lost in the din of day-to-day political shouting.)
We catalogue the heavy breathing on both sides in the latest episode The Fifth Column, recorded pre-memo and posted after. Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and I also go down some Sockless Joe Scarborough musical rabbit holes, and end up with a surprisingly long conversation about the relationship between foreign policy "realism" and the Trump administration. You can listen to the whole thing here:
