Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Pseudo-Election 2016 | TomDispatch

Andrew Bacevich, Pseudo-Election 2016

If you’re of a certain age (as I am), there’s something that should have startled you recently and yet, as far as I know, no one has bothered to mention it: anytime in the last seven decades, any American politician running for any position from dogcatcher to president who had called on Russia’s leaders for help in a domestic campaign (no less for them to release the supposedly cyber-hacked emails of a former secretary of state) would have been pilloried.  His or her career would have instantly been over; his or her reputation turned to ash; his or her future life, rubble.  No exceptions.

Yet the immortal Donald, the Incredible Hulk of present-day American politics, did just that -- not once but twice.  First, he said: “By the way, [the Russians] hacked -- they probably have her 33,000 [missing] emails.  I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted because you'd see some beauties there.  So let's see."  Then, assumedly just in case anyone had missed what he was getting at, he put it even more bluntly: “Russia, if you're listening: I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.  I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.  Let's see if that happens."

And he lived to tell the tale and threaten to “hit” not Russian President Vladimir Putin, but former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who dissed him at the Democratic convention) “so hard his head would spin.”  It’s true that a little flurry of press accounts reported on the way Trump had inserted himself into an already roiling scandal involving the possible Russian cyber hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers.  It’s also true that various national security state types leapt, in typical Cold War fashion, to accuse him of engaging in acts that were “tantamount to treason,” or of having committed an actual, prosecutable crime.  But they, not The Donald, were clearly the dinosaurs of our post-asteroid moment.

For the first time in 70-plus years, an American politician made mockery of the knowns and givens of the American national security state's definition of The Enemy and got away scot-free.  So consider Trump’s plea to Putin as an announcement that we’ve all been thrust willy-nilly into a new age, a new era so strange that we need TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, to begin to unravel it for us.Tom

The Decay of American Politics
An Ode to Ike and Adlai
By Andrew J. Bacevich

My earliest recollection of national politics dates back exactly 60 years to the moment, in the summer of 1956, when I watched the political conventions in the company of that wondrous new addition to our family, television.  My parents were supporting President Dwight D. Eisenhower for a second term and that was good enough for me.  Even as a youngster, I sensed that Ike, the former supreme commander of allied forces in Europe in World War II, was someone of real stature.  In a troubled time, he exuded authority and self-confidence.  By comparison, Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson came across as vaguely suspect.  Next to the five-star incumbent, he seemed soft, even foppish, and therefore not up to the job.  So at least it appeared to a nine-year-old living in Chicagoland.

Of the seamy underside of politics I knew nothing, of course.  On the surface, all seemed reassuring.  As if by divine mandate, two parties vied for power.  The views they represented defined the allowable range of opinion.  The outcome of any election expressed the collective will of the people and was to be accepted as such.  That I was growing up in the best democracy the world had ever known -- its very existence a daily rebuke to the enemies of freedom -- was beyond question.

Cont.....