"Straight out of the Kremlin." Shareblue Media writer exposes the GOP’s Russian playbook

The Republican Party used to feel quite differently about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Indeed, their own candidate in 2012 labeled the country as our “number one geopolitical foe.”

But ever since Russia helped the GOP win the White House — installing Donald Trump in the Oval Office instead of their common target of irrational hatred, Hillary Clinton — suddenly Republicans are singing a different tune.

And it’s a starkly disturbing and highly un-American one.

After news broke Friday that special counsel Robert Mueller had secured the first indictment — and possibly more than one — the Trump team and the right wing went into immediate panic mode.

And of course, that had to involve desperate claims that Clinton is the real corrupt one among us, that the “real Russia” scandals are the Trump dossier that was partially funded by the Clinton campaign and the debunked conservative spin about the Uranium One deal involving Russia’s nuclear energy agency.

As a GOP strategist noted, this is all “total misdirection.”

And as Shareblue Media’s Eric Boehlert pointed out, it’s also “classic Putin.”

“This is straight out of the Kremlin,” he added.

“You take what is being accused of you and you turn it around,” he continued, noting that this is nothing new for the GOP.

But the specifics of it this time around are unique, something “[created] overnight … this witch hunt, to drag someone from Chappaqua, private citizen,” rather than something used against a sitting a president or a Democratic nominee.

And he called out the Republican Party for seemingly being just fine with the hateful rhetoric coming out of Fox News in particular.

This is classic Putin, right? This is ‘what about-ism.’ This is straight out of the Kremlin, to as you were kind of saying, deflect. But it’s a very specific kind of deflection. You take what is being accused of you and you turn it around. So you say, ‘Yes, we might have colluded with a foreign government to overthrow this election, but what about Hillary Clinton?’

We’ve seen this right-wing media, GOP hand in hand before, over ten years. It’s usually to create an investigation for a sitting president — Barack Obama. It’s usually to create an investigation for a Democratic nominee. But again, as you say, to create overnight — literally, overnight, within 48 hours — this witch hunt, to drag someone from Chappaqua, private citizen, and literally a witch hunt. We have people on Fox News calling for her imprisonment and for her execution. How anyone in the Republican Party can be comfortable with that is beyond me.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party is comfortable with it because it gives them what they want: a Republican president who will help push forward all of their dangerous and damaging goals, no matter how unpatriotic the means to those ends may be.

The GOP will surely continue to get called out for putting party over country. And they will just as surely continue to insist that their preferred version of reality is the real one.

But as the indictments are unsealed and the investigation moves forward, Trump and his cronies will have less and less room for their blatant lies and transparent machinations.