There’s no question that over the last couple of years there has been a disproportionate amount of media attention given to the Trump/Russia investigation. Many issues, the climate crisis as one very huge example, have been shoved to the side or barely mentioned on MSNBC and CNN compared to the Mueller investigation and related Trump news.

For some on the Left, however, this has not been their main gripe. For them a major criticism has been that the focus on Trump’s connections to Putin and Russia and Russia’s efforts to swing the Presidential election to Trump has made it harder to reduce US/Russia tensions. This demonization of Putin/Russia, as they see it, only strengthens the military-industrial sector and their supporters who use Russia and China, their existence as countries not in the US/NATO orbit, as a reason why so much of our taxes have to go for war and militarism.

I think this is a legitimate criticism, to an extent.

There’s also the very accurate criticism that the United States, going back to the Monroe Doctrine centuries ago, has intervened in all kinds of ways, including military intervention and imperialist war, to overthrow governments it doesn’t like and install those it can control or influence. This is definitely a point that we should all be making.

But for some, Glenn Greenwald this morning on Democracy Now being a prime example, it’s something else: that the Trump/Republican investigation is just the corrupt Democrats trying to divert attention from their weaknesses and their shady practices. That there’s little “there” there as far as Trump/Russia connections, despite a great deal of public evidence and Trump statements to the contrary. That, at bottom, there’s little difference between the Republicans and Democrats, between Trump and Hillary, and it’s time to move away from the Trump/Russia issue.

I don’t agree with this at all.

I’m sorry, but fascist Trump and the Republicans are not the same as Hillary and the Democrats, even if you don’t take account the DP’s current leftward trajectory. Anyone who believes that is letting their ideology or something else get in the way of an objective assessment of reality.

Listening to Greenwald this morning was, at times, like listening to a Trump supporter. He equated whatever it was the Hillary Democrats did to try to gather dirt on Trump from Ukrainian sources with Trump’s proven Russian financial connections and his campaign’s interaction with Russians connected to Putin, his repeated efforts to shut down the Mueller investigation, his repeated and public pathological lying, all in the service of a racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, more-money-to-the 1% agenda.

Fortunately, from all I see, the very-off-base approach of Greenwald and others on what should be done now that the Mueller report, most of it, has come out – to try to ignore and move beyond it – has very little support on the Left. The vast majority of us want the release of that report with all of its damning information in it about Trump to be used by the Democrats in the House to get at the truth about what has been going on since 2015. We want Trump and the Trumpublicans to be exposed for who they are: a serious, dangerous, existential threat to our rights, to democracy, to the possibility of a decent and just future for the world and all its life forms.

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist, organizer and writer since 1968. Past writings and other information can be found at https://tedglick.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jtglick.

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