Jonathan Turley: There Was A Time When Russiagategate Would Have Been The Story Of The Century

Turley is the voice of sweet reason:

  Yet none of this matters. A Democratic administration using a secret court to investigate the opposing political campaign does not matter to many in Congress or in the media anyway. An investigation continuing despite the lack of credible information supporting collusion does not matter to them either. A president and a vice president who take personal interest in the surveillance of their political opponents also does not matter.
   There was a time, however, when all of this did matter. There was once a time when this would be viewed as the story of the century, including the unmasking of Biden himself in this investigation. But these are not those times, and this cannot be the story. Russian collusion is the story and, as Biden stressed, the rest is just a diversion. It is up to the public to decide who has been ultimately unmasked by the Flynn investigation.

Russiagategate could turn out to be fairly minor. I don't understand it very well yet. But this seems undeniable: it's prima facie alarming as all hell, and demands a full investigation. That the Dems deny this is predictable, because politics is bullshit. That the press denies is also alarming--because it's merely the latest proof that, in a sense, we don't have much prominent. mainstream journalism anymore. Our popular mainstream media has turned itself into the propaganda arm of a rising, extremist political faction and the (formerly fairly centrist) political party that faction has hijacked. They not only have no interest in investigating this astonishing story, they've decreed that there's nothing to it. And, of course, that the mere suggestion that there even might be something to it is a right-wing conspiracy theory. 

   And Turley makes a point here that seems right, but that I haven't really seen that clearly: the left and the MSM (standard 'but I repeat myself') have never quite given up on Russiagate. They put all their hopes in the Mueller report...but seem to have, in some important sense, just shoved Mueller's conclusions aside. They still seem to think that there was some sort of widespread Russian manipulation of the '16 election, and they still seem to allow the collusion fairy tale to float around in the back of their minds, influencing their thinking.