Is it just me, or is everyone missing the biggest, most mind-boggling part of the never-ending “Trump-Russia collusion” drama?

(Article by David Kupelian republished from WND.com)

I’m talking about something more troubling than ex-FBI chief James Comey being one of the biggest leakers, or his refusing for months to inform Americans that Donald Trump was never under FBI investigation – while capitulating to Obama AG Loretta Lynch’s demand that he hide the fact that Hillary Clinton was under investigation. I’m talking about something more absurd than an investigation lasting almost a year – entirely without evidence of a crime!

Let’s set aside all the deceit, demagoguery and mass hysteria associated with the left’s ongoing campaign to overturn Trump’s election by endlessly accusing him of “colluding with the Russians,” and consider the biggest scandal of all:

For the past 100 years, it’s the left that has been continually “colluding with the Russians.”

For something like three generations this nation’s most vital institutions, from higher education to Hollywood, have been powerfully influenced, if not entirely dominated, by the Marxist-socialist worldview incubated, nurtured, celebrated, propagandized and exported primarily by Russia.

As I documented last year, today’s Democratic Party, pushed radically leftward by President Barack Obama (whom both former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy and ex-New Left leader David Horowitz accurately call a “neocommunist”), has become almost indistinguishable from the Communist Party USA. In case you didn’t know, the CPUSA came into existence as a U.S.-based, Moscow-controlled-and-funded communist party, but has lost most of its influence and support since the Soviet Union collapsed, thanks to President Ronald Reagan. Today, the CPUSA no longer fields its own presidential candidates, but rather, urges voters to support Democrats, having enthusiastically endorsed John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

If you think this comparison of the Democratic Party with the Communist Party USA is hyperbolic, I suggest – as I did last year – that you “just stop reading right now and pull up the CPUSA’s website. Spend some time reading and digesting it. Try to discern any major differences between the Communist Party’s concerns, sensibilities and solutions – on issues from gay rights, to unfettered immigration, to renewable energy, to wealth redistribution, to condemning cops as racist, to universal health care – and those of today’s Democratic Party.”

Currently, CPUSA.org includes articles supporting Obamacare, warning about global warming, advocating the impeachment of Trump, extolling Black Lives Matter, advocating for expansive immigrant rights attacking the wealthy “1 percent,” decrying racism in America and other bread-and-butter issues of today’s Democratic Party.

Remember also that the Democratic Party’s rapid leftward drift while Obama steered the American ship of state for eight years was characterized by actual “collusion with the Russians,” including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official agreement to hand over control of one-fifth of America’s strategic uranium reserves to Russia, in return for which millions of dollars flowed from Russia to the Clinton Foundation – not to mention $500,000 to husband Bill for giving a one-hour speech in Moscow. And who can forget President Barack Obama being caught on a hot mic saying to Russian President Medvedev, “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.” (Translation: After I’m re-elected president, I can do things Putin wants, but that the American people would never approve of.) To which comrade Medvedev replied, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you.”

Then of course last year during the presidential primaries we had Bernie Sanders, the “aging hippie communist” (in Rush Limbaugh’s words) who honeymooned with his bride in the Soviet Union, yet who might arguably have won the Democratic presidential nomination had the Democratic National Committee not scandalously rigged the primary contest for Hillary Clinton.

Putting aside the defamatory “collusion” allegation against Trump, as well as all the wild-eyed leftwing incantations that Russia “hacked our democracy” (a mysterious accusation no one can define because it doesn’t actually mean anything), you may reasonably wonder what to think about the broader and more basic charge that Russia tried to influence the 2016 American election.

Reality check: Everyone even modestly aware of modern geopolitical history knows Russia has been attempting to influence America and her elections for decades. In fact, most powerful nations, including America, attempt to influence other nations’ politics and elections – it’s called foreign policy.

Barack Obama, in his zeal to influence the outcome of Israel’s 2015 national election, actually spent American taxpayers’ money on a failed attempt to defeat a sitting prime minister and close ally, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Even worse, during Reagan’s first term as president, liberal Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy made secret overtures to the Soviet Union to thwart Reagan’s re-election! Yes, this actually happened! When I reached out to Reagan biographer and Russia scholar Paul Kengor, he nailed the details – and the media’s stunning hypocrisy.

“Democrats are searching desperately, frantically, hysterically, for any tangible proof that Trump or one of his aides or associates was reaching out to the Russians to influence the 2016 election,” Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College, told me. “Well, the May 1983 KGB document between Victor Chebrikov (head of the KGB at the time) and Yuri Andropov (head of the USSR at the time) details an offer from Ted Kennedy to help the Russians prior to Ronald Reagan’s 1984 election campaign.” Kennedy’s purpose: Prevent Reagan’s re-election.

“It’s an actual official Soviet document,” Kengor told me, “one that was housed in the Central Committee archives until it was discovered after the Cold War in 1992. I first published the document in full in my 2006 book on Ronald Reagan, “The Crusader.” (See the original Soviet document memorializing Sen. Edward Kennedy’s collusion with Russia, first in Russian and then translated into English.)

But wait, weren’t the “mainstream media” alarmed, once they found out, that a U.S. senator had attempted to subvert the reelection of a sitting U.S. president by “colluding with the Russians”?

As Kengor told me: “That entire time, Ted Kennedy was alive and could have been questioned about this. But the fact is that the Democrats and the liberals in the media didn’t give a damn. Why? Because Ted Kennedy was one of their darlings. They had no interest or intention in exposing any possible Ted Kennedy dealings or – worse – potential collaboration or collusion with the Russians. They could give a rip. But now, in the Trump era, the Democrats and liberals are suddenly Russia hawks.”

To put this whole issue of “Russian influence” into proper context, I reached out to someone who has more firsthand knowledge of the subject than almost anyone else alive – my good friend, Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc defector to the West during the entire Cold War. “Mike,” who now lives in the U.S. as a proud American citizen, was once a top communist spymaster in the Soviet disinformation world whose fulltime business was influencing America and her elections! (I had the honor of serving as editor of Pacepa’s epic 2013 book, “Disinformation,” co-authored with Professor Ronald Rychlak, and we have been dialoguing ever since.)

“Mike,” I emailed the other day. “How long would you say Russia has been actively trying to influence American society, politics and elections?” I explained the gist of the article I was writing about the American left’s century-long secret “collusion” with Russia.

Russia, he said, has been attempting to influence America for more than half a century, adding pointedly: “The leaders of our Democratic Party have known at least for seven decades that Russia was trying to influence the U.S. policies and her elections process – it was an open secret.” Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, who wrote the “Introduction” to Pacepa’s “Disinformation” book, concurs, saying Russia has been trying to influence America’s political and electoral direction “since at least the 1940s, and possibly going back into the 30s.”

Pacepa, once director of foreign intelligence for communist Romania and a top adviser to the infamous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, courageously defected to the U.S. in 1978. Ceausescu immediately had a nervous breakdown and put a $2 million bounty on Pacepa’s head, dispatching multiple assassination squads, including the notorious terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez (“Carlos the Jackal”) to the U.S. to find his former top adviser and kill him. Fortunately, all such efforts were unsuccessful.

“When I broke with my life at the top of the Soviet empire,” Mike reminded me in his email, “I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people to stop thinking of government as a boon bestowed from on high, and to free itself from the clutches of Marxism.”

Unfortunately, added Pacepa, “Now, that ‘bubonic plague’ of Marxism has also infected my adoptive country, the United States.”

And how exactly did this Marxist “infection,” which permeates most of our university campuses and is endangering America’s very existence as a free republic, and about which Pacepa and others have been urgently warning us for decades, come about?

The history of the American left is literally a history of “Russian collusion,” from the major infiltration of Soviet agents into the U.S. government during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations to the pivotal role Soviet disinformation played in turning American public opinion – and ultimately Congress – against the Vietnam War. From subversion of America’s entertainment industry (there were close to 600 communists in Hollywood alone when Reagan stood up to them as head of the Screen Actors Guild) to the awarding of New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty a Pulitzer Prize for covering up Stalin’s genocidal starvation of 7 million people in Ukraine. From the creation of dozens of communist-front “antiwar” and other groups active in the U.S., to even the infiltration – as Pacepa and Rychlak document in “Disinformation” – of major Christian churches by the KGB.

Interestingly, Pacepa added in his email: “In 2009, the U.S. got its first Marxist president, and in March 2013, the CIA got a director, John O. Brennan, who had voted the Communist ticket.” (That’s right. In the 1976 U.S. presidential election, Brennan voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall.)

So, what does Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, one of the world’s top experts on genuine “Russian collusion,” think about the leftist Democrats and “mainstream media” daily attacking President Donald Trump for alleged “Russian collusion”?

The left, he said, specializes in fabricating fake news, history and reality, and always has. He recalled, thoughtfully: “In my other life as a Soviet bloc intelligence general, I had a banner posted in my DIE [Romania’s foreign intelligence service] office proclaiming in upper-case letters: ‘CAPITALIST ESPIONAGE REPORTS HISTORY. WE MAKE IT.’ Communist espionage was not designed to predict enemy intentions, as Western espionage services do. Our omniscient rulers knew best,” he said, indicating that communists prefer to rewrite and re-invent history, something the American left is notorious for doing.

And never more ferociously than right now.

“Now,” summarizes Pacepa, “a new generation of Democratic Party leaders who seem to have sawdust in their heads are trying to use Russia as a scarecrow in order to prevent the return of the U.S. to capitalism and freedom.”

After all, the dream of the American left, which has for all practical purposes completely swallowed up the Democratic Party, has long been socialism – including socialized medicine and a guaranteed annual income (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, during a recent commencement speech, urged the U.S. government to provide everyone with a “universal basic income” – cradle-to-grave security guaranteed by the state).

But these are in no way American ideals, rooted in liberty, constitutionally limited government, Christian morality, the work ethic, and unlimited freedom and opportunity, which birthed the most prodigiously successful, powerful, generous and noble nation in history. It is, rather, the dream of communist Russia that mesmerized American leftist politicians, intellectuals, celebrities and activists for generations. Today it has metastasized throughout much of the nation, all the result of a hundred years of the American left “colluding,” on one level or another, “with the Russians.”

It’s doubtful I could fit any more irony and absurdity into this story without it bursting at the seams, but just consider, as a postscript, that Russia is no longer communist. Remember, as an economic system Marxism/socialism doesn’t actually work, and eventually breaks down because it so profoundly and totally violates human nature, the laws of economics and the lessons of history. It always fails. Just ask oil-rich Venezuela.

Maybe the hardcore left is angrily turning on Russia now because the motherland broke faith with their shared socialist dream. That must hurt. But America’s leftists could at least find solace in the knowledge that the glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Republics didn’t give up on socialism willingly. It died because socialism has always been dead; its “life” is just an illusion, a seduction, a con game, a temporary something-for-nothing charade, a promise of one thing that delivers another – namely totalitarianism. It’s a living death at best. Even the Russians know this now.

Only the American left, which has spent a century lusting over a socialist utopia that can never be, still craves it.

In the meantime, the same left that demonizes America and capitalism with arguments identical to those learned at the feet of Russian communists, continues to accuse pro-American capitalist Donald Trump of “colluding with the Russians.”

That’s irony for you.

Read more at: Wnd.com