Are Democrats Waking Up to Russia Insanity?

RCP highlights an MSNBC hit from Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy in which the liberal lawmaker says that the party’s D.C. elite is spending too much time focusing on “issues like Russia” rather than policy questions that concern his constituents.

Over the past few weeks, the maximalist “Russian puppet” narrative, pushed so hard by top Democrats and the media, has been unraveling in a big way. Centrist pundits are cautioning against going too far with this issue, and the leak pipeline about Trump’s contacts with Russia seems to be drying up. The obstruction investigation getting press now is focused on determining whether Trump mishandled the Russia investigation which so far has not turned up a smoking gun.

The truth is that the Democrats have zeroed in on the Russia attack line because it casts a pall of illegitimacy over Trump’s election, and this helps salve the wounds from their unexpected defeat. But while the Russian hacking of DNC servers was a deadly serious matter, it does not invalidate the election, and there is still no evidence that Trump participated in any way.

The Democrats need to grow up and become a serious opposition party. The country is worse off when a single party operates unchecked. Instead of acting perpetually aggrieved at the fact that their anointed candidate was so incompetent that she could not beat a complete political neophyte, they might instead get back to the business of governing the country.

That would mean working with the GOP where possible, while focusing like a laser on their opponents’ policy shortcomings. The Senate’s rushed and secretive handling of the AHCA, for example, ought to be a ripe political target. Instead, coastal Democratic operatives are spending days focusing on whether or not Trump’s lawyers slipped up on TV in discussing Trump’s tweet about whether he was or was not under investigation by a special counsel appointed by an acting Attorney General for firing the FBI director for refusing to say in public that he wasn’t being investigated. Can the rest of the country be blamed for tuning out this noise?

None of this is to suggest that ongoing investigations into the Russia affair ought to be dropped. After all that has been alleged, if there was in fact no collusion, the Trump Administration and the Republican Party above all should want to read an exhaustive report exonerating them. But the Democrats’ demented fixation on the issue is not only politically self-destructive, it’s also harming the very fabric of our country. It’s good to see a prominent member of the party waking up to this harsh reality. More, please.

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