POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

Yesterday’s daily newsletter from TheTeaParty.org featured this headline: “We’re Not Joking: Kerry’s School Lacrosse Captain Was Robert Mueller.”

The news item to which the headline provided a link featured this photo:

Yes, Robert Mueller and John Kerry both attended St. Paul high school and played on the same lacrosse team. This “news” item shows how far the Far Right is willing to go to “prove” that Trump is the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy and to support his contention that the “whole Russian thing is just a made-up story.”

By the way, there are sites on the Far Left that have promoted essentially the same position, fully accepting the idea of a “deep-state” conspiracy against Trump and emphasizing the deeply ingrained anti-Russian bias in the American government and military-industrial complex. Although that bias does undoubtedly exist, Russia is no longer Leftist, never mind communist, and it no longer warrants being defended reflexively by Far Left ideologues, for it has indisputably moved to the Far Right under Putin and his oligarchs.

This paradox of the two ideological extremes coming to the same skewed position would be a head scratcher except that, in most historical practice, communism and fascism have been two competing forms of authoritarianism. Moreover, those on the very Far Left seem always to want something more extreme than the socialist states that have been created in some Western European nations, in particular in Scandinavia. So, this current circumstance is bipartisanship at its worst—ideological lunacy producing the same very skewed exaggerations of any small detail that confirms their worst preconceived or cherished notions, their worst deeply ingrained biases.

But let me get back to the Mueller investigation.

The same Far Right politicians who launched eight investigations into the terrorist attack on Benghazi in an effort to smear Hillary Clinton, including the third longest investigation by any House committee in U.S. history, are now acceding to, if not promoting, the notion that the investigation of Trump’s connections to Russia is a “witch hunt”—even though the GOP controls all three branches of the federal government and the lead investigators are lifetime Republicans. I want to emphasize that I have used the word “smear” in connection with the Benghazi investigations because it had to be clear long before the last, extraordinarily prolonged investigation heading by Trey Gowdy that there were no real “secrets” to be uncovered. I would also like to emphasize that although I have never been a big fan of the Clintons, precisely because of their penchant for cronyism and self-exoneration, my arithmetical abilities are not sufficient for me to calculate how much I think that she (or almost any “serious” person) would be preferable to Trump as president.

In any case, in contrast with the item “uncovered” by TheTeaParty.org, on Ari Melber’s show on MSNBC, Rep. Eric Swawell (D-CA) made this very funny and quotable observation about the investigation involving Trump associates and Russians: “Any tree that you shake in this Trump forest, a Russian falls out.”

To a Facebook posting of this comment, someone attached the following graphic:

I don’t know exactly what Mueller is uncovering, but I think that any reasonable person would say that there is enough already public evidence of possible corruption and collusion to warrant a thorough investigation.

I also think that the question that the Far Right should be answering is why they themselves are not investigating those possibilities with any of the very determined energy that they expended on the Benghazi attack.

But I will settle for asking this rhetorical question: If Hillary Clinton could withstand such exhaustive investigations of the Benghazi attack, why can’t Donald Trump withstand the investigation headed by Robert Mueller?

After all, he repeatedly made the point that he has much more stamina than she has.