On April 10, media types were crowing that CNN had brought in Eric Lichtblau who had been, in the Washington Post’s words, at “the forefront of the New York Times’s reporting on the relationship between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.”

It was “an investment in investigative reporting and the sprawling Russia story”. It didn’t take long for the investigative investment to sprawl badly.

On June 25, Lichtblau resigned from CNN in a growing scandal over a Fake News story about a Trump associate.

"Eric will guide our coverage and thinking," Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates, had boasted. "And when he’s onto a investigation, he’ll still be reporting and writing too.”

Not for long. For Harris has joined Lichtblau on the unemployment line after the Fake News scandal.

CNN Investigates had been announced after President Trump’s inauguration. Its hit pieces had followed the same pattern as the Scaramucci attack that would be its undoing.

Go after a personality tipped for a job with the new administration. CNN Investigates had previously targeted Monica Crowley and Sheriff Dave Clarke with plagiarism accusations. But this time around, CNN’s anti-Trump unit had made a big mistake.

Trump’s self-made video parody that shows him wrestling down CNN has all the self-righteous pundits in an uproar, but it puts the heat where it belongs.

On CNN and the rest of them that round-the-clock give him no peace, no mercy, no fairness, no slack. In return, Trump goes Raw.  Like Truman once did.

Friends in Israel tell me that Trump is not alone. Benjamin Netanyahu, they say, gets the same treatment from the Hebrew press. Most times, even worse.

The same, maybe. Worse, impossible. 

On top of that, the obscenities coming from our TV news and talk shows are so violent that there is no choice but to say that we are past media bias and deep into media depravity.

It’s been so non-stop nasty that many of us have stopped reading and watching the coverage. We know what’s coming. We are braced. Trump gets even.  Trump’s revenge.

This morning, the President sent this tweet from Brussels:

As well he should.  For lawmakers failed to seize on an alarming development in the Russia collusion story last week, one that should spark serious and immediate congressional inquiry.

But it didn’t involve President Trump or his administration.

During a heated Fox Business interview with Maria Bartiromo (6/28), Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief John Podesta made a series of misleading statements when questioned about his involvement in a company that received $35 million from the Russian government while Clinton served as secretary of state.

On Jan. 18, 2011, a small green-energy company named Joule Unlimited announced Podesta’s appointment to its board. Months later, Rusnano, a Kremlin-backed investment fund founded by Vladimir Putin, pumped $35 million into Joule.

That’s just for starters for collusion between Russia and Podesta.

1. The Democrat establishment has vortexed the party's narrative energy into hysteria about Russia (a state with a lower GDP than South Korea).

It is starkly obvious that were it not for this hysteria, insurgent narratives of the type promoted by Bernie Sanders would rapidly dominate the party's base and its relationship with the public.

Without the "We didn't lose--Russia won" narrative, the party's elite and those who exist under its patronage would be purged for being electorally incompetent and ideologically passé.  The collapse of the Democrat vote over the last eight years is at every level, city, state, Congressional and now, presidential.

Yet this narrative has reached a dead end – and thus so has the Democrat Party as a political institution.

If they weren’t trying to destroy the president, Democrats would have to focus on an agenda most Americans don’t support.

By 1968, voters had tired of the failed Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. Four years later, the 1972 Nixon reelection re-emphasized that a doubled-down McGovern liberalism was even less of a viable agenda.

In that context, in 1974, obsessing on Watergate and a demonized Nixon were wise liberal alternatives to running on a positive left-wing vision, given the growing conservative backlash of the 1970s.  After Watergate and the Ford pardon, Jimmy Carter squeaked to a close victory and a one-term presidency — before the country tired of his strident liberalism poorly cloaked in conservative clothing.

Given this historical reminder, the current efforts at Trump character assassination may be the best — or only — progressive pathway back to political power.  Here is why – in excruciating (for Democrats) detail.

When Bernie Sanders first came to Vermont, he bought a shack with a dirt floor with unemployment money. Last year, Bernie joined the company of Vermont’s 1% and bought his third home.

Nice to have a summer beachfront home on a private island on Lake Champlain, isn’t it?  Along with your other two homes, in Burlington VT and Washington DC.

The money that Bernie used his way to break the $1 million mark and buy his way into the 1% came from the $27 donors he touted during his campaign. Other campaigns were funded by billionaires.

But the folks paying for Bernie’s private Delta 767 with its menu of herb crusted lamb loin, chocolate ganache, fine cheeses and white wine were ordinary people who would never be allowed to fly on it.

Yes, last year (April 2016), Bernie chartered a Delta 767 to fly him, his wife, friends, and campaign staff – less than 50 total – to Rome and back.

Bernie could live large on their donations, but he couldn’t directly pocket their money. Not unless he figured out how to sell them something of his own. And that’s how Bernie joined the 1%.