FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Rep. Adam Schiff Holds Hearing To Attack ‘Authoritarianism’—Meaning President Trump

Feb. 27, 2019 (EIRNS)—Coinciding with President Donald Trump’s historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the pathetic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA) held a hearing yesterday that was a thinly-disguised attack on President Trump, and on any other nation—China and Russia were specifically mentioned—that fails to respect “Western liberal democracy.”

Entitled “Autocracy’s Advance and Democracy’s Decline: National Security Implications of the Rise of Authoritarianism Around the World,” the hearing brought together witnesses who share Schiff’s view that any nation questioning the value of neo-liberal democracy is bordering on fascism. These included former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (better called “All-Brit”), former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and Andrea Kendall-Taylor of the neo-con Center for a New American Security, among others, The Hill reported.

Albright, a fixture of the Clinton-Obama apparatus, used her remarks to rail against the “discarding of mainstream politicians, the emergence of leaders who seek to divide rather than unite, the pursuit of political victory at all costs, and the invocation of national greatness by people who identify greatness only with themselves.” She darkly warned that Trump’s actions may be weakening U.S. efforts to promote “democratic values” overseas.

The U.S., she said, has always served as a “rock against which the forces of despots run aground and break apart.” But now, she lamented, “we may no longer be able to make that claim.” Foreign leaders have told her, she said, that if the U.S. has a leader who always says the press lies,

“how can Vladimir Putin be faulted for making the same claim? If America has a leader who insists that judges are biased, and who calls the American criminal system a ‘laughingstock,’ what is to stop a repressive leader in Hungary or Southeast Asia from discrediting his own judiciary?”

Rasmussen raved that tyranny “is awakening from its slumber,” and named Turkey, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Egypt, and of course China and Russia, where, he charged, authoritarianism is replacing democracy. Kendall-Taylor intoned that this “is the most trying time for democracy since the 1930s when fascism spread across much of Europe.”