Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov picked an inauspicious time to visit Washington. Starting with the increasingly crass and distasteful assertions by American comics that President Donald Trump is beholden to Russian president Vladimir Putin, continuing with hearings on Capitol Hill examining the “Russian hacking” of the 2016 elections and ongoing assertions that meetings with the Russian ambassador are somehow tantamount to treason, and culminating in the dismissal of FBI Director James Comey, the U.S. political outrage machine has fixated on two recurring talking points: (1) Donald Trump is a Kremlin puppet, and (2) Russia has been “rewarded” by having its foreign minister travel to Washington and to be received by the president.
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