USS Enterprise NCC-1701-C. Image from Wikipedia

Guinan: “Families. There should be children on this ship.”
Picard: “What? Children on the Enterprise? Guinan, we’re at war!”
Guinan: “No we’re not! At least we’re not… supposed to be. This is not a ship of war. This is a ship of peace.”

(from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” episode 63, Yesterday’s Enterprise, February 19, 1990)

As the US House Intelligence Committee questions FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers on the “possible ties” between “associates” of Donald Trump and “agents of the Kremlin,” do you get the feeling that members of the U.S. political class and media are sweeping us into some bizarre reality?

Listen to this interview of Stephen Cohen (professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University) by John Batchelor, March 22, 2017, on “How the New McCarthyism grows stronger.”