Fantastic Lies: the Russia Ruse Runs out of Rope

NinaIllingworth March 18, 2017November 17, 2022 2016 US Presidential Election, A Brief Thought, Bill Clinton, CIA, Clinton campaign, collusion, collusion with a foreign government, corporate Democrats, covering your own ass, Democratic Party elites, Democrats, Department of Justice, DoJ, Donald Trump, Essays, establishment democrats, failed campaign strategy, fairy tale, Fantastic Lies, FBI, foreign policy, Guccifer 2, hacking, Hillary Clinton, hysteria, ICE, interfering, James Clapper, John McCain, Joy Reid, liberal media, liberals, Maddow, mainstream liberal media, mainstream media, mass hysteria, meddling, Media, Meme, Michigan, Mike Morell, neoliberal, neoliberalism, News, Nina Illingworth, NSA, Op-Ed, Opinion, Politics, President Obama, Propaganda, propagandist, proto-fascist president, Rand Paul, Rants, rats flee the ship, Rec Reads, Recommended Reading, rhetoric, Russia, Russia conspiracy, Russia Probe, Russiagate, Russian Hackers, Senate Intelligence Committee, Six Things I Think, Stephen Colbert, townhall protests, treason hysteria, treason smears, Trump Administration, Trump campaign, Trump-Putin smear, US Congress, US Senate, Vladimir Putin, warmongering, wasted energy, Wikileaks, Wisconsin, World War Three

Editor’s note: well my friends, we’re finally here – after six long months of lies, conspiracy theories and misinformation we’re finally coming to the end of the “Trump is secretly a Russian agent” saga and frankly, it’s not a moment too soon for both my mental health and the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party.

If the truth is to be told, I have long found the Trump-Russia scandal to be an infuriating if not maddening waste of fucking time and to at least some degree, I’ve purposely avoided writing about it here on this website. As far as I’m concerned, I told my readers that the whole story was a massive pile of steaming bullshit all the way back in September and thus I saw little need to opine on various permutations of what was essentially the same shitty, cold war spy story being sliced up and repackaged ad nauseam.

Unfortunately for my psychological well being however, social media does in fact exist and after being asked dozens and dozens of times about various breaking stories that invariably proved absolutely nothing we didn’t already know before the election – I sat down to explain once again, in the simplest possible terms why it was virtually fucking impossible that Donald Trump was a Russian agent; namely because the entire American intelligence community had been investigating the matter for months before the election and yet Trump wasn’t rotting in fucking Gitmo.

Although I will probably never understand why so many otherwise educated and rational Democrats went along with the “Giant Russia Theory” hook, line and sinker; I can finally say that today’s piece is the last goddamn story I will write about the Trump-Russia scandal. Buckle up my friends; it’s gonna be a bumpy ride:

Sources:

Obama’s intel chief says he knows of no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion

Inside The Investigation To Get To The Bottom Of Russia’s Role In The Election

Clinton Ally Says Smoke, But No Fire: No Russia-Trump Collusion

Key Democratic Officials Now Warning Base Not to Expect Evidence of Trump/Russia Collusion

From Russia, with Panic

Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media

Politicking Without Politics

The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation

A Brief Thought: Trump is an Authoritarian Nightmare, not a Russian Spy

Joy-Ann Reid & the Return of McCarthyism

A Brief Thought: The Deep State Dilemma

A Brief Thought: The Real Reason Flynn Must Walk the Plank

Note: if you’re having trouble reading the above meme, just right click on it and select “view this image” to pop out a larger version. As always please feel free to share this meme anywhere you like; although the mainstream elites that control the Democratic Party are aware that the jig is up, there are probably a lot of confused, angry liberals in your life who’ll need to be talked down off the ledge once it’s clear the Russia conspiracy party is over.

While there will naturally be millions of mainstream liberals and Democratic party supporters still clinging to the tattered threads of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory for quite some time – the evidence that “reasonable people” are backpedaling away from the scandal at high speed is all around us and goes well beyond the graphic at the top of this article:

In addition to clearly stating there was no evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russian government, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell also completely discredited the so-called “Christopher Steele Dossier” by pointing out that Steele had both paid his sources (many of whom were ex-FSB officers) and only interviewed them through intermediaries. This is important because much of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory hinges on supposedly compromising material in this dossier; but Morell flatly stated that the dossier “doesn’t take you anywhere, I don’t think” and you know it isn’t because he’s a big fan of Donald Trump. While I am loathe to trust a goddamn ghoul like Morell (or Clapper for that matter), their ties to the Obama administration and willingness to stir up the Russian conspiracy pot in the past suggest that they’re being truthful now as a matter of self preservation.

In the span of three months, mainstream liberal media & government officials have gone from saying Russia hacked the 2016 election, to Russia instead interfered with the 2016 election and are now talking about Russia merely “meddling” in the 2016 election. Even if you accept (with very little evidence) that it was a Russian hacker who penetrated the DNC computers and you ignore the purposeful attempts by mainstream liberals to conflate the DNC leaks, with the Podesta email leaks and the less useful, more sketchy Guccifer 2 leaks – it is still impossible to prove that the Russian government was involved or that even a single document has been falsified; they’re all real and if they weren’t, someone would have been able to prove it by now. Under the test of time, suggestions that Russia actually “hacked” or “fixed” the election look more and more ridiculous on their very face and as such, corporate media has shifted to more ambiguous, less sinister descriptions to avoid embarrassment. This isn’t simply a matter of word choice, as it becomes obvious there’s nothing to the scandal “respectable” media sources will also try to distance themselves from earlier wild accusations backed up by the sketchiest of sources.

Even the Democratic Party itself (with the exception of a few astoundingly dim stalwarts) is starting to back away from the Trump-Russia scandal; in addition to dampening expectations from inside the Senate Intelligence Committee, the party is already attempting to introduce legislation that would shift the focus from the Russian government to state-sponsored news channel Russia Today News. In light of this, it’s not hard for a clear-thinking observer to realize the Democratic Party intends to say that negative stories about Hillary Clinton on a Russian, state-sponsored news channel count as “interfering” in the 2016 US election, declare “victory” and call it a day. This is of course utterly fucking absurd because of the microscopic number of Americans who watch RT News and because nobody is suggesting that the overwhelming amount of positive coverage Hillary Clinton received on say, CBC (a Canadian state-sponsored news channel) amounted to an attempt to fix the US election for her.

Look, when even a milquetoast, mainstream “liberal” comedian like Stephen Colbert is taking the piss out of your propagandists and whackjob, warmongering neocon piece of shit John McCain is stealing your best lines just to own a dweeb like Rand Paul – it’s time to put a fork in your conspiracy theory because it is fucking done like dinner baby.

Frankly, I hate the swine emperor with the passion of a thousand suns and would love nothing more than to see his proto-fascist government fall; preferably before these assclowns manage to start World War Three. At some point however, even the most rabidly partisan Democrat has to stare down the reality that this “scandal” has been kicking around in the public sphere for over nine months now and yet not one solitary goddamn person has been able to put the biscuit in the basket; there remains no solid evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

President Obama’s top intelligence officer, James Clapper, admitted that the FBI, the NSA and the CIA all investigated Trump’s ties to the Russia and came up with nothing except the idea that the Russian government would prefer Trump to Clinton; which seems pretty rational if you consider Hillary’s rhetoric during the campaign. During the election itself, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party undoubtedly devoted a tremendous amount of resources to investigating this scandal and you can be sure that they didn’t come up with anything either or you would certainly have heard about it by election day. Literally thousands of news organizations who aren’t very fond of Trump, spread all across the globe, have spent months investigating the Trump-Russia conspiracy and they’ve also come up with no solid evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin or the Russian government. Hell, at this point even Congress and the Senate are investigating, but so far they haven’t found anything either.

Any rational person examining the scandal without emotion also has to come to terms with the fact that all of the circumstantial evidence being passed around liberal media like the gospel truth was known to both the government and the Democratic Party long before the protections provided to Donald Trump by the office of the Presidency would have kicked in. If President Obama thought that Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin he absolutely could have and indeed would have thrown Trump’s ass in jail; instead, he publicly promised to help Trump grow into a better President. That also means that Hillary Clinton herself would almost certainly have had access to the same information (through Bill’s classified briefing as a former President if necessary) and she certainly didn’t call for Trump’s immediate arrest before inauguration day. Am I really the only person who thinks that Clinton would have done a little more than just bitch about Russia hacking her emails at a private dinner for donors a month after the election if she had evidence Trump was working for Russia?

Attempts to suggest that nobody knew until it was too late to charge Trump don’t really work either; there hasn’t been any compelling new evidence since at least January and it simply strains credulity to suggest that all of these people investigating Trump’s status as a Russian agent (enthralled by renowned super villain Vladimir Putin) would have come up empty if he really was a Kremlin stooge. Remember we’re not talking about nerds on a Reddit forum here folks; we’re talking about multi-million dollar media corporations, the NSA/FBI/CIA and some of the most sophisticated, well-funded political operations in the country.

Eventually, don’t we have to ask how many people do those still pushing the Trump-Russia scandal intend to have arrested for colluding with a foreign power to rig an election? Would they like to have just the entire Department of Justice arrested or are we talking about “almost everybody working under the former Obama administration” here? Just how many people do liberals think are involved in this conspiracy? How can any serious adult believe that the entire apparatus of American government would allow a collaborator to take office as President, without presenting the evidence necessary to take him down, because of “national security” or some well-meaning desire not the tip the election apple-cart? Why is it so hard to believe that billions of dollars worth of free media coverage, the Democratic Party’s decision to purposely elevate Trump during the Republican primary process and an incredibly inept campaign that refused to set foot in states Clinton needed was enough to propel even a monster like Trump to victory; without the help of Vladimir Putin or the Russian government? There is of course a fine line between crazy and stupid, but the mental gymnastics required to explain why Trump isn’t already in prison if even half of this scandal were true, comfortably straddles both categories this time.

In short, the entire Trump-Russia scandal simply does not pass the smell test, numerous times over and it never really has. If the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russian government during the 2016 Presidential election, virtually every relevant authority in the country had the means to find out and stop Trump’s coronation before January 20th – yet, they all did and for the most part continue to do, absolutely nothing. The whole thing was a neoliberal fairy tale designed to distract you from the fact that the Democratic Party just lost every single branch of government and intended to change absolutely nothing about itself in response. If you don’t believe me, just ask yourself, who’s out? Who got fired after blowing a winnable election against a goddamn fascist reality TV star? Who was held responsible while the entire Democratic party and its voting base focused on a bullshit Russia conspiracy theory?

The answer is of course the same as the answer to the question “who can actually prove Donald Trump is working for Russia?” Nobody at all; and since we’re talking about accusations that would tear apart the government and potentially start a catastrophic war with another nuclear power – that’s just not fucking good enough anymore.