The way political dissent is smeared as Russian propaganda will be remembered as one of the most embarrassing things about 2016.
This morning I watched with delight as my hero Jimmy Dore jumped up and down on the warm corpse of Representative Adam Schiff, who last week was mauled to death in a brutal one-sided beatdown by Fox News pundit and Pee Wee Herman swagger jacker Tucker Carlson. My God it was glorious. In the video Jimmy played, oligarchy fluff girl Schiff was insinuating that the Russian government was behind the WIkiLeaks drops, and Carlson repeatedly challenged him to look straight at the camera and tell the American people that he knew for a fact that the Russian government was behind the Podesta leaks. Schiff refused to, instead equivocating and dodging and eventually getting so frustrated that he resorted to the tactic more and more establishment Democrats are resorting to: accusing Carlson of carrying water for Putin.
And as beautiful as Schiff’s humiliating thrashing was (imagine what a different world we’d be living in if journalists had done that with WMDs in interviews with proponents of the Iraq invasion?), the sadistic grin quickly faded from my face when I realized that liberals all around America have definitely watched that same interview and thought to themselves “Yeah, that Tucker Carlson is a real Putin lover!”
“Putin lover.” Like that’s even a thing. Like there are teens in the Jersey suburbs whose bedroom walls are covered in posters of Vladdy with an unbuttoned shirt and a man bun chilling sexily on the beach. Seriously, how much thought did anyone give Vladimir Putin before the tail end of this election cycle? In 2015 I am certain I thought about the original host of Blue’s Clues more times than I thought about Putin, and I’m a political junkie. Calling someone a Putin lover is like calling someone a Hillary lover-- there’s no such creature. No one loves Putin; I guarantee you half the liberals in America had no idea who he is until the talking heads on TV started informing them that he’s the official new Foreign Guy To Be Afraid Of. And yet I’ve been called a Putin lover and a Russian troll more times than I can count just for questioning the official narrative in the articles I write.
Right, guys. Because I say we should trust the CIA as much as Michael Moore trusts a flimsy deck chair, I’m clearly a secret Kremlin operative. You’d have to empty out all of Russia to fill all the roles of all the people who’ve been accused of being Russian spies this year. They’d all be crowded into America, plotting to subvert U.S. democracy and kill Moose and Squirrel while depleting the nation's potato supply.
I mean, does this year really need one more thing to be ashamed of in the future? It’s like whoever’s in charge of 2016 was sitting at their desk going “Hmm, this year is really struggling. What can I do to help? A new life-affirming Pixar movie? Another viral Pharrel Williams tribute song phenomenon? Oh! I know! Let’s bring back McCarthyism!” Great, yeah, because that looked so awesome in retrospect the first time around. What delightfully nostalgic reboots from the bowels of America’s emotional trauma can we expect in 2017? Hey, we haven’t seen a good blackface minstrel show in a while!
It’s been so surreal seeing people regurgitate such innately absurd think-tank manufactured slogans over and over again this year, from “Bernie can’t win” to “but Trump!” to “fake news” to “if you dissent you’re a Russian shill.” We just saw the first ever presidential election result to be determined largely by alternative media, so in a sense this is the most awake American consciousness has ever been, but in so many other ways it seems like everyone’s just as asleep at the wheel as ever.
You’re better than this, America. Act better.
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