Back in Limbo: How Low Can America Go?
I apologize to regular visitors for my uncharacteristically long absence from Limbo. I have just returned from a visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Canada — but more on that later. For now, I will merely offer a few observations about the week’s big TV event, namely the latest and greatest episode of Trump’s Sellout Summit Series with Global Killers, Season One.
In 2012, Barack Obama privately told Vladimir Putin’s man Friday, Dmitry Medvedev, that he, Obama, would have more flexibility (i.e., be able to bend over backwards more easily) after his re-election campaign, since it would be the last time he would have to worry about the opinion of the American electorate. This moment of manifest subterfuge — not to say treachery — was caught on a hot mic, and the conversation sounds exactly like those scenes in mafia movies in which a mid-level thug begs the Don for more time to complete his assigned crime.
The American news media responded to this remarkable exchange by collectively scoffing, “Oh, come on! Hot mics don’t count — that would be ungentlemanly.”
Now Donald Trump, having formally met the international killer with the most invested in Trump’s election victory in 2016, is making his predictable beta male, lily-livered excuses and apologies for the very same Putin, seemingly compromising American interests and dignity, and sullying the global reputation of his own intelligence agencies — and the very same American news media are just shocked, shocked they tell you.
They tell you.
My first takeaway from this: Putin owns the American news media even more completely than he owns Trump and owned Obama. In other words, not only is Putin effectively President of the United States, wherever his interests are concerned; he is also editor-in-chief of the American press. They are serving his interests, playing each tune he calls — merely the local edition of Russia Today. They are amplifying hatred, rendering tribal animosities insurmountable, ensuring that violence and suppression will ultimately supplant dialogue, thereby ushering in an era of Russian-style democracy, in which a popular will is achieved only by a combination of propagandizing the virtues of unanimity and forcibly restraining opposing voices as threats to national interests.
My second takeaway: Trump apologists who are covering for their hero on this issue, but who were pulling their hair out at the media’s refusal to report on Obama’s sellout in 2012, are just as hypocritical as the media they are attacking now. They are merely participating in the same empty tribalism as CNN and the Washington Post. In other words, they too are being manipulated by Vladimir Putin.
And that, in the end, is what the “alt-right” is and was all about, folks, not just in America but in Europe as well. Vlad the Poisoner is a popular icon of the movement, perhaps even the man behind the curtain. That would be an iron curtain, of course.
Coming soon to a Trump rally near you.
“Okay, so he’s a pushover for Putin, Kim, Erdogan, and Xi — but I love the way he talks tough with…um, Jimmy Fallon.”
No Collusion! MAGA!