I was wondering what Ken Silverstein was referring to on Twitter Monday when he posted some convoluted art with Donald Trump's and Vladimir Putin's mugs front and center and more flow chart lines than some old BASIC programming skit from the 1980s.
I found out Tuesday: It's Obama fellator Jonathan Chait, moving from crack-smoking to the glue-sniffing stage of lunacy in a long, long, long-form piece for NY Mag claiming that Trump has been a Soviet/Russian asset since 1987. No, really.
First, to address some of Chait's basic nuttery with mugshots on the US side of the graphic. Michael Flynn? A nothingburger, overall, as I noted here, who was ultimately, it appears, working for Turkish President Erdogan and Israeli Premier Netanyahu. Manafort? An all-purpose grifter most of whose most recent grifting was working for Ukrainians of various stripes, primarily pro-West, pro-NATO ones.
The meetings in Trump Tower, where Russians own apartments? Gee, Jon, where's Jill Stein sitting at the same table as Putin.
I ultimately refer to a recent piece by Jack Matlock, who happened to by our ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1987. Matlock scorns the Hillbot-lauded "17 intelligence agencies" report by DNI James Clapper on Jan. 6, 2017 as cherrypicked not just for its analysis, but which of the minority of those agencies were actually asked to participate.
Ambassador from 1987-1991, during the fall of Communism and the old Soviet Union, and a Foreign Service careerist, Matlock would surely have known if Donald Trump were being cultivated as a Soviet/Russian asset. It also ignores that it would have been hard for Vladimir Putin to be personally recruiting Trump during the Donald's 1987 trip to Moscow, as per Wiki, Vlad the Impaler was still stationed in Dresden, East Germany at that time.
In the blue corner, or the other blue corner, to riff on boxing, we have David Corn, who published a whole book of Putin Did It nuttery along with Michael Isikoff. Corn, aka Hillary's Lapdog, aka Steele's Bellboy.
Corn goes for the JFK route, implying that we have an American version of "While England Slept." He joins Chait in claiming the "mainstream media" has failed to denote enough coverage. Really? Who printed the "17 intelligence agencies" lock, stock and barrel? Who prints every move of special prosecutor Robert Mueller?
Here's Corn's capper:
Trump and Putin have jointly worked to disappear perhaps the greatest crime ever committed against American democracy and their respective complicity in this villainy.
Actually, no.
I can think of many worse crimes.
- The Supreme Court's misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment almost from the moment the ink was dry through Plessy v. Ferguson.
- Dred Scott.
- The foisting of a House of Lords-type Senate on the American populace.
- The first Red Scare after World War I.
- The second Red Scare after World War II.
Those are just starters. They took about 30 seconds to think up.
Beyond that, as a response to both Corn and Chait, Matlock has also decried Russiagate hysteria in general.
The two of them have surpassed even the nuttery of former Kossack Marcy Wheeler, aka Emptywheel.
Don't worry, this could escalate.
As I said on Twitter, next, Corn needs to try to top Chait's claim that Trump was a Russian asset since 1987 to claim that Kremlin scientists kidnapped Trump's mom while pregnant and altered his DNA.
They've even topped the latest from Alex Jones.
This all said, I think we need another bracket or two for a real playoff on this, like the World Cup or the NBA Finals. A person like Louise Mensch would of course be a ringer and be thrown out.
But, Sarah Kendzior? Rachel Maddow? Bring em on!
