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Featured image: President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation | July 16, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
It’s been nearly a week since Trump sold America’s birthright to Comrade Putin, making the once-great United States a Russian colony as payment for a dozen Russian hackers’ efforts in winning him the presidency. Six days we have had nothing to eat but borscht and sadness, while our former president, clad in nothing but a spiked collar and chaps, is paraded around on a leash from press conference to press conference, barking like a dog.
That was the story in the establishment media, at least, which offered the American people five days of unprecedented hysteria, flinging around terms like “treason” as they frantically tortured their thesauruses to the brink of death trying to impress upon the people the urgency of the situation. After flogging the “treason” narrative to within an inch of its life, with nothing to show for it but strained vocal cords and declining ratings, they abruptly switched gears, returning to the well-worn territory of what Hillary Clinton used to call “bimbo eruptions” – a recording from Trump’s lawyer involving payments to a Playboy Playmate to keep quiet about her past assignations with the commander-in-chief.
The Helsinki hysteria shone a spotlight on the utter impotence of the establishment media and their Deep State controllers to make their delusions reality. Never before has there been such a gaping chasm visible between the media’s “truth” and the facts on the ground. Pundits compared the summit to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, with some even reaching for the brass ring of the Holocaust by likening it to Kristallnacht, while polls revealed the American people really didn’t care.
Worse, it laid bare the collusion between the media and their Deep State handlers – the central dissemination point for the headlines, down to the same phrases, that led to every outlet claiming Trump had “thrown the Intelligence Community under the bus” by refusing to embrace the Russia-hacked-our-democracy narrative during his press conference with Putin. Leaving aside the sudden ubiquity of “Intelligence Community” in our national discourse – as if this network of spies and murderous thugs is Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood – no one seriously believes every pundit came up with “throws under the bus” as the proper way of describing that press conference.
The same central control was apparent in the unanimous condemnations of Putin – that he murders journalists, breaks international agreements, uses banned chemical weapons, kills women and children in Syria, and, of course, meddles in elections. For every single establishment pundit to exhibit such a breathtaking lack of insight into their own government’s misdeeds is highly unlikely. Many of these same talking heads remarked in horror on Sinclair Broadcasting’s Orwellian “prepared statement” issuing forth from the mouths of hundreds of stations’ anchors at once. Et tu, Anderson Cooper?
The media frenzy was geared toward sparking a popular revolt, with tensions already running high from the previous media frenzy about family separation at the border (though only one MSNBC segment seemed to recall that they should still care about that, and belatedly included some footage of kids behind a fence wrapped in Mylar blankets). Rachel Maddow, armed with the crocodile tears that served her so well during the family-separation fracas, exhorted her faithful cultists to do something. Meanwhile, national-security neanderthal John Brennan all but called for a coup, condemning the president for the unspeakable “high crimes and misdemeanors” of seeking to improve relations with the world’s second-largest nuclear power. He called on Pompeo and Bolton, the two biggest warmongers in a Trump administration bristling with warmongers, to resign in protest. This would have been a grand slam for world peace, but alas, it was not to be. Even those two realize what a has-been Brennan is.
Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb’s rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future “meddling,” and John McCain, still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the “disgraceful” display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole. Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash, motherfucker.
Trump’s grip on his long-elusive spine was only temporary, and he held another press conference upon returning home to reiterate his trust in the intelligence agencies that have made no secret of their utter loathing for him since day one. When the lights went out at the climactic moment, it became clear for anyone who still hadn’t gotten the message who was running the show here (and Trump, to his credit, actually joked about it). The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and…crickets. On to the Playmates.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series, “Who is America,” targeted Ted Koppel for one segment. Koppel cut the interview short after smelling a rat and expressed his high-minded concern that Cohen’s antics would hurt Americans’ trust in reporters. But after a week of the entire media establishment screaming that the sky is falling while the heavens remain firmly in place, Cohen is clearly the least of their problems. At least he’s funny.
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Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski.
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