One of my fave journalists, a real muckraker and intrepid digger, Matt Taibbi, has been barking at length in recent days, his ire directed against the entirety of the American journalistic community. You know, the gang that baited us for going on two years that the Mueller report would magically set this holy land back on track.
I was suspicious of the whole Russiagate idea from the get-go. My reasonings?
- Donald Trump and team never thought they were going to win the election. In fact, he was shocked he’d even emerged as the Republican nominee. He had no real interest in becoming president as he had other, more important things to do, like build his brand and make bigger piles of dough. His run for prez was a lark, a masturbatorial series of orgiastic pep rallies, feeding his ravenous ego and, yes, building his brand to a level previously unattainable via his tried and true griftings. The job of the presidency would take him away from those profitable enterprises. So — for the ten thousandth time — why would he collude with anyone in hopes of getting elected?
- No one surrounding Trump — other than Steve Bannon, who came aboard long after the supposed “collusion” began — was smart enough to set such a scheme in motion.
- The Russians didn’t give a good goddamn who won the election, so long as they could play havoc with the American electoral system and with the American psyche. No matter who would have won in 2016, the Russians could sit back smugly and say, “Mission accomplished.”
Anyway, Taibbi likens the mania for Russiagate to the fever dream conspiracies bandied about by the participants of the online QAnon. You remember them, don’t you? The guys — of course guys — who shrieked about, among other things, high-ranking Dem officials, including Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, who were part of a child-sex ring operating in broad daylight out of a Washington, DC pizza parlor.
No one but the loons who inhabit QAnon bought the theory but those boys bought it like gospel.
Taibbi holds that Russiagate was almost as ridiculous a conceit. Yet, tens of millions of us bought into it. Better yet, wished, hoped, prayed, almost willed it into fact.
Here’s Taibbi today on the journalists who we looked to, imploringly, for confirmation that Trump was just another paid spook for Vladimir Putin:
…[D]id America’s entire “respectable” news media really spend 22-plus months humping a transparent conspiracy theory, praying out loud for a former FBI chief to save them from Donald Trump, like cultists awaiting passage to Heaven’s Gate on the Hale-Bopp Comet?
The Trumpists fell all over themselves for their candidate because he was the lone gunslinger, the Shane, the Dirty Harry, the superhero who’d come in and clean out all the lying elitists in Washington. We Americans love petty messiahs. Even those of us who detest Li’l Duce. Our petty messiah was Robert Mueller.
Rival Superheroes
We were so let down when Mueller turned out to be just a guy who did his job.
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More Movies
The Gadabout Film Festival national tour is hitting Bloomington May 4th, a week from Saturday.
The GFF is a do-it-yourself affair, featuring motion pictures decidedly unlike the stuff Hollywood’s been throwing at us for years. Don’t expect hundred-million-dollar Marvel Comix productions or big-star laden caper flics. The GFF people say about their tour/fest, established in 2002:
We bought a van, got a projector, screen and PA then took a program of independent short films out on the road. We screened in basements, art houses, music venues, collective spaces, warehouses, parking lots, park, etc. Each year since, we’re continued to create a new program and taken it on tour.
Cool, huh?
Bloomington’s stop on the tour this year will be the FAR Center for Contemporary Arts, 505 W. 4th St. As noted in these precincts previously, the intersection of 4th and Rogers streets is fast becoming this town’s locus for cutting edge, imaginative, avant garde, and envelope-pushing creative types.
Anyway, the GFF slate begins at 8:00pm and costs a measly five bucks. Look, you’re not even going to get a coke and a box of peanut M&Ms at the local cineplex for a fin. Rather than dropping a cool fifty on two tix, a big popcorn and couple of soft drinks, spend your dough on something a little more interesting than the latest iteration of The Avengers.
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