The Daily Caller just published an op-ed on "The Ever-Changing ‘Russia Narrative’" written by Oleg Deripaska, the Putin ally and Russia billionaire who paid Paul Manafort millions to lobby for Putin-friendly oligarchs in Ukrainehttps://t.co/QY8wqMT1eC
— Astead (@AsteadWesley) March 8, 2018
I know ‘can you imagine… ‘ is an overworked trope, but if — for instance — Think Progress had published an op-ed like this, the Daily Caller would be screaming for Trump to send Seal Team Six through their office window.
This includes no disclosure of Deripaska's ties to Putin or Manafort, either. https://t.co/GsLIPyPTvR
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) March 8, 2018
Newsworthy? Sure. But given his ties to a propagandist and adversarial foreign power, perhaps a Q&A in which you could have actually challenged him.
Also, not sure how there is zero disclosure of his Putin or Manafort ties. Stunning, really.
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) March 8, 2018
BTW, I’m being only a little cheeky about this. Remember that Manafort’s bail terms got squeezed tighter when he was caught writing an op-ed for some oligarch (iirc it wasn’t Deripaska) https://t.co/25F1QAt27k
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) March 8, 2018
Like, you'd really think that one benefit of being a Russian oligarch is that whoever you pay to write your Daily Caller op-ed is a better writer than this (the kicker!!) pic.twitter.com/iD9yxannAl
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) March 8, 2018
I doubt if the Daily Caller staff have health care, let alone life insurance!
— Lindsay Beyerstein (@Beyerstein) March 9, 2018
Would like to know which PR/lobbying firm helped place this. They may need to register under FARA.
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) March 8, 2018
Bring out the puke funnel, boys…
Drudge has linked to Russian propaganda hundreds of times in recent years. He's already linking to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska's Daily Caller op-ed. pic.twitter.com/S7EzIBl8Fo
— Media Matters (@mmfa) March 8, 2018
mike in dc
“This ‘Helter-Skelter’ Murder Investigation Is Turning Into A Witch Hunt” by Mr. C. Manson.
Mr. Manson is a prominent figure in the LA youth counterculture community
Villago Delenda Est
Tucker Carlson is a traitor.
Wow, that’s fucking shocking, isn’t it?
OzarkHillbilly
@Villago Delenda Est: I’m not sure he’s smart enough to be a traitor.
Debbie(aussie)
Even from the side of the planet this seems amazing. To answer the question in the title, I’ll go with both ☹️
Debbie(aussie)
Can’t seem to edit my comment should be ‘other’ side, duh!
OzarkHillbilly
Love this headline at the Guardian: How Trump tried to keep his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels a secret “Alleged”? Please….
Pete Downunder
@Debbie(aussie): Is it time for an Oz meet-up? There are least 3 or 4 Aussies (or ex-pats living in Oz) who comment here.
Patricia Kayden
@Villago Delenda Est: The entire GOP are traitors including their President who refuses to attack Putin no matter what.
Amir Khalid
@OzarkHillbilly:
Trump probably wants to deny the affair. He was already in the doghouse with Melania before word of it came out; and there’s a chance, however slim, that he might sue the Graun for calling the affair a fact.
OzarkHillbilly
@Amir Khalid:No lawsuit of anyone by trump would ever get to discovery. That said, here’s my alternative headline:
How trump tried to keep his relationship with Stormy Daniels a secret
Sm*t Cl*de
@Amir Khalid:
Teh Grauniad are well-lawyered. They would love a presnidential lawsuit.
OzarkHillbilly
Texas, it’s a whole ‘nother country:
Gee, ya think?
I’m just gonna take a wild guess and say that the judge and I have different ideas of just exactly what constitutes “judicial ethics”.
Jay
Wow, the calls are now coming from “inside” the house.
Tony Jay
@OzarkHillbilly:
That gets said a lot in relation to the various turds swimming around the American Right’s toilet bowl but it’s not really that much of a contradiction. I think history would bear me out if I said that while some traitors have been smart and cunning enough to achieve their aims and actually grasp and hold onto power (in which case the old saw about “If treason doth prosper, none dare call it treason” comes into effect), the majority of traitors, especially the ones who do it for money, aren’t likely to be the sharpest tools in the box. They can’t be, as they’re doing something incredibly dangerous for an often piddling financial reward, but they’re not capable of doing a simple risk/reward calculation beforehand.
I think that’s the case with most of the treason being unearthed by Mueller’s investigation. So many of these chancers, scoundrels and grifters – right on up to the occupier of the Oval Office – have been playing Russia’s game at whatever remove because they saw a way to make money out of it. Ideology, however much they personally buy into it, was always secondary to the prospect of shady moolah. And they thought they’d get away with it because they always had in the past. The idea that riding their Russian money-train right into the White House might bring out the bright klieg lights of serious investigation never seemed to occur to them… because they’re stupid.
tl:dr – Most traitors aren’t smart, they’re just greedy.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
One step forward, 30,000 steps back. Shameful, disgraceful, repugnant and a raft of other adjectives unfit for polite company.
GM’s World of Tomorrow exhibit at the ’39 World’s Fair expunged a lot of the future.
OzarkHillbilly
@Tony Jay: This is America where the pursuit of money is the national past time. Just being greedy ain’t enough. Just being greedy and stupid ain’t enough. Otherwise Dana Rohrabacher would have been in prison decades ago.
lowtechcyclist
@OzarkHillbilly:
As Tony Jay said, you don’t need to be smart to be a traitor.
My mind still boggles at how totally all-in the right wing is with the new “Russia’s great, fuck Europe” party line. I’m 64, and one of the defining GOP memes for my entire lifetime up until the past few years has been “you can count on us to be tougher against Russia than those spineless comsymp Dems.” And suddenly, they’re Putin’s little buddy.
Debbie(aussie)
@Pete Downunder:
Would like that. But it’s a very big country ?
Robert Sneddon
@lowtechcyclist: Today’s Russia is right-wing, pseudo-Christian, militaristic, racist and sexist and yearns for the Good Old Days. What’s not to like in that for American right-wingers compared to Germanistan or sharia-dominated Britain (both of whom have weak feeble female leaders too!)
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@Debbie(aussie): Yeah, I get asked to explain Trump all the time. I try, but it’s not always easy. After the election somebody asked me why I was so upset, and I said “Imagine Pauline Hanson just became the Prime Minister and her party had a full majority in both houses of Parliament. Would you find that, stressful?” I found that worked.
Amir Khalid
@OzarkHillbilly:
Gallagher had an accused person physically tortured. I don’t understand why he’s still a judge.
rikyrah
Traitors all
Tony Jay
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, yeah. Rohrabacher is a great example. Clearly he’s a dim little rat who has been the Kremlin’s bag-man for a long time, but he was getting away with it because the pursuit of dirty cash is, like you say, as American as dancing girls and maverick TV cops, and the people who – should – have been on his case saw nothing wrong with a little Russian grift as long as it was paying for things that benefitted them. Ryan said as much in his not-famous-enough warning about keeping all the Russian funding on the down-low. They didn’t care that it could be looked at as treason because they’re ‘savvy’ enough to look at it as just another shady funding stream that would let them achieve their real aims of billionaire welfare and mass disenfranchisment of minorities.
What’s changed is the scale of the grift and its obviousness. All of the little rats found their individual small and not-so-small shennanigans coalescing into one great, big, foreign intelligence operation aimed at torpedoing U.S. democracy, and now they’re exposed and in the open. It no longer really matters what coy little euphemisms they use amongst themselves to cloak what they did for money. The US Intelligence Agencies, via Mueller, have their own terms of reference for their actions, like bribery, conspiracy and, in Rohrabacher’s case, probably some kind of espionage. He and the others may have done it for money, which was stupid, but what they did went far beyond just financial crimes.
Viva BrisVegas
@Amir Khalid:
It’s Texas. Unless the judge is unlucky he is now a shoo-in for the Texas Courts of Appeals.
The defendant’s own attorney didn’t feel obliged to object to the electrocution.
That’s Texas.
Marmot
That’s horrible. But the lesson you took is that it’s the fault of Texas?
That’s kind of impressive. Lots of cowboy movies in your childhood? You know that among 27 million people, the odds of random stories cropping up about terrible people are a bit high, right?
Marmot
@Viva BrisVegas: As if on cue.
We Texas Dems are doing our damnedest, and you pricks aren’t helping. Fucking get yourself a geography lesson.
Viva BrisVegas
@Marmot:
Whoa there buckaroo, somebody put a burr under your saddle?
I didn’t mention Dems. I assumed, correctly, that the judge was a Republican, and that his actions were the sort of actions that please Republicans.
Don’t see how that would help. I know where Texas is. It’s a small state where, if Florida is America’s penis then Texas is located right around where the bumhole would be.
If you want to blame someone for pointing out that the torturing of defendants in court is not a good idea, start blaming those who voted to allow the accused to be fitted out with electroshock in the first place and then expected it would not get abused, i.e. your fellow Texans. If that doesn’t help get Dems elected, then fuck Texas.
Sab
@Debbie(aussie): I live in Ohio and even I know that Australia is a country and an entire continent.
germy
My local sinclair tv news station features Boris Russianlastname as a regular commentor. The station also has a news tip line. I was tempted to call in and tell them Boris was being questioned by Mueller, but I was too lazy.
Sinclair actually owns a bunch of stations. One that plays only shitty, 4th-rate sci fi films, another one that’s intended for young people that consists of young people juggling and skateboarding (remarkably content-free), another one that plays ’70s action films, another one that’s all sports. And there’s a “CW” one that’s playing reruns of Tim Allen’s cancelled show… This is all in addition to their news channel. It’s quite a monopoly.
Westyny
In Russia, Putin-tied oligarch edits you.
jc
“This includes no disclosure of Deripaska’s ties to Putin or Manafort.”
Naturally. It’s Tucker Carlson, human superfund site of toxic sludge.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
It was communism that was the issue, not Russia per se. After all we were allies with them during the WAR. And we weren’t fighting the USSR/Russia in Vietnam, we were fighting to stop communism. Now that Russia is no longer communist, all is well and they are the greatest. We Won! And then, primarily because they are exactly the country that conservatives would like us to be. The very, very wealthy get to do whatever the fuck they want and everyone else gets to help them do that. The ones that help the ultra wealthy get paid and promoted well and the rest can suck it. They like Vlad because he’s exactly their roll model.
Ruckus
@Viva BrisVegas:
Probably/possibly figured correctly that if he did object he’d get the volts as well.
tybee
@Marmot: