I’ve been half-assed monitoring the mainstream political media’s reaction to incontrovertible proof that the House GOP based its impeachment inquiry on a threadbare Russian disinformation campaign. In normal times, that would have been an earthshaking revelation, right? That one of the two viable political parties in the U.S. is using its constitutional powers to work the political will of a genocidal foreign dictator?
Of course, these are not normal times, and the latest score for Putin’s intelligence services isn’t a bit surprising to folks who’ve paid attention since Donald Trump descended that accursed escalator in 2015. We’ve watched from the cheap seats for damn near a decade now as a malignant foreign power manipulated that dope, coopted his morally and intellectually bankrupt party, and vaporized any objections to unconditional surrender with pitiful offerings of flattery and domestic political assistance.
But our high-minded elite political press is loathe to describe this reality in such stark terms. Maybe they fear if it’s as simple as telling folks what happened and explaining how it affects domestic and foreign policy, anyone could do their outrageously lucrative jobs. So, how are they coping? This snippet from a 2/22 piece by Susan Glasser, staff writer for The New Yorker, is a representative sample of the genre, IMO:
The Crazy Collapse of the House G.O.P.’s Impeachment Case Against Biden
“A Big Russian Intelligence Op” flops on Capitol Hill.…There is much still to unravel about how this came to be. In the government’s court papers this week, Smirnov emerges as an almost comically obvious liar, telling multiple versions of his Biden bribery story, while bragging about contacts with various foreign intelligence services. How is it possible that this guy was an F.B.I. informant for more than a decade?
That’s a good question, but it has a corollary: Why did the mainstream political media, including Glasser’s husband, chief NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker, treat the House GOP goat rodeo as if it were a serious inquiry rather than a 5-alarm scandal featuring members of congress serving as the unwitting dupes or active partners of a hostile foreign regime?
It’s not like the links between the GOP House committee’s recent accusations and prior attempts to smear Joe Biden by corrupt Trump operatives like Rudy Giuliani weren’t “comically obvious” all along. Same bullshit lies, same repeatedly discredited liars.
It looks like Glasser and other elite media figures plan to just integrate the latest revelation into the preexisting scandal without a moment’s self-reflection on the role they themselves played in the mess. It’s a Republican circus, you see, and they are merely reporting on the acts:
In the “perfect” phone call that Trump himself publicly released, he pushed Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open an inquiry into Biden, referring to allegations that Biden had “stopped the prosecution” of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that had paid Biden’s son to serve on its board, at a time when the then Vice-President was helping oversee U.S. policy toward Ukraine. This is the same conspiracy theory that Republicans have been pursuing in the current impeachment inquiry into Biden, all these years later. It did not matter to them when the charge was dismissed as unproved Russian disinformation back in 2019, and, I fear, it will not matter to them now that this latest iteration of the tale, with its own Moscow angle, has been discredited, too. The circus tent is not coming down; it has taken up permanent residence.
If only there were a class of expensively educated and highly influential people whose job it is to ferret out the truth and shout it from the rooftops. Regardless of how traitorous and corrupt the facts make one of the two major parties look. Maybe AI could figure this political reporting shit out?
BTW, “sufficient indicia of credibility” was Trump-appointed prosecutor Scott Brady’s excuse for passing Smirnov’s lies along to DOJ special counsel David Weiss, another Trump holdover who was put in charge of investigating Hunter Biden in August 2023. Glasser (and Baker, et al.) won’t say so, but it’s true — it’s time to clean house at the DOJ while there’s still a “sufficient indicia of credibility” left in the joint.
Open thread.
