Trump fanned the flames of Russiagate, then cried foul when progressives took him seriously

It was July 27th, 2016, at a news conference, where Trump asked Russia to intervene in our election to "find the 30,000 emails that are missing". Trump later claimed it was a joke, saying he and the audience laughed. Typical of a Trump lie, it was easily exposed as a lie by examining the cspan footage of the entire press conference. But he has so much contempt for his supporters, he knows they won't check.

As you may recall, conservative media was having a field day criticizing Clinton's use of a private email server instead of government servers, and the fact that many emails were lost in an alleged backup debacle. They benefitted from Clinton's mistake, however. Without that mistake, Guccifer would likely have been unable to hack Sidney Blumenthal's emails, which provided a lot of political treats for Republicans and conservative media over Benghazi.

Anyway, back to Russiagate. He claimed that, as a candidate, he had no connections to Putin or Russia. When the Mueller report was released, it documented many links between close family and campaign connections to Russia and the Russian government.

Now, the conservative media is pretending Russiagate was a fever dream of progressives suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. I might add that self-styled patriots had a similar derangement over Obama.

The Mueller Report speaks most plainly about the collusion between the Trump campaign/family and the Russian government and its proxies. But, in a typical Trump move, he had his lap dog Attorney General, Bill Barr, put out a press release essentially lying about the contents of the report. Again, the contempt Trump has for his followers is galling.

It's true that the Mueller Report was not the smoking gun progressives had hoped for. It was enough for thinking people to realize Trump had played the media and his followers like a master playing a perfectly tuned Stradivarius.

The most troubling aspect of the Trump phenomenon is how easily he lies about easily verifiable things. Remember his claims about his inauguration turnout? Why would anyone believe him when the same lying, vindictive swine says the election was stolen?

Uri Berliner Exposes Ideological Capture at NPR

The Free Press just dropped a piece from Uri Berliner, where he lays out how NPR has been ideologically captured. Setting my watch for 12 hours for the world to see the collapse of NPR as leftist activists hack away at the pillars of this once great American institution.

I used to be an almost rabid NPR listener. My last car proudly spirted an "I heart NPR" bumper sticker. I once had an argument with an elderly man who, upon seeing my bumper sticker, made a snide remark about communists.

Little did I know, he was right. I just hadn't noticed yet.

This was in my first year living in the Seattle area. We had moved from the frigid midwest to the warm and green pacific northwest. We moved because wanted to be sure our state government would never use our tax dollars to enshrine second class citizenship for gays into law.

In the Midwest, I had joined my local Occupy group as I was irritated by the bailouts of banksters and the fact that no one went to jail for the massive fraud that tanked the economy. I was immediately shocked at the nastiness and vitriol lobbed at anyone who dared question the consensus condemnation of what was being called "late capitalism". It was clear I had not found my tribe.

That's the kind of liberal I was.

When we moved to Seattle, we thought we were moving to the liberal utopia. Our enthusiasm was short-lived.

First there was the degree snobbery. I never had the privilege or money to go to college. Hell, I barely could afford the fees to take the GED test. That caused me to have long stretches of unemployment, punctuatedby minimum wage jobs. In the Midwest, I was the CFO of a small technology company. 

Then I noticed the intolerance of the locals. I once made the mistake of saying, at an atheist meetup, that I quite liked not having an income tax at the state level. The organizer politely asked me to leave.

I recall the exact moment I stopped my monthly contributions to KUOW. They had started referring to pregnant women as "pregnant people", and the station started uncritically quoting election material provided by the city council's own socialist bomb thrower, Kshama Sawant.

So, I'm starting my stop watch. It will be hours, if not minutes before Mr. Berliner is hounded out of his job by activists pretending to be journalists. Even the union will turn on him.

The moment he starts a substack, I'll join as a paying subscriber. I did the same for Cliff Mass, a local meteorologist, who was canned for not toeing the line on climate change. 

Leftist Podcast Implosion

I used to be a fan of a podcast called Opening Arguments, until I had a disagreement with one of the hosts over email.

It brings me so much joy to see the podcast has imploded in a leftist witch hunt over, obviously "sexual misconduct". Isn't it always?

And the atheist leftist community went absolutely apeshit.

I love watching political zombies eat each other's brains.