Posted by Rude One
If you were unfortunate enough, you got to watch or listen to the freak
show this morning where President-Elect and human/gila monster hybrid
Donald Trump sputtered and free-associated his way through what you
might consider answers to the questions in a press conference. It was
one of those embarrassing moments for the entire nation that we all
better get used to.
At some point, Trump is going to be at a gathering
of world leaders and one of them is going to say, "What the fuck are you
saying, you fucking brain damaged moron? Fuck, I thought Bush was
dumb."
And most of us in the United States will just look away, ashamed
of Trump, like he's our boyfriend's racist grandpa who can't stop
talking about what "the blacks" need to do.
What Trump said today doesn't matter because he's a filthy liar who
traffics in the kind of hyperbole that'd make P.T. Barnum go "Whoa,
there, man, calm that shit down." He's lying about the extent of his
separation from his business. He forced his tax lawyer to lie about the
emoluments clause of the Constitution. Essentially, he said, "You should
be so fortunate to have me as president that I shouldn't have to do
anything that every other modern president has done, but here's a couple
of bones so you can shut the fuck up." Motherfucker, you ran for
president. You asked for the office. Divest or get the fuck out. But he
won't because truth and honesty don't matter.
What does matter is that he is so obviously deranged, so blatantly
incapable of complex thought, that he more or less just repeated
everything from his campaign, layering on extra degradation for members
of the press that he didn't like. When Jim Acosta of CNN tried to insist
on getting in a question because Trump kept attacking his network, I
wanted him to keep going until Trump went into a full-blown Captain
Queeg-like strawberry-seeking paranoid fit.
Meanwhile, so many questions surround
the dossier prepared by a former UK spy as oppo research for some
campaign (maybe JEB!'s). It's sopping wet with allegations of Russia
trading DNC email releases through Wikileaks in return for Trump backing
off criticism of the annexation of Crimea, as well as the desire for
Trump to criticize NATO's expansion, both of which he did. There's the
corruption, with the allegations of bribes and kickbacks in deals with
China. Then there's all the hookers and golden showers and other
possible blackmail material, most of which would fall on deaf ears like
drops of urine running down Trump's manboobs. God, how the media are
flagellating themselves and each other over the material, over whether
it should have been released, how it hasn't been corroborated, no matter
how reliable the sources are, what it means for future allegations
and...
You know what? Fuck it. Let's act like Republicans for a little while
and just state everything as if it's true. In fact, even if it's proven
to be 35 pages of utter fantasy, let's just keep saying it's true.
Because, see, Trump made his political career, fuck, much of his entire
career, on lies, and almost all Republicans didn't have the honor to
say, "No, sorry, that's just something he's pulling out of his ass."
The
mainstream media had no problem doing story after story about whether
or not Barack Obama was born in the United States, a lie that Trump
fingered and humped like it was the American flag with a pussy. Facts
are dead, as Reince Priebus and Newt Gingrich and other Trump surrogates
told us. We create our own reality, real reality be damned. So fuck it
all.
Trump can say he won in a "landslide" (he didn't), he can say he
didn't say things that he said on video or that he tweeted, he can push a
voter fraud fable like it's beyond reproach, he can claim that inner
cities are hellholes of crime, and he can say that his political
opponents are doing, have done, or will do things that are not even in
the realm of actual. And he just doesn't care if you tell him he's wrong
or there are facts that contradict him. It doesn't matter.
And I haven't even gotten into the sea of Republican and nutzoid
conservative lies over the decades that drowned Hillary Clinton, up to
and including the email controversy and the completely bug fuck insane
Pizzagate.
So fuck it. It's time for Democrats to have some fun. Let's not even
allow the idea that the Russian dossier isn't true. Let's just go with
that it's totally true. It's right there in writing. Page 27: Trump
"paid bribes to further his interests" in doing business in St.
Petersburg, where he "participated in sex parties. Or page 2: "The
Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his
opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,
for several years." Let's just repeat it over and over and demand
investigations and more investigations if those don't turn up what we
want and let's force the media to keep talking about it and make it the
only talking points so that all we can think about with Trump is that he
is a corrupt loser who watches hookers piss. It feels like it's true,
so let's go with the truthiness instead of the truth. Why should we be
left behind in the rush to jump off the cliff of reason?
Trump force-fed us his nonsense. He's still doing that now. Instead, make him choke on this dossier.
(Note: Of course, we won't do it. Because at the end of the day, we
sadly still have some sense of devotion to facts. It is our tragic flaw
as liberals.)
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In 2014, he ripped Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “nasty” human rights record. He also torched American conservatives for siding with the Russian president as a counter to President Obama. “Putie is their new hero,” sneered Schultz.
But the times have changed. And so has Ed Schultz.
In mid-2015, MSNBC handed Schultz his last paycheck. After six years on the air, the ratings of his daily program, “The Ed Show,” were soft and MSNBC was going for more news in Schultz’s time slot, not opinion. His daily radio show had ended the previous year.
So Schultz went back to his lakefront home in Detroit Lakes, Minn., and took stock. At 61, after a lifetime in broadcasting, he concluded he wasn’t done. In early 2016, he returned to television, albeit in an unlikely place and role for a guy who once styled himself as a “prairie populist.” He became the lead news anchor for RT America, the domestic network of what was once known as Russia Today, a globe-spanning multimedia organization funded by the Russian government.
Schultz, in other words, went to work for “Putie.”
The transition would require a bit of adjustment.
Schultz now hosts RT America’s signature evening newscast, “News With Ed Schultz,” produced in a studio located three blocks from the White House. Schultz is the American face — ruddy, beefy, with a megaphone voice — of a Moscow-based media organization that reports the news a little differently than CNN or NBC.
“Good evening, friends,” Schultz boomed on his program one recent evening before swiftly segueing into “the alleged hacking” of the presidential election by Russia. Schultz skipped the latest details, such as President Obama’s views on the matter or the consensus among American intelligence agencies about the extent of Russian meddling. Instead he went straight to Ed Schultz’s view of the matter: “This has become a lifeline for Clinton supporters in an effort to reverse the outcome of the election. . . . In the meantime, the story has entered the arena of outrageous.”
Schultz quickly threw to a recorded package, in which RT America reporter Alexey Yaroshevsky wondered how long the “spiraling downfall of sanity” over hacking in the U.S. media would continue. “Until the public sees forensic evidence, if such exists at all, these accusations should carry as much weight as online humor,” Yaroshevsky reported.
Next up: A Schultz-led panel discussion of Trump’s appointment of ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and Tillerson’s ties to Putin.
“Why is [Tillerson’s] business relationships and successes with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the business world and in the energy industry, why is that a negative on Capitol Hill?” he asked the panel, almost pleading. “Isn’t that a positive thing that he knows Putin?”
***
RT,
whose slogan is “Question More,” arrived in Washington in 2010, five
years after being launched in Moscow by its founder, Margarita Simonyan,
at the time a 25 year old state journalist. Simonyan, who remains RT’s
editor in chief, was also a member of Putin’s re-election staff in 2012.
RT America has broad distribution via the Internet, but virtually no presence on cable; only 19 cable systems (out of 5,208 nationwide) carry the channel. Nevertheless, RT claimed this year that it had a weekly TV audience of more than 8 million in the United States , a questionable figure given its limited cable carriage.
Schultz, who once said on MSNBC that Putin is “crippling” his country, now has a Russo-friendly, or perhaps American-skeptical, viewpoint on any number of issues on his RT program. So do most of the guests he interviews.
The crisis in the Syrian city of Aleppo, besieged by Syrian and Russian military forces? Apparently, it’s the United States’ fault: “You’ve got [Secretary of State] John Kerry supposedly trying to find the peace while the U.S. is being an arms dealer right into the city of Aleppo,” said Schultz on Dec. 8.
Fake online news, allegedly generated by Russian sources? Schultz, a North Dakotan who once considered running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, thinks it’s all “fear and hype” by the American news media and a smear by the Democratic Party, especially Clinton.
“If they [the American media] want to go after fake news, they can start with the Clinton campaign and their accusations” about Russian involvement, he said on a broadcast in September.
RT America’s approach to the news makes some American officials and foreign-policy observers wonder: Is it merely “an alternative voice,” as it likes to say, or something more sinister?
Stanford professor Michael McFaul, the former American ambassador to Russia, calls RT “an instrument of the Russian state. Their mission is to advance the mission of Mr. Putin and the [Russian] government.”
By mimicking the look and feel of an American newscast — even to the extent of permitting an occasional dissent from the Kremlin-centric line — RT is trying to “disguise” its real intent, he said.
And Schultz is part of the strategy, says McFaul. “They put on a lot of Americans as hosts and journalists,” he said. “The idea is to obfuscate and confuse people about it being a government entity.”
Schultz, a former college quarterback and sportscaster, rebutted the notion that he or RT America were mouthpieces for the Kremlin. He blamed the news media — and Clinton.
“The Clinton camp is trying to do all it can to connect Donald Trump to Putin,” he said during a phone interview in early September. “They’re trying to cast anyone on RT in a negative light. I think it’s deplorable. We’re journalists. We’re fair. We have correspondents all over the world. Yes, part of our funding comes from the government. But so does the BBC. So does the Canadian Broadcasting Network. The mainstream depiction of RT is a travesty. It’s dishonest.”
A follow-up question: How does Schultz square his liberal résumé with his current embrace of a Kremlin-friendly outfit like RT?
That question will have to wait. Schultz agreed to another interview in mid-October, and even sounded eager about it. But when a reporter came to RT’s Washington office on the appointed day, he was intercepted in the lobby by a network representative. The interview, she said without explanation, was off.
Reporters from Politico and the Daily Beast got the same treatment this year. Their interviews with Schultz were canceled at the last minute, too.
Fast-forward to early December. Schultz sounded eager about talking again but deferred final approval to an RT spokeswoman, Tiffany Evans. A few days later, Evans declined via email.
***
The RT gig marks another twist in Schultz’s long and winding broadcast career.
But the budding Rush Limbaugh underwent a stunning political conversion a few years later, switching from conservative talk-show host to a fiery liberal one.
Schultz attributed the conversion to his wife, Wendy Noack, a psychiatric nurse who worked in a Fargo homeless shelter and later became his radio producer. Schultz’s longtime friend from Fargo, Don Haney, thinks the transition was sincere. “The change was gradual, but Ed really meant it,” says Haney, an anchor and reporter at KFGO-AM, Schultz’s old station.
But others suspected that Schultz merely smelled an opportunity for counter-programming in a field dominated by conservatives.
In any case, Schultz-the-liberal was no less subtle than his conservative persona. He taunted Limbaugh for his drug addiction and tore into President George W. Bush as an enemy of “the working stiff” (later on, in 2011, he apologized after calling conservative radio host Laura Ingraham “a right-wing slut” on his radio program).
But this second guise was Schultz’s most successful. Backed by donations from Democrats, Schultz took his radio program into national syndication in 2004. “The Ed Schultz Show” eventually reached about 100 stations, including those in big cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington.
Among those who came calling was the senator from New York, Hillary Clinton; she sat for several interviews with him and described him as “a personal friend.”
MSNBC hired him in 2009, just as President Obama took office.
Brent Budowsky, a columnist for the Hill newspaper and an irregular guest on Schultz’s program, says he still views Schultz “as a strong voice for progressive populism.” Even so, he says, RT promotes the interests of the Russian government, sometimes moving into outright “propaganda.”
Budowsky calls Schultz “a good man in a difficult spot.”
But perhaps a comfortable one, too. In October, Haney saw his old friend again when they traveled to Des Moines to interview Bernie Sanders. They flew there on Schultz’s newly purchased jet, whose previous owner was golf legend Arnold Palmer.
