Masterfully Baiting the Reds for a Dick’s Re-Election

Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0

If we define “Russian” during this latest Red Scare as being opposed to war, and not supporting an oligarchy or its neoliberal agenda, then ‘guilty as charged’. I’m a Russian. You probably are, too, if you hold certain beliefs that contradict the official corporate State/DNC narrative – particularly the one put forward by ‘The Resistance’. This elite cadre of party flacks and wine cave dwellers are merely resisting grassroots opposition to Trump since it actually has a chance of succeeding. Thus Americans who openly criticize their party’s nomination process are maligned as fifth columnists. Non-Americans who express their own opinions about the next person to lead a country that will potentially invade theirs are similarly accused of “hacking” a foregone conclusion. And who wants to be a traitor to the cause of accelerated planetary collapse?

Under a deluge of horse shit, red-baiting opining and punditry from the donor class, you might be feeling compelled by now to deny your Russian-ness, even distance yourself from your principles because you’ve been told that they are line with a Very, Very Bad Man who lives in Moscow. Never mind that this Very, Very Bad Man from Moscow is capitalist to his frozen core, the point is, he’s a communist oligarch from an orbiting death star, here, there and everywhere. In order to remove the taint of the Kremlin from your conscience, you must denounce all your ideals and embrace not just the status quo, but its handpicked plutocrats who make up the Democratic Party fold.

This Very, Very Bad Man, according to the DNC, wants to exact revenge on all of us by providing Americans with free health care, and he will accomplish this by installing his preferred stooge into the White House. This unfolding (and unraveling by the minute) conspiracy put forward by the American Corporate State Media aka ‘The Plutocrat Pravda’ goes even further: This Very, Very Bad Man got Donald Trump elected, and now he wants to replace his personally picked, tinpot, ding-a-ling demagogue with a slightly left of center New Deal Democrat. Don’t ask why, just trust the national security apparatus when it says the Vermont Senator and his Bro Brigade are being manipulated by RT’s hottie anchors and hipster pundits to help make this happen.

“Sir, the reason we called you in for this highly classified briefing, is to tell you that we intercepted a broadcast from Russia’s English language State television. Here, take a look for yourself . . . Oops! Someone accidentally inserted footage from the Zapruder film into this, but I think you get my drift. Oh, and don’t let the door – or a ricocheting bullet – hit you on the way out”!

When Bernie Sanders addressed the Very, Very Bad Man during the Nevada debates to denounce Russian interference into future American elections, the Very, Very Bad Man chuckled telepathically into his ear, and said “Victory is yours” in Russian. Sanders had become proficient in the Communist language, while he was slinging Molotov cocktails in his youth.

Remember when the one time Republican nominee and now POTUS paid lip service to a more isolationist foreign policy? Sure, it was a meaningless stance, reversed as soon as he discovered his predecessor’s lesser known Do Not Kill list among his own cheeseburger wrappers. With this discarded, grease-stained document, he helped his Saudi friends assassinate one of their dissidents and called a drone strike on an Iranian General. Fast forward to 2020, and the Russians have once again implanted seditious ideas into a front-running, US presidential candidate popular among the rabble.

Despite all his enthusiasm for murdering Muslims as they attempt to broker peace or get married, it still isn’t enough to for the permanently entrenched, unelected powers who call the shots and order airstrikes on oil rich targets from their wine-filled, temperature controlled bunkers. Something had to be done to counter all this foreign meddling into the affairs of State. By “meddling”, they don’t mean the overt influence of Saudi Arabia or Israel, but homegrown resistance to globalization, concentrated wealth and ecocide, which they call “Russian interference”.

Let it be said that even a hint of tinkering with the Deep Squid National Security State causes it to lose its ink. Desperate, they have called on a cavalry of billionaires to rescue the flatlining Empire from its flatulent Emperor, and more urgently, his presumed successor. Bernicus may be a humbug Senator from a hinterland province of little consequence to the Holy Empire, but his ideas about re-distributing its concentrated wealth have enormous consequences for its divinely-appointed leadership.

You have to go back further in time, 2016 A.D. to be precise. That’s when the sneaky Putin first unleashed his troll brigade to write mean things about the lady who was stumping for endless war and the interests that sustain and profit from it. This was the same lady who transformed Africa’s most prosperous economy into an IS breeding ground/slave market when she headed the (Failed) State Department. No doubt she had similar plans for her own country as its President. Thanks to Russia, or rather the millions of voters all in thrall to a charlatan monk, who was murdered in 1916, (and brought back to life a hundred years later) Hillary Clinton was never able to achieve her ambitions. Rasputin 2.0, much like his ancestral namesake, was able to seduce the American electorate like they were some kind of sex-starved Czarina, only too willing to be screwed over by a shady Russian peddler with uncanny superpowers.

What else could explain all this electorate contempt for a corrupt, flat-footed ‘centrist’ with all the charisma of a tub of margarine? Her defeat explains why elections have been transformed into plutocrat beauty pageants, where the contestants all vie for the title of War Criminal/Hedge Fund Manager-in-Chief. It is the judging panel, (assembled by AIPAC) that decides the winner. Clearly voters cannot be trusted to correctly assess the individual merits of the contestants, having been brainwashed by the Russians into thinking Miss Vermont should be crowned.

If you are trying to wrap your brain around all the confounding and laughably illogical storylines put forward by the DNC and their former Clinton campaign advisers, it probably means that Russians have hacked your brain. Why else would you shrug off the opinions of a bunch of failed, butt-sore hacks unable to gauge, or even acknowledge, the growing class resentments that their candidates engender every four years? This is why you should consider CNN and MSNBC as disc cleaners that will de-bug your thoughts and replace them with Bloomberg-paid pundocrats all shilling for Wall Street and endless war in unison.

There’s only so long you can keep pinching your nostrils as you cast that noxious ballot for yet another chest-thumping, business-as-usual Republican from either party, before you suffocate altogether. Or you can join us Russians on the Dark Side. We have vodka on tap, not to mention endless reserves of pessimism to get us through the eternal winter of every American election cycle. We also know a thing or two about how to deal with crowned heads of state.

We are offering you the choice between heading into the unknown on a rusty tractor, or being run off a cliff by a hybrid golf cart. Since we are all Russian here, fatalist to the bone and prone to lifelong bouts of melancholy, we readily admit none of us stand much of chance against an outcome determined by the drivers of the golf cart. Then again, we whupped Nazis on empty stomachs in our threadbare socks, and consigned at least one Imperial dynasty to the dustbin of history. Perhaps we underestimate ourselves.

Jennifer Matsui is a writer living in Tokyo and a columnist for the print edition of CounterPunch magazine.