Donald Trump & Associates' Fake News Machine is just downright awesome, far superior to the comical Baghdad Bob's but a frightening doppelgänger of Joseph Goebbels'. Truth and reality are the Trump regime's villainous Semites — a subversive, back-stabbing cabal of underhanded Clintonites, the "crooked media" and a "deep state" of vague hostility, all of which must be subdued by staggering blows of counterfactual humbug.
Tweeted Trump yesterday in the classic satanic method of mixing some truth with a dispositive Big Lie: "Clinton campaign & DNC paid for research that led to the anti-Trump Fake News Dossier. The victim here is the President." Last night, Trump told Fox Business Network's Lou Dobbs that Democratic payments for the dossier were "the real collusion." Trump is also implicating the FBI in Hillary Clinton's nonexistently nefarious Russian-collusion scheme. Reports the Washington Post: "Despite there being no proof the FBI actually paid [British investigator Christopher] Steele" — the two had a preliminary agreement that never materialized — "Trump suggested it might have in a tweet last week — along with 'Russia … or the Dems (or all).'"
"'DOSSIER DECEIT' screams the headline on the story at the top of FoxNews.com," notes the Post's Paul Waldman. "There are three separate articles about it dominating the front page of Breitbart. 'CLINTON, DNC PAID FOR DIRT; RUSSIAN DOSSIER' says the huge headline on the Drudge Report."
All this twaddle is of course meant to alarm the casual news consumer. The real and fundamental story is an old one. "CNN first reported on the dossier's existence back in January, [saying] the research effort was originally funded by President Trump's GOP opponents and then, when he won the nomination, by those supporting Clinton" — although not specifically by the Clinton campaign. This newly revealed aspect of the story is being mutilated by Trump's Fake News Machinery as definitive proof of who the real villain is, and, naturally, who the victim is — the eternally victimized Donald Trump.
It must be admitted — unsurprisingly, even tediously — that part of the empty richness of Trump's fake news bonanza was awarded by the Clinton camp itself. As Waldman further notes: "Some of the reporters who worked on this story in the past are saying that [the Clinton campaign's lawyer] had told them previously that he and the campaign were not involved in funding this opposition research…. [If the lawyer] did lie about it, it’s not clear why he would have, since every presidential campaign funds opposition research…. It’s also unclear how much the Clinton campaign itself knew about the work, since Steele was a subcontractor to a subcontractor to a law firm representing the campaign." Why would the Clinton camp emphatically deny what perhaps it just didn't know? Because inviting self-damaging rolling disclosures was what the Clinton camp excelled at. In 50 years of politics, Hillary never learned that clever concealments were anything but.
At any rate, yesterday I laughingly agreed with Republican strategist Steve Schmidt's assessment of this fake, Trump-inflated non-story. Appearing on MSNBC, Schmidt said its shocking significance was going right over his head. Is it astounding news that political campaigns fund opposition research? he asked. And how did this research much differ from any other? Campaigns need dirt on their opponents; campaigns pay for such dirt; the Clinton camp did nothing more than fulfill its oppo-research obligation.
Trump's Fake News Machine would have the rubes and casual news consumers believe that the customary was, rather, the foulest of skulduggery; and that the latter has victimized and — voila! — exonerated the president. Once again, truth and reality are being packed into Trump's stinking railroad cars and shipped to annihilation. It's but another week's work of his Goebbelesque rot.