rachel maddow
I was surprised to see an old photo going around late last week in the Green Party circles I'm in showing Jill Stein dining with, among others, Vladimir Putin. Green Party folks are sensitive creatures, so my momma bear hackles got raised right away because they were so distressed in their search for an explanation for why their lady was seen fraternizing with the corporate media's current official supervillain. I had already seen the photo because it had previously been used to smear Jill Stein during the lead-up to the general election in the days when McCarthyist red-baiting was still a shocking new thing that stuck out like a sore thumb, before it hit the ubiquitous perpetual shriek that it's at today. Not everyone's a progressive news junkie though, so for many this photo was a startling revelation.

I figured someone must have brought it back into mainstream circulation, and I figured who that person probably was. There's no public figure who's been such a virulently Russophobic nutcase and so relentlessly aggressive in their attacks upon third parties as one Rachel Anne Maddow.

The photo in question, of course, was taken long before Americans were being told every single day by every talking head on TV that the Russian president was someone they're supposed to hate and fear. It was taken in 2015 when Stein took a trip to Moscow to attend an event at which Putin spoke, during which, as the phenomenal Glenn Greenwald reported last year, she made a video in which she "criticized Russia for diverting scarce resources into military spending while its people suffered." This somehow got twisted into an act of treason in which Americans were duped into imagining that Russia was a nation they'd considered an enemy back in 2015 in an incredible feat of revisionist Orwellian doublethink.
"At no time in history have more people with less knowledge, and greater outrage, opined on the subject of Russia's president."
~ Keith Gessen
The photo went viral in August 2016, and last week Rachel Maddow resurrected it on Viceland's "Desus and Mero" program for no other reason than to keep kicking the former Green Party candidate for daring to run against the Dempublican one-party extortion scheme and criticize a warmongering corporatist who literally campaigned on a pledge to shoot down Russian military planes over Syria, risking a world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies. Stein led the charge in drawing attention to the potentially world-ending implications of Clinton's unbelievably warlike rhetoric toward a nation most Americans had hardly ever thought about until that time, and, despite the fact that she was 100 percent correct and that she herself only received one percent of the popular vote, Maddow has never stopped blaming Stein for Clinton's spectacular failure of a presidential campaign.

You'd think a week-old clip featuring a 2015 photo of a presidential candidate who got one percent of the vote would quickly fade from public interest. You'd think the fact that the clip features Maddow and the two hosts "ohh"ing and "aww shit"ing like they're listening to sick burns at a rap battle instead of regurgitating scripted corporatist propaganda would grate against people's natural aversion to fake things. Inside the bizarre world of the liberal echo chamber, however, anything can be forced to happen with enough money and ham-fisted manipulation. More and more online news outlets have been picking up the story days after the video came out, and from what I'm seeing on social media it's a hotter story now than it was even a few days ago. Hence this article.

rachel maddow photoshop on fox news
Rachel Maddow is an asshole. She gets paid more money in a single day than most Americans make in a year to lie to us about Russia to scare us into supporting her plutocrat bosses. She spends an obscene amount of time and energy attacking tiny political parties that have no platform to fight back, and people applaud her for it. Her long, rambling conspiratorial tirades that would make even a peak 2010 Glenn Beck blush are mistaken for truth by a populace that has been so ferociously terrorized and beaten down by corporate media psy-ops that they can't tell which way's up anymore, and she's loving every minute of it. She's currently enjoying her best ratings since 2008.

Stop listening to these assholes, America. WikiLeaks has shown us that the liberal echo chamber was deliberately designed by Democratic insiders and billionaire plutocrats to make you stupid and compliant, in the exact same way the conservative echo chamber uses Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to do the same. They're playing both sides of the chess board to keep us chasing ghosts and boxing shadows instead of turning our attention on the ruling elites who have been exploiting us and deceiving us into supporting a system that funnels all new income to the wealthiest of the wealthy while taxes go to kill other people's children in corporatist wars overseas and the Walmart economy chokes America to death.

Don't let them do that to you. You deserve so much better. You can have so much better. All you have to do is push past their lies and manipulations, and take it.