Caitlin Johnstone
Newslogue
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.
Newslogue
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."Read more
~ Keith Gessen
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