A STARK CHOICE

Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas. Checking in on the top news today I’m reminded of the movie The Sting. If you haven’t seen it I recommend it as an object lesson on what we’re reading right now. A ‘mark’ is singled out. A scheme is made to take him for all he’s worth, using his own greed. And anger. He is made to believe in a finely tuned plan, worked by people highly skilled in the game of the grift, that results in disaster for the mark, and he never even knows what hit him. Because they leave no trace of their actions, or culpability, in the whole scheme. It’s basically an illustration of expert propaganda in action. All it requires is an ability to tell a story that the listener wants so badly to hear that nothing else matters. And at some point the listener is so far into the tale being told, there’s no going back. Even when what they’ve been told is proven to be false, they can’t, or won’t, accept it. That’s y’all with the whole Biden impeachment fiasco. Successful propaganda given to a willing mark. What we’re reading… “Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, made comments to CNN’s Anderson Cooper this week, arguing that his far-right colleagues “wittingly or unwittingly ... have been acting as an agent or an asset of Russian intelligence.” Goldman added that the evidence now suggests that Republicans “are willing to be used as assets of Russian intelligence,” concluding that “the real danger” in Congress is members “operating at the behest of Russian intelligence and Vladimir Putin.”” In other words, did Jim Jordan, James Comer, and their colleagues accidentally rely on foreign disinformation, or did Republicans knowingly rely on foreign disinformation? Tim Miller, the former Republican political operative turned author, MSNBC contributor, and Bulwark writer-at-large, wrote that they “have a psychological and political need for it to be true.” “The Smirnov indictment reveals that Republican leadership in the House is advancing literal Russian propaganda about the president,” Miller said. “This should be a massive triple red siren story and yet conservative media is unbowed and completely at peace with doing Putin’s dirty work. [It’s] astounding.”” “That foreign countries try to influence elections is far less a surprise than that one of the two major U.S. political parties now appears to be, wittingly or not, working on their behalf.” How does it feel to be a colossal mark for Putin’s purposes? Wittingly or not? I guess the answer will lie in what we hear from you on the subject going forward.