Mendacity

Responding to the effort of Vladimir Putin to whitewash Russian history, Putin critic Gary Kasparov remarks "To invent a new history, the old one must be erased, painted over with Putin’s thick black brush. The evils of the past must be recast as necessary, even salutary, before they are imitated."

In the USA, we have Trump apologists such as a former Fox News propagandist:

The Mueller investigation found no collusion and the Durham probe has demolished what was left of the Steele dossier. But the collusion truthers are fighting back. https://t.co/SrvCoBofha

— Brit Hume (@brithume) December 28, 2021

The Washington Examiner article to which Hume approvingly linked was written by staunchly conservative journalist Byron York, who criticizes several individuals, among them David Frum (video below), who recognize that the association between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russians was no hoax. 

Mueller chose not to charge the then-President with a crime because, he explained, it "was not an option." Rather, he asserted, "if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

Deeply dishonest, York invokes the term "collusion" twelve times, despite knowing that Robert Mueller, a lawyer, never used the word nor considered the concept because, as the latter emphasized, it "has no relevance to the criminal law arena." York, a gifted and clever writer, even once placed the term (i.e., "collusion") in quotations, thus making it appear that critics of Trump had used it.

Collusion need not rise to the level of conspiracy but be mere cooperation, and if collusion is what York, Hume, and other apologists want, Frum's summary seems apt:

It remains fact that Russian hackers and spies helped his campaign. It remains fact that the Trump campaign welcomed the help. It remains fact that Trump’s campaign chairman sought to share proprietary campaign information with a person whom the Senate report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.” It remains fact that Trump hoped to score a huge payday in Russia even as he ran for president. It remains fact that Trump and those around him lied, and lied, and lied again about their connections to Russia.

A Republican huckster doesn't have to be one of the usual suspects. It can be the likes of York, Hume, or any other professional journalist who yearns for Trumpism without Trump or perhaps Trump with Trump.  They know that to escape ignominy, history must be rewritten, and they are hard at it.

 

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