The lefty media’s had a rotten few days. They found out Mueller just wasn’t that into them, or into fabricating Russian collusion. Michael Avenatti -- once CNN’s live-in creepy porn lawyer -- is going to jail. Heck, they can’t even trust their sky-is-falling climate change narrative to self-perpetuate. So it’s understandable if they lash out like dumb, wounded animals at anything that may be the source of their torment.
How else to explain this article on the lefty site Raw Story: “Trump entertains Russian hockey player and Putin ally in the White House”? It’s based on a report from New York Times White House Correspondent Annie Karni about the Stanley Cup Champion Washington Capitals, with timing only a just God could manage, visiting the White House on March 24. Insert your own “Icing on the cake” pun here.
Just “a few short days since Attorney General Bill Barr released his summary of the special counsel’s report about Russia interference into the 2016 election,” wrote Raw Story’s Dominique Jackson, “President Donald Trump is already entertaining ‘prominent’ Russians at the White House.”
(To be fair, Raw Story’s piece is perfunctory, maybe even a bit skeptical. Karni seems like the true believer.)
The prominent Russian is league MVP Alex Ovechkin, beloved of D.C. sports fans. But Ovechkin “is also a vocal admirer and personal friend of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia,” according to the Post. Before you scoff, hear the Karni out:
Mr. Ovechkin has said he is an apolitical sports star. But questions about his connections to Mr. Putin, and whether he is a participant, knowingly or unknowingly, in a Kremlin propaganda machine, have swirled around his career. They peaked when Mr. Ovechkin announced last year the creation of a “civic movement” that he branded online as #putinteam, ahead of Russia’s elections.
Mr. Ovechkin, who received a wedding gift from Mr. Putin and reportedly has his personal phone number, insisted that the hashtag and the campaign were simply his own project, involving no input or signoff from Mr. Putin’s government. There were questions, however, about whether a public relations firm with Kremlin connections was involved.
A wedding gift from Putin! He got the dictator's digits? Not so fast, Mr. Mueller -- this plot goes all the way to the Capital One Arena! We're talking a transmitter where one of Ovechkin’s teeth used to be.
Okay, that’s just stupid. Karni's just miffed that Trump is spiking the football, er, puck. Here’s the real Gray Lady horse pucky:
But the optics of Monday afternoon’s event recalled another Oval Office meeting Mr. Trump took with Russians, in May 2017. At that meeting Mr. Trump told Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States, that firing the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, took “great pressure” off him.
The optics of a hockey team visiting the president for a photo op recall nothing to anybody except the most dead-end partisan grown addicted to typing conspiracy theories. Unless you’re bent on reminding the public of all the time, money and credibility you and your media colleagues burned to pursue a hoax for two years, this is a non-story.
It’s not news that’s fit to print -- it’s, ahem, fake news.
