As Corinne Weaver at NewsBusters noted on Tuesday, an alliance of far-leftists and Never-Trumpers has formed a group called the "Committee to Investigate Russia." In a video posted on Monday, octogenarian actor Morgan Freeman contended that the United States is "at war" with Russia.
On Thursday, Fox News's Tucker Carlson interviewed actor and director Rob Reiner, a member of that group's advisory board. Despite Reiner's outwardly cool demeanor, Carlson's lines of questioning seemed to catch the guy who is still perhaps best known for having played "Meathead" back in the 1970s on CBS's All in the Family utterly off-guard.
Carlson, instead of engaging in a blah-blah "what's the latest about the investigation?" inquiry, went after the historically far-left activist Reiner for involving himself with a group which so nonchalantly invoked the militaristic warlike language in the Freeman video, and for forming an alliance with proven war hawks. He also noted how CIR has completely ignored the Mainland Chinese Communist government's far more extensive cyber warfare efforts, and how Hollywood in general, jettisoning its alleged fealty to creative freedom, has kowtowed to Chinese demands for censorship of its cinematic content.
Carlson began by showing a small portion of that Freeman video. For those who can stand it, that entire video is below. Freeman summons all of his presumptively authoritative vocal powers to try to convince his audience that "We are at war":
Transcript:
MORGAN FREEMAN: We have been attacked. We are at war.
Imagine this movie script: A former KGB spy, angry at the collapse of his motherland, plots his course for revenge.
Taking advantage of the chaos, he works his way up through the ranks of a post-Soviet Russia and becomes President.
He establishes an authoritarian regime. Then he sets his sights on his sworn enemy, the United States.
And like the true KGB spy he is, he secretly uses cyber warfare to attack democracies around the world.
Using social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political processes, even their neighbors.
And he wins.
Vladimir Putin is that spy, and this is no movie script.
We need our president to speak directly to us and tell us the truth.
We need him to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office, and say, "My fellow Americans, during this past election we came under attack by the Russian government. I've called on Congress and our intelligence community to use every resource available to conduct a thorough investigation to determine exactly how this happened.
The free world is counting on us for leadership. For 241 years, our democracy has been a shining example to the world of what we can all aspire to — And we owe it to the brave people who have fought and died to protect this great nation and save democracy, and we owe it to our future generations to continue the fight.
Let's be clear here about the three bolded paragraphs above, which collectively reveal this group's true agenda:
- The script refers to "democracies," but every newspaper story shown during this section refers to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and every video shot with people in it is from all appearances of people in the U.S.
- Thus, the "And he wins" statement means that in their fevered minds, Putin swung the presidential election in Donald Trump's favor.
- Therefore, the speech Freeman wants Trump to make would be a de facto admission that there is a significant possibility — which the left would instantly turn into an admission of personal guilt on Trump's part — that Putin's "attack on the electoral system" is why Trump became President. This is an obvious avenue to justify impeachment proceedings, and its integrity would depend on an intelligence community which has yet to let go of its seething hostility towards Trump. Good luck with that.
There is so much that is bogus and hypocritical in all of this that one hardly knows where to start. Three points will suffice:
- A Stanford University study showed that "Fake News Didn’t Tip (the) Election Against (Hillary) Clinton," and that "the most widely believed fake news stories were those that benefited her."
- In Reiner and Freeman, we have two people among millions one the left who were firmly in the camp that believed during the 1980s that "The USSR isn't so bad, and it's Ronald Reagan who is the war criminal who will blow up the world." At the time, they were as mad about the fall of the Soviet Union, and especially the credit given to Reagan for the Evil Empire's demise, as they claim Putin was.
- The "hawks" in this alliance are utter fools, aka useful idiots, to believe that they would be treated kindly if CIR were ever to achieve the impeachment and removal objectives which are so blatantly obvious.
Even Casey Michel at the far-left ThinkProgress website believes that CIR has gone over the edge, asserting that the "No actual Russian experts have been identified as helping the group," and that it "has clearly favored narrative over factual analysis."
Now let's get to Carlson's interview of Reiner.
The entire interview is here. Two short clips follow in this post.
Carlson began by asking Reiner when the bombing of St. Petersburg and the blockade of the Gulf of Finland should start. After all, if you're at war, you don't call for an investigation that might take months. Reiner responded that the video was about cyber warfare. Though that term was mentioned once in the narrative, it was overwhelmed by Freeman's dramatically delivered near-opening four words: "We are at war." Sorry, Rob, that one little mention doesn't get it.
Reiner tried to shift to how important it was for people to understand other countries' capacity for cyber warfare through hacking, social media, and other means.
As to hacking, it's as if we don't know that already, and as if our intelligence agencies aren't aware of it — though not doing a particularly good job fighting it during the Obama administration, to the point of making some of us wonder if Team Obama didn't mind making this nation's secrets available for worldwide consumption.
As to social media and other means, the Obama administration actively tried to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu using far more aggressive methods in that relatively tiny country than anything anyone has been able to legitimately concoct about Russia in the U.S. elections. (The latest load of media rubbish is about how 21 states' electoral systems were supposedly "hacked" by Russia. The worst that can be said at the moment, even if it was Russia — which, given the intelligence agencies' track record, is questionable — is that someone tried, and failed, to "hack" anything.)
At about the 3:50 mark, Reiner delivered the howler of the month: "This really doesn't have anything to do with Donald Trump. Trust me." Based on the discussion of the Freeman video above, we don't trust you, Meathead, nor should we.
Reiner then moaned about how "divided" the country is (See this map. Yeah, the division, primarily between coastal and urban elites and the rest of the country is quite obvious. And whose fault is that?).
This gave Carlson, at the 5-minute mark, the opening he needed to go after Reiner and Hollywood over their nonchalance relating to China:
Transcript:
TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of this is deeply disingenuous.
Anyone who looks at cyber warfare will tell you — any honest person will say — the Chinese military is the primary culprit in the United States. Hacked into the White House not that long ago into the computer system there and into almost every federal agency. Nobody said anything. You guys in Hollywood sell your movies in China. You bow to the imperatives of their propaganda and censorship office. You change your movies to suit them. Yet no one says we are at war with China. So you are sucking up to this regime that has actually broken in installing industrial and military secrets that have hurt this country. You say nothing until Hillary Clinton loses, and now, all of a sudden, we are at war with Russia. Can you see why some of us are saying, wait a second, Rob Reiner, we are at war with China. Why are you selling your movies over there?
That's known as a direct hit.
The best Reiner could ultimately claim is that he personally doesn't sell movies in China. (Really? We're supposed to believe that none of the nearly 20 films listed here which he has directed and/or produced can be found or has ever been screened in at least slightly sterilized form in Mainland China? Excuse my skepticism.)
With time running short, Carlson grew weary of Reiner's bobbing and weaving and basically repeated his question, ultimately forcing out the real answer:
Transcript:
CARLSON: If China is a bigger violator in the United States than Russia, and I think everyone agrees that it is, why are they not in your movie?
REINER: But China has not insinuated themselves directly into our democratic process, into our elections.
CARLSON: Are you being serious? Of course they have. I mean, they've stolen information directly from the U.S. Government, from our political figures, from the Pentagon, from CIA, from the White House. If they’re not in our political system, I don’t understand what the definition is.
REINER: I didn’t say that they weren't in the political system. Of course they are. What I’m saying, they didn’t utilize that material to try to affect an election in some way.
CARLSON: Oh, to hurt Hillary. I get it. So you can see why some of us are maybe a little skeptical. Maybe you’re not selling as many movies in Russia as you are in China. Anyway, good luck with David Frum and Max Boot. Good to see you, Rob.
It's also "good to see" that Carlson got the Meathead to admit what Freeman's video also essentially admits: 10-1/2 months after Election Day, the left's efforts to delegitimize Donald Trump's presidency in Americans' hearts and minds continue unabated.
The guess here is that the American people will largely see through and/or ignore this, as they have seen through the barrage of fake news produced by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Big Three broadcast networks since before last year's election.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
