A good way to judge how the fake news story about the supposed collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians is holding up is to take a look at how liberal but skeptical reporter Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone is covering it.
Almost a month ago on March 8, Taibbi was warning Democrats and the mainstream media to be very wary of this dubious story. Since nothing has been uncovered since then to lend a shred of credibility to this fake news story, Taibbi has progressed to openly mocking those who continue, against all evidence, to desperately hang on to this fairy tale in order to somehow bring President Trump down.
You can get an idea of just how brutal Taibbi's mockery of the Trump-Russia collusion cultists is just by the title of his April 3 Rolling Stone story: Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives. The subtitle is no less brutal: Whatever the truth about Trump and Russia, the speculation surrounding it has become a dangerous case of mass hysteria.
Nobody wants to be the one claiming the emperor has no clothes the day His Highness walks out naked. And this Russia thing has spun out of control into just such an exercise of conspiratorial mass hysteria.
Even I think there should be a legitimate independent investigation – one that, given Trump's history, might uncover all sorts of things. But almost irrespective of what ends up being uncovered on the Trump side, the public prosecution of this affair has taken on a malevolent life of its own.
One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who doesn't believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going on virtually unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent weeks.
The aforementioned Mensch, a noted loon who thinks Putin murdered Andrew Breitbart but has somehow been put front and center by The Times and HBO's Real Time, has denounced an extraordinary list of Kremlin plants.
She's tabbed everyone from Jeff Sessions ("a Russian partisan") to Rudy Giuliani and former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom ("agents of influence") to Glenn Greenwald ("Russian shill") to ProPublica and Democracy Now! (also "Russian shills"), to the 15-year-old girl with whom Anthony Weiner sexted (really, she says, a Russian hacker group called "Crackas With Attitudes") to an unnamed number of FBI agents in the New York field office ("moles"). And that's just for starters.
That's Louise Mensch. She has become such a moonbat in regards to the Trump-Russia collusion fake news story that Taibbi is worried that she will completely destroy the credibility of all liberals.
Others are doing the same. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, upon seeing the strange behavior of Republican Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes, asked "what kind of dossier" the Kremlin has on Nunes.
Dem-friendly pollster Matt McDermott wondered why reporters Michael Tracey and Zaid Jilani aren't on board with the conspiracy stories (they might be "unwitting" agents!) and noted, without irony, that Russian bots mysteriously appear every time he tweets negatively about them.
So there are other conspiracy loons besides Mensch. And if you are liberal but somewhat skeptically sane on the matter of the Trump-Russia collusion fantasy as Taibbi is, you will also be smeared by the loons:
I've written a few articles on the Russia subject that have been very tame, basically arguing that it might be a good idea to wait for evidence of collusion before those of us in the media jump in the story with both feet. But even I've gotten the treatment.
I've been "outed" as a possible paid Putin plant by the infamous "PropOrNot" group, which is supposedly dedicated to rooting out Russian "agents of influence." You might remember PropOrNot as the illustrious research team the Washington Post once relied on for a report that accused 200 alternative websites of being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season."
Even someone with a respectable reputation such as Senator Mark Warner (D) of Virginia is acting like a loon on this matter as hilariously revealed by Taibbi:
Warner furthermore told The Times that in order to get prepared for his role as an exposer of 21st-century Russian perfidy, he was "losing himself in a book about the Romanovs," and had been quizzing staffers about "Tolstoy and Nabokov."
This is how nuts things are now: a senator brushes up on Nabokov and Tolstoy (Tolstoy!) to get pumped to expose Vladimir Putin.
...If the party's leaders really believe that Russian intervention is anywhere in the top 100 list of reasons why some 155 million eligible voters (out of 231 million) chose not to pull a lever for Hillary Clinton last year, they're farther along down the Purity of Essence nut-hole than Mark Warner.
The problem for Matt Taibbi is that the Democrats and their MSM allies dug themselves so deep into that "Purity of Essence nut-hole" that they can't get out despite his warnings and mockery.
