(Illustration by Victor Juhasz, and found here);

In my post earlier with the Brian Williams ‘You had me at hello‘ video, I’d fogotten a precise analysis by Eric Boehlert on his Press Run dispatch from this morning on how the media is handling the current horrid escapades between Republicans and a bloated, vile, former president — journalists, pundits, whatnot have failed to grasp the shitty, remorseless ethos of the GOP as lying, fawning T-Rump bitches:

Casting aside the fact that he incited a murderous mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol, 45 Republican senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), voted to give a remorseless Trump a pass.
The vote came in the wake of news that, during the final days of his presidency, Trump secretly plotted to fire the U.S. Attorney General in order to force Georgia officials to overturn the state’s election results, which would have ignited the country’s gravest Constitutional crisis in a century.

Confirmed: There is no looming GOP “reckoning” over Trump, and there will never will be, no matter how many times naïve news outlets suggest otherwise.

For five years, the press has gotten this story wrong.
Why?
Today’s Republican Party represents an unwieldy challenge for news outlets.
It spent the winter wantonly trying to invalidate election results, while simultaneously endangering the masses during a public healthy crisis by deliberately misinforming Americans about the Covid-19 pandemic.
It has also taken no disciplinary action against a new Congresswoman who previously supported the killing of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Yet the press remains committed to portraying the GOP as a mainstream, center-right entity.
That’s why it keeps botching the “reckoning” story — reporters assume there is a Republican breaking point with Trump and the politics of hate and revenge he represents.
But there never is.
…
The press has been making this mistake for years, anxiously portraying Republicans as being deeply concerned over Trump’s reckless and dangerous behavior.
Last summer, the Times announced GOP members were “despairing” over Trump.
“The result is a quiet but widening breach between Mr. Trump and leading figures in his party,” the newspaper insisted.
The breach though, was only visible to members of the press.

This kind of coverage has been predictably wrong throughout the Trump era because journalists have been projecting a rational thought process onto the Republican Party, and especially after he incited a deadly mob, leading journalists to think, ‘Of course they’ll punish Trump, of course he’ll be forced to pay a price, right?’

Way-wrong! Boehlert e-mails out a Press Run post two/three times a week (you really should sign up for it at the link), and they’re a really most-excellent barometerr of journalism at play in this peculiarly dangerous period of US history — like this:

On Jan. 13 — after members tested positive for COVID-19 after being locked down with her on Jan. 6 — Marjorie Taylor Greene came up from behind me, loud and unmasked. I called out to her to put hers on.

Her staff yelled at me, “Stop inciting violence with Black Lives Matter.” pic.twitter.com/GtN5AmGrkO

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) January 29, 2021

General details via CNN this afternoon:

Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri announced Friday that she will be moving her office away from GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, following a heated exchange earlier this month where Bush confronted Greene about not wearing a mask in a hallway on Capitol Hill.

The fallout led Speaker Nancy Pelosi to take the extraordinary step of ordering Bush’s office to be moved away from Greene, following a request from Bush, the latest signs of the growing tensions between the two parties in the aftermath of the deadly riot on Capitol Hill.
…
Bush did not dispute the fact that she confronted Greene, starting the altercation.
Bush repeatedly asked Greene to put on a mask, to which Greene and Greene’s staff criticized Bush on an unrelated issue.
Bush also cited CNN KFile reporting on Greene’s social media posts that appeared to support violence against politicians as well as “Taylor Greene’s renewed, repeated antagonization of the movement for Black lives in the last month directed towards Congresswoman Bush personally” as reason for the move.

Greene, remember, favors executing Democrats (and others, like maybe, FBI agents) as her claims off her Facebook rantings attests, and about Pelosi specifically, as “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove the Speaker from office — of course, chickenshit Greene deleted the posts once called on them.

The Cori Bush episode, however, resulted in a tweet from Ilhan Omar of Minnesota:

This is a red flag!

Imagine going to work with an armed hostile unstable colleague and not having much recourse. @CoriBush moving her office doesn’t mitigate the threat.

I am afraid inaction from Congressional leadership has the potential to lead to physical harm. https://t.co/8xKwNh5Zhw

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 29, 2021

What will GOP leadership do about Greene? Kevin McCarthy ‘plans to have a conversation‘ with the nutcase next week, and you know, nothing will happen. Crazy is now embedded deep within the Republican party’s soul.
And they’re doing this shit with a bombshell anti-Cold-War-Warrior flash — T-Rump has been a home-grown version of “The Americans” all along — via the Guardian this afternoon:

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin.
The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
…
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model.
Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
…
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time.
Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”
…
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

And the Mueller exposition was a type of dud:

Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”

He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”

Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”

Screaming way-out loud two words — fucking bizarre!

(Illustration: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here).