The Strange Success of Russiagate

It was the popcorn fart heard round the world. After two years of the vilest Russophobic hysteria seen since McCarthy was hauled off to a laughing academy in a straight-jacket, Robert Mueller, patron saint of butt-hurt Dems and indefinite Muslim detention, came to a conclusion on Russiagate only stunning to those of us who don’t live outside the bulletproof walls of stone blind denial. After 37 indictments for totally unrelated Beltway scumbaggery. After $26 million of the taxpayers pilfered dollars flushed down the fucking toilet. After five hundred thousand hours of unhinged sore losers like Rachel Maddow giving Alex Jones a run for his money screaming their bloody heads off about one grassy knoll after another. The results of the great Russian Inquisition of 2019 are bupkis, notta, zero, no collusion whatsoever between one Donald J. Trump and the Putin regime. You could have heard a pin-head drop at MSDNC.

It was like the last scene of the Sopranos. Ivanka is struggling to park the Jag. Melania and Baron are popping onion rings. Putin heads for the bathroom with his hand shoved deep in his Members Only jacket. Journey swells on the jukebox. The bells on the door jangle. Donny’s big orange face looks up it’s “Don’t stop!….”. Lights out. And the pumped up kiddos in the #Resistance are smacking the side of the Sony until Robert Mueller’s name appears on the credits. There all screaming high-holy what-the-fucks while skeptical cunts like me struggle to hold back our hysteric laughter long enough to say I told you so. Long story short; No collusion, you imbeciles! A sexually aggressive cartoon character became president because you insisted on cutting corners for a bomb dropping Wall Street battle ax who the Rustbelt casualties in purple America couldn’t stomach voting for. You lose. You blew it. There are no boogeymen with long Slavic names to blame. You suck. Game over.

Naturally, the faithful in snowflake country are taking the news a little hard. Some of them are still holding out hope for a secret Easter egg of collusion buried somewhere deep in the fully unredacted Mueller Report and who knows, they could get lucky. There might be some shred of humiliating evidence lost in that massive unholy Finnegan’s Wake of labyrinthine documentation. Some whimsical anecdote from a Ukrainian goat herder about a meeting between Trump and Stalin at a Burger King ten miles outside of Donetsk. Lord knows the Truthers managed to milk the 9/11 Commission Report for a few fleeting boners. And if the public never gets their hands on it, both sides of Congress will be able to spin this thing into more converging narratives than the New Testament. We will have the Adam Schiff Book of Mueller, the Devin Nunes Book of Mueller, the Dianne Feinstein Book of Mueller, each more bullshit than the last.

But the truly woke members of the Resistance have already begun to accept the harsh reality that if an old school neocon gumshoe like Mueller couldn’t justify his pitiful career of framing immigrant children for terror plots with a climactic slam dunk then there was never really any ‘there’ there to begin with. Mueller is one of the assholes who legitimized the Iraq War with nothing but a few crumbs of yellow cake and a C+ term paper. If even a steel-haired master inquisitor like him couldn’t scrounge up enough dirt to save face for such a pointless publicity stunt then the litter box is officially empty. No one wants to go down in history as a foot note next to Ken Starr. These well intentioned dupes who invested so much of their hopes and dreams of saving America from the Orange Menace into this aimless witch hunt are finally awakening to the nightmare that their crusaders for truth in the Fourth Estate and the deep state have mislead them down the rabbit hole into becoming the new Truthers. They’re looking up at their dorm room walls as we speak, to a manic collage of crumpled receipts, torn magazine adds and scribbled Post-it notes tied together with thumbtacks and red yarn and asking themselves, “What in god’s green dick have I become?”

With any luck these shell-shocked man-children will never trust another mainstream journalist or federal agent ever again and I take comfort in that. But does that mean that Russiagate was a total bust? Well, that really all depends on how you look at it. If the point was to vindicate the Democrats for losing the White House to a confirmed lunatic then the answer is a pretty resounding yes. However, if you’re one of this countries talking heads on loan from the Military Industrial Complex, you have a long career and a grossly increased stream of income to look forward to. That’s because the most lasting result of our latest Red Scare has been pushing both parties to embrace the most dangerously Russophobic foreign policy positions that we’ve seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even the once ostensibly detente friendly Donald Trump has eviscerated the INF Treaty, threatened World War Three over Kremlin aid to the embattled Maduro regime in Caracas and completely forgotten Julian Assange’s name as he’s being hauled off to Florence Supermax for the next thousand years.

And perhaps this was the point all along. Not to impeach a president who has turned the world’s foremost sinking superpower into a laughing stalk. But to insure that a geostrategic wildcard with possible financial ties to sanctioned Russian oligarchs stayed the course and kept the new Cold War the deep state has invested so much time and money into running. If the latter is indeed the case then I’d say that Russiagate has been a resounding success. Congrats, boys. Once again, you’ve made the world a far more dangerous and prosperous place. The Dulles brothers would be so proud.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.