My New Favorite Thing: Watching NeverTrumpers Who Have Pushed the Collusion Narrative For Years Now Claiming to Have Always Been "Collusion Skeptics"

Some NeverTrump bloggers and pundits who have zestfully retweeted and hyped and promoted every single drop of Russia Hysteria Hoax News and speculated wildly about the import each dribble had about Trump's future, but never linked or mentioned a single piece debunking or questioning these hoax pieces.

They're now pretending they were totally not into the Collusion Delusion and all and were always "collusion skeptics" and weren't at all like their twitter palz or their Hero Jake Tapper.

Have any of these alleged "collusion skeptics" ever linked or mentioned Lee Smith?

Mollie Hemingway?

Julie Kelly?

Margot Cleveland?

Kim Strassel?

John Solomon?

Chuck Ross?

Do you... even recognize most of those names?

How citing about Nunes' disclosures?

How about Andy McCarthy's pieces questioning the origins and basis of the case? I mean, he fucking works with you for crying out loud. You'd think that would buy some credibility.

No? Never? Never?

Not a single time?

And you did, of course, breathlessly retweet every single single-source anonymous leak from the Fusion Collusion crew at CNN, right?

In fact, I seem to remember "collusion skeptic" Jonah Goldberg being very reluctant to retract a story revealed to be totally bogus after tweeting it out to his hundred thousand plus followers.

Took hours to get him to issue a correction, which was, get this, grudging and angry.

Then: In what sense were you ever "skeptics"? This is like claiming you're bisexual but you've never once even thought about sex with a woman.

This also reminds me of the media's behavior when they found out their Hero Obama had lied about keeping your doctor. They were faced with a choice: Admit that they were ignorant about what ObamaCare said about keeping your policy, or admit that they were covering it up. Amazingly, it turned out that many would rather admit that they were part of the cover up than admit On The Internet that they had been ignorant and taken for a ride!

The intellectual vanity -- entirely unwarranted, of course -- is so strong in some that they'd rather admit they lied than admit that they were fooled.

Can any of the people now pretending to have not bought into this Russia business point to an essay they wrote in the past questioning the basis of the collusion narrative?

I know some people stood apart from the Groupthink Twitter Borg and took a lot of mockery and social shaming for daring to question the official Believed-But-Never-Actually-Considered media/Twitter Smart-Set narrative.

But I don't remember any of these Sudden Skeptics doing so.

Did these "collusion skeptic" Johnny Come Latelies ever dare risking the snark of their fellow Permanent Twitter Asylum Residents?

Let's call a couple of bad actors out:

Jonah Goldberg: If you were a "collusion skeptic," why did you snidely tweet-quote or subtweet just about every Mollie Hemingway link casting doubt on the collusion narrative?

You seem to have hewed to a single position on collusion, and it wasn't "skepticism" -- you sneered at the skeptics.

That's a real "skeptical" sneer about being skeptical of the media's fake news collusion bullshit. You can tell it's skeptical because it has the extra "o" in Okay which stands for Objective and another extra "o" which stands for Open-Minded.

I should say, in fairness, that Goldberg called himself a "collusion skeptic" before the Mueller report dropped.

But... I never noticed him calling himself a "skeptic" until kind of all the media was starting a bit of a walkback when word started leaking out that maybe this report would... disappoint some true believers.

If Goldberg can point out signs of genuine skepticism of earlier vintage -- not just rhetorical throat-clearings like "we need all the facts" -- I'll gladly correct and include them.
David French: If you were a collusion skeptic, why did you actually make mock of actual collusion skeptics with your friends at MSNBC? Please explain this video from Real Clear Politics entitled, David French: Awful Lot of People Are "Desperate" To Believe Trump/Russia Collusion Is All "Nonsense".

Is that skeptical, French? It doesn't sound skeptical. It sounds like you are positively scornful of actual skeptics, and you're calling them deluded and maybe crazy.

CHUCK TODD: We would be laughing at it if Putin would be pulling the wool over our eyes using RT doing something like this. This is what-aboutism and all of this stuff on of the head. But David, I would argue it's effective right now.

DAVID FRENCH: Who needs RT when you have got Sean Hannity?

There are an awful lot of people who are desperate, desperate to believe all of this is a bunch of non-sense. Look, I don't know what's true and what's not. All of us have very partial information right now.

CHUCK TODD: Correct.

I know you'll say "But I said 'I don't know what's true and what's not'" -- but I also know there was only one narrative you were questioning. Those who said this was made-up hokum, you were scornful of and suggested they were desperate and deluded. But Chuck Todd's tranquil, Zen-like confidence in the collusion narrative?

You had not one god-damned thing to say about that.

This is just a bit of rhetorical cover people use all the time: "Look, we don't know all the facts, but let's face it, we kind of know all the facts or at least should act as if we do."

I mean, Bill O'Reilly made a career of this, as with the claim that that Congressman murdered Chandra Levy. "We don't know the facts, obviously," he'd caveat, before demanding the Congressman resign from office.

We don't know the facts, but come on, we know the facts well enough to demand some actions be taken as if the facts were indeed proven facts.

This also doesn't sound "skeptical," French:

DAVID FRENCH: Here's what I do know. Here's what I do know. If the son of a presidential candidate gets a message from -- that is purporting to say, or that actually says, I have information to share with you from the government of Russia about a plan to help Mr. Trump and to help facilitate his election, that it is not right to respond to that with, "I love it."

If somebody does respond with "I love it," what that indicates is at the very least they were enthusiastic about potentially colluding with the Russians. Enthusiastic about it. In the face of evidence like that among many other things we could go into, to then say all this is is a witch-hunt, all this is is non-sense I think strains credulity.

Is that all you know? Was there anything else you knew, like that Natalia Velitsniskya was working with Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS to -- yes, Fusion was working both sides of the streets, literally trying to advance Putin's interests in getting rid of the Magnitsky Act while also trying to frame Trump for trying to advance Putin's interests. Did you know that?

Did you know the entire collusion narrative was cooked up by Hillary Clinton and the DNC? If so, you sure were shy about saying so.

Did you know that as Shattered reported, Hillary Clinton and her zealots decided as a group to push this collusion conspiracy nonsense to undermine Trump and vindicate herself?

Again, it's strange the things you choose to "know" and not know quite so much.

Also, please explain this tweet in which you straight-up say that Trump supporters are excusing "collusion" that they know happened.

Skeptic, huh? I guess you were a Secret Skeptic posing as a True Believer?

A Double Agent operating behind enemy lines, maybe? Gathering valuable intel about the collusion delusion forces?

By the way: Even though all these guys whine about "Whataboutism," they deploy Whataboutism without any shame at all.

In this thread, David French excuses his media pals' -- and his own -- eagerness to believe a conspiracy theory by saying "But there are other conspiracies other people believe in too, like Seth Rich!"

And he once again plays the "Both Sides" card by saying, essentially, "no one on the right criticizes Sean Hannity but they're beating up my swell MSNBC friends."

Well, Frenchie:

1, that's Whataboutism. It does not bear on the issue of whether your media pals, and you, bought into a ridiculous conspiracy theory that other people bought into other conspiracy theories.

2, did the Seth Rich conspiracy theory consume the country for two and half years, generating over five hundred thousand print articles and video news segments?

3, did the media's Department of Handing Out Awards to Everyone and Their Cousins give Sean Hannity any Pulitzers for his reporting on that conspiracy theory? Did the White House Correspondent's association hand out trophies to QAnon on the night of their Prom For Ugly Old People?

No?

Not really the same thing then, is it?

lol get fucked, "skeptic"

I Denounce This Comment:

This is disgraceful! Stop this madness immediately!

70 We Were Totally Skeptics About Collusion and Please Stop Railing My Wife When I'm Not There

Posted by: Future Articles

Approval! David French gets a big endorsement for his Whataboutism thread from a man who never once pushed the Collusion Conspiracy Theory.

posted by Ace of Spades at 01:12 PM

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