Proving that the left has fully embraced the paranoid style in American politics, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews stated on the air that President trump had missiles fired at that Syrian airfield not so much to stop Basher Assad from gassing babies but to stop the media from suggesting that he is Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate. Matthews even suggested that the operation was concocted by Trump and Putin together to throw people off the scent of the secret alliance between the two world leaders.
Matthews is given to saying alarming things on the air.
Recently he suggested that Susan Rice was getting grief for allegedly spying on Team Trump because she is a woman of color. Matthews has also compared the Trump children of Saddam Hussein’s murderous sons, Uday and Qusay. Uday was an exceptional piece of work, who made it a habit of attending weddings so that he could rape the bride. Uday and Qusay were eventually killed in a shootout with American soldiers after the liberation of Iraq. Eric, Donald Jr., and Ivanka have not been reported to have murdered, tortured, or raped anyone.
The strategy that Matthews is alleging is the so-called “wag the dog” gambit, named after a 1990s satirical movie that depicted a Bill Clinton-like president distracting the American people by faking a war in the Balkans.
Clinton himself was accused of launching military strikes against enemies of the United States timed to change the media narrative from some particularly sordid sex scandal that he had gotten himself involved in, especially the Monica Lewinsky affair that so blighted the last two years of his presidency.
But the scheme that Matthews describes would be of complexity that would have astonished Machiavelli.
Putin would, mostly, pretend to throw his primary client in the Middle East under the bus to maintain the integrity of his alleged client in the United States. One wonders if Assad was in on this scheme or whether he was kept in the dark on a need to know basis.
Or maybe, using Occam’s Razor, we can accept things at face value.
While Trump thinks that Putin might make a good ally in the war on terror, he also does not like Middle East tyrants gassing babies. His speech on the night of the attack seemed to be heartfelt. If Putin doesn’t like the response, Trump takes, as for as the president is concerned, he can lump it. But that would go against the media narrative, so it has to be dismissed out of hand.
