Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin was portrayed as such a disaster by US media earlier this week that even superheroes went into hysterics over what was spun as Trump’s betrayal of the US intelligence community.
The reason for the media uproar in the wake of the Helsinki summit was Trump’s response to a reporter, in which he stated (or misstated, depending who you listen to) that he believed Putin when the Russian leader said there was no interference in the US presidential election of 2016.
On CNN, that silver-spooned, silver-haired Silver Surfer clone, Anderson Cooper immediately responded to Trump’s performance by shrieking:
“You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader certainly that I’ve ever seen.”
Former head of the CIA John Brennan, who looks and acts frighteningly similar to Thing from the Fantastic Four, tweeted:
Former director of the CIA and NSA Michael Hayden went full Hulk in response to Trump contradicting the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. Hayden monosyllabically rage-tweeted:
Then a “real” superhero jumped into the fray. Chris Evans, the actor who plays Captain America in the Marvel franchise films, who is the perfect representation of America because he is so boyishly handsome, ridiculously muscular, emotionally infantile and staggeringly empty-headed, tweeted of Trump:
I have a sneaking suspicion Mr Evans is often at a complete loss… like when he happens upon a doorknob. Apparently, the Captain’s Twitter finger is even more powerful than his ‘Vibranium’ shield because he didn’t stop there… he followed up by tweeting:
Captain America’s logic is pristine… I mean, how could anyone in their right mind dare to question America’s saintly intelligence community about their limited and still evidence free “assessment” that Russia interfered in the American election?
Sure, the American intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel on 9/11, wrong about WMDs in Iraq, ran a secret rendition and torture program, spied on American citizens, international allies and the US Congress, and then lied and perjured themselves about all of the above in order to cover their backsides… but when it comes to what happened in the 2016 election, we should totally take their word for it!
Evans was joined in his Twitter rampage shortly thereafter by fellow Marvel talent James Gunn, who in addition to writing and directing the Guardians of the Galaxy movies also produced this year’s smash hit Avengers: Infinity War. Gunn re-tweeted this:
In an ironic case of “he who liveth by Twitter, dieth by Twitter,” Gunn, who is notoriously quick on the draw when it comes to tweeting, transformed into an ex-Marvel talent later in the week when he got fired from directing Guardians of the Galaxy 3 after some entirely unrelated decade-old tweets surfaced in which he joked about rape and pedophilia. No doubt Gunn’s Twitter handle will now be holstered.
While Gunn’s re-tweeted Thanos meme is legitimately funny, equating Thanos – the villain in Infinity War who kills half of all beings in the universe in order to restore balance – to Putin, is hysterical… literally.
The mainstream media may claim otherwise, but the truth is Putin is not some omnipotent supervillain intent on universal or even global domination. Putin presides over a nation with only the ninth-largest population in the world, the 11th largest economy (by projected GDP), and the fourth-largest military budget (which is nearly 10 times smaller than the US military budget) – that is not a Thanos level of super villainy… that doesn’t even rise to the level of Ultron, Loki or Lex Luthor, for goodness sakes.
If Putin were truly a Thanos-level supervillain, he would at least have the world’s largest economy, largest military budget, more foreign military bases than any other nation in human history, the largest prison population, a vast worldwide eavesdropping surveillance system, along with extra-judicial kill lists, and also have fomented coups and waged wars in such far off and diverse lands as Ukraine, Libya, Egypt, Honduras, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan. Of course, in order to have all of those things Putin would have to be the president of the United States.
The reality is that Putin is nothing more than a nation’s leader whose interest is in protecting Mother Russia and its people from existential threats, which historically for Russians is a much more pressing matter than for those of us living in the United States.
It is difficult for Americans like James Gunn and Chris Evans to grasp, but a little over 75 years ago, the elite of the Nazi war machine were a stone’s throw from Moscow. Maybe if we Americans learned our history from somewhere other than Marvel movies we would know that it wasn’t Captain America that defeated the Nazis, it was the Soviets who broke the back of Hitler’s military monstrosity and who lost more than 26 million lives in the process.
Even in the last 30 years, Russians have had to survive the chaos and calamity that befell them when the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO encroached on their borders, and America shamelessly meddled in their elections and economy.
The truth is that Anderson Cooper, John Brennan and Captain America Chris Evans all inhabit different wings of the same American propaganda machine that has no interest in hearing differing or nuanced viewpoints and has its heart set on demonizing and castrating Russia.
Cooper, a former intern at the CIA, is a cheerleader for American militarism, and stokes the flames of Russophobia nightly on his CNN “news” show.
Brennan now plays a “serious” pundit on MSNBC, who routinely calls Vladimir Putin a “low-life thug.” Since Brennan aided and abetted torture and treasonously spied on his own government while he was at the CIA, should he be considered a “high-life” thug because he is well paid as a member of the political and media establishment?
Chris Evans is also part of the American propaganda machine – the Hollywood wing. Is Evans aware that most of Hollywood, including Marvel and its parent company Disney, make movies in co-operation with the Pentagon? Does he know that in exchange for use of military equipment, personnel and expertise, the Pentagon gets creative control of those projects and eliminates any negative narratives that shed a bad light on the US or its military to insure that those films will be coercive advertisements for American militarism?
Is Chris Evans aware and comfortable with the fact that America’s intelligence community also has a fruitful working relationship with Hollywood that has distorted history and whitewashed torture?
Does Chris Evans also support the cavalcade of anti-Russian films and television shows being churned out in recent years by Hollywood that brazenly dehumanize Russians and make Americans more susceptible to believe any negative story they hear about Russians in the mainstream media?
Maybe the vacuous gruel that is the Russiagate case will expand to become a sumptuous feast of evidence proving Putin’s guilt and Trump’s complicity. And maybe Trump is exactly what the media and Captain America claim he is… a useful idiot who is a “moron, puppet and coward…” But upon closer examination, the same could also be said of Evans who, wittingly or unwittingly, enables the Pentagon and intelligence agencies’ militaristic and Russophobic propaganda campaigns to indoctrinate the American people to be gullible to the media, subservient to authority and aggressively belligerent toward Russians.
Add in the fact that liberals in Hollywood and the media are now so deeply in the throes of their virulent anti-Russian hysteria that they actually equate any alleged Russian election interference with the atrocities of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, and you have a perfect recipe for a potential war… talk about useful idiots.
Michael McCaffrey, for RT
Michael McCaffrey is a freelance writer, film critic and cultural commentator. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he runs his acting coaching and media consulting business. mpmacting.com/blog/
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.