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March 28, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
12:20
The Tears of Rachel Maddow
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It has been a rough few years for Rachel Maddow since the election of Donald Trump.
MSNBC star host has been constantly on the very cusp of glory in her attempt to bring down this renegade president.
And this began even before Donald Trump had won his campaign.
But after he had, this was her response.
You're awake, by the way.
You're not having a terrible, terrible dream.
Also, you're not dead and you haven't gone to hell.
This is your life now.
This is our election now.
This is us.
This is our country.
It's real.
Rachel didn't wallow in her profound disappointment with the American public for too long.
She went on the offensive.
Anything and everything that she could find to throw at Donald Trump, she did, whether it had any basis in reality or not.
Take, for example, the way that she objected to him handling the border crisis, the crisis of illegal immigrants coming across the border, trafficking women and children and drugs and guns.
Why, it was enough to bring a person to tears.
Some new news.
This has just come out from the Associated Press.
This is incredible.
Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children to at least three.
Put up the graphic of this.
Thank you.
Do we have it?
No.
Three tender aid shelters in South Texas.
Lawyers and medical providers.
Just.
I think I'm going to have to hand this off.
Yeah.
Sorry.
That doesn't frustrate.
We'll see you again tomorrow.
No, it is time for the last word with Lawrence O'Donnell, where he is live in Brownsville, Texas.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
Don't worry about the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has been saying, well, look, sex trafficking of children across the border is a serious threat to the children, and it is our responsibility as the authorities to make sure that these children are actually with their parents and not with some child trafficker who kidnapped them down in Guatemala or something and has traveled them all the way to the United States in order to do God knows what to them.
And don't worry about the fact that these children, once separated from their potential child traffickers, are given clean beds in a safe place with food and games and entertainment as in much better conditions than they had before they arrived in the United States.
But don't worry about any of that because Rachel Maddow was crying for the percentage of children who were actually brought by their parents to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Her tears were real.
They weren't real when Barack Obama was doing the same thing, but they're real now.
And Trump has to pay.
So when Rachel Maddow got hold of Trump's 2005 tax return, well, that's it.
The game is afoot.
Now we're going to expose just how much tax Donald Trump did, or rather did not pay in 2005.
What I have here is a copy of Donald Trump's tax returns.
We have his federal tax return for one year for 2005.
I believe this is the only set of the president's federal taxes that reporters have ever gotten a hold of.
What we have are these two pages, front and back, from the same 1040 form that you might have filled out when you file your taxes.
And in terms of what's on here, let me give you the basics.
Aside from the numbers being large, these pages are straightforward.
He paid $38 million, looks like $38 million in taxes.
He took a big write-down of $103 million.
More on that later.
If you add up the lines for income, he made more than $150 million in that year, Mazeltov.
Rachel Maddow has you now, Donald Trump.
She hyped this up for weeks in advance.
And now it turns out that you paid a higher tax rate than Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Mitt Romney.
Wait.
Oh, shit.
Even the late-night partisan comedians could not stop themselves from teasing Rachel Maddow for this massive cell phone.
But all is not lost yet, because Rachel Maddow still had one ace in the hole, one card up her sleeve that she could play her, if you will, Trump card.
The fact that Donald Trump wasn't legitimately elected as a president of the United States by the American people, oh no, he was installed by America's eternal archenemy, Russia.
I mean, if the big picture Russian dream here is to have their very own president of the USA, if their dream is to compromise an American presidential candidate so that candidate is beholden to them, and then install that compromised candidate as president, then the Trump Tower Moscow project, which compromises Trump, and the election interference campaign, which is designed to install him, those are the same op.
Compromise your guy, then install your compromised guy.
World domination in two easy steps.
And how were the Russians going to conquer the United States from within?
Well, through the use of compromats, compromising materials on the president himself.
In this case, a particular dossier that was created by a British spy that asserted that Donald Trump used to engage in water sports in Russia for some reason with various prostitutes.
This dossier was considered so unreliable that only BuzzFeed would publish it.
And of course, none of the salacious allegations within it were ever confirmed to be true.
But that didn't really matter to Rachel Maddow because at the end of the day, this dossier, if it were true, would prove collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The main allegation here, the thing everybody is most worried about, which is the bottom-line allegation of this unproven dossier, is that Russia didn't just attack our election.
They did so with the knowledge of and support of the Trump campaign.
That the Trump folks were in on it, that they knew what Russia was doing while they were doing it, and they continued meeting with Russians in knowledge of that activity during the time of the attack.
And so there was no need to be skeptical about this or even beat around the bush.
The Russians may be controlling the US government.
Now, the Russians themselves said that's ridiculous, but that's what they would say, isn't it?
And so this became the baseline from which Rachel Maddow would conduct her inquisition into the Trump administration with regards to their connection with Russia.
This is what Rachel Madow fed to her viewers non-stop.
Russia.
Russia, Vladimir Putin, Russia, Russia.
Russia.
Russia hates Russia.
Russia.
Russia.
Putin.
Russia's Russian.
Russian.
Russia.
Russia.
Moscow.
Moscow.
Russia.
Russian.
Pro-Russian.
Russian.
Russia.
Russian.
Russian.
The Russians.
Russian.
Russians.
Russians.
Russia.
Russians.
Russian.
Russian.
Russia.
Russian.
Moscow.
Russian.
Russian.
Russia.
Putin.
Russian.
Russian rush against us.
Russians.
The Russians rush against the U.S.
The Russians.
The Russian government scheme.
The Russians.
Vladimir Putin.
Russia.
Vladimir Putin.
Russian.
Putin.
Putin and Russia.
Russia.
Moscow.
Russia.
Russian.
Russian.
Russia.
The Russians.
Russian.
Russians.
Russia.
Russia.
Russian.
Russia.
Russia.
Putin.
Putin.
Putin-Putin.
Russian.
Russia.
The Soviet Empire.
The second of the 20th century's great evils.
Communism.
Russia.
Communism.
Russia.
Assault by Russia.
Russia.
Russia.
Russia's.
Russia.
Putin despises the West in general and the United States in particular, Soviet Empire, Russia, they're the adversary.
They want to bring us down the Soviet Union, undermine the West, Soviet communist, communists on the left, Russia.
That does it for us tonight.
We will see you again tomorrow.
According to an analysis done by left-wing publication The Intercept, Rachel Maddow's coverage of Russia took up more time than all other topics combined.
In one six-week period, Rachel Maddow dedicated 53% of her program to a conspiracy theory regarding Donald Trump and the Russian government.
And her audience lapped it up.
Rachel Maddow's ratings skyrocketed and she became the most watched cable news network in the United States.
Not just cable news program, but all of cable television, with a total audience of 3.89 million viewers during the period where Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen were under particular scrutiny.
And then Robert Mueller ended his investigation into coordination between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia.
After thousands of subpoenas, hundreds of interviews, and unfathomable amounts of news coverage, much of it from Rachel Maddow herself, Mueller said that there would be no further indictments.
The investigation was over.
But what's worse was that Donald Trump was in the clear.
It did not appear that he had colluded with the Russian government in order to win the 2016 presidential campaign.
The conspiracy theory that Rachel Maddow had been proselytizing to millions of Americans every day above all other coverage was over.
And it wasn't true.
And when she was talking about it, you could see that her eyes looked, well, a little watery.
I want to bring into the conversation now our friend Chuck Rosenberg.
He's a former U.S. attorney from the Eastern District of Virginia.
He's also former FBI.
How many thousands of hours had Rachel Maddow pumped into this conspiracy theory?
How successful had this conspiracy theory made her?
So it wasn't really a surprise when a clip of her apparently tearing up when delivering the news went viral.
To do that Bill Barr stopped Mueller from doing.
And that's fascinating.
Everybody would like to do that from Robert Mueller as well as from Bill Barr.
But at this point, it's only Bill Barr who was speaking on Mueller's behalf.
Robert Mueller is still at this point publicly silent, as he has been from the very beginning.
Although we'll have more on that in a moment.
You know, like, whatever.
I'm not crying.
You're crying, was Rachel Maddow's response to this on Twitter, despite the fact that it really did look like she was a little bit upset.
And why wouldn't she be?
The gravy train is over.
Her ratings collapsed overnight.
A 19% drop.
All because Donald Trump did not conspire with the Russians in order to rig his presidential election campaign.
And it isn't just Rachel Maddow herself who has seen this massive ratings drop.
Other MSNBC hosts have seen the same thing, and Fox News, the opponents of MSNBC in this regard, have seen a massive ratings spike.
It turns out that if you make your bones pushing a conspiracy theory, and that conspiracy theory is proven to be false, then the cash cow that you were milking suddenly dries up.
And now you can't blame someone else, some outside interference, for why the Democrats failed in 2016.
The left needs to become introspective and ask themselves why?
Why did people vote for Donald Trump?
Why did people reject them?
What are they doing wrong?
Instead of making excuses and saying it's not us, it's the Russians.
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