Imagine the millions of Russian people believing Putin’s propaganda rhetoric about the invasion/war against the Ukrainian people.

Thousands of men, women and children have been killed in obvious unconstrained bombing, wiping almost entire Ukrainian cities off the face of the earth.

If and when the war comes to an end, millions of Ukrainians will return home to find nothing left of their previous lives. Some will never return, opting to stay in the new countries to which they fled.  

Just how powerful does Putin  and his media thugs have to be to control the minds of willing Russians to believe this crap? He has closed all media, or opposition opinions. Thousands of protestors to Putin’s rhetoric have been arrested.

On top of that, Russian lawmakers dramatically toughened “fake news” laws, in the Kremlin’s latest move to crack down on domestic dissent amid its ongoing war on Ukraine.

If you doubt the supreme leader, you are shunned, even if you were once a true Putin believer. False information about the Russian government’s intent  and overall goal is quickly silenced, as Putin critics are seen as ambivalent to the leader’s actual facts.

After all, the Great Putin  unites the true Russian people’s feelings of an unjust past and future for this once great empire.

Do you believe those stupid Russians are falling for all that fake news?

Luckily, we Americans are much smarter that those gullible Russians.

Speaking of fake news...all credible evidence tells us that the 2020 election was very secure. Experts on both sides of the political aisle, and even President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department, have confirmed that 2020 was a free and fair election. Even a Republican-sponsored audit of Arizona’s results found no evidence of fraud or malfeasance.

Nevertheless, a majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen.

In a recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, fielded online Dec. 14-20 by YouGov among a nationally representative sample of the U.S. voting-age population, only 21 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate.

Meanwhile the Trump machine is still pumping out false rhetoric with the majority of Republicans actually believing this.

In a story by Yahoo News by  David Knowles on Wednesday:

“With the U.S. public showing a vast disapproval of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the wake of his invasion of Ukraine, former President Donald Trump has sought to explain his glowing appraisal of the Russian leader’s moves leading up to the war.”

Also on Wednesday, Trump released a statement in which he parsed the semantics of using the word “genius” when referring to Putin’s military strategy.

Real Republican leadership is wanting to move on and knows the truth, but Trump is still hand picking believers to push his lying agenda as candidates for ongoing elections, pitting Republicans against Republicans.

Yes, there are still some media folk wanting to hang on to the false propaganda, but the most credible have long ago attempted to find new avenues of false news.

In the latest poll numbers in an NBC News story noted: “A majority of voters (58 percent) do not believe there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, while 38 percent say they believe there was widespread fraud. 

As for Republicans on the Ukrainian fiasco?

Former President Donald Trump tries to refine his message about Russia’s war against Ukraine. His base is splintered over the question of America’s engagement in Eastern Europe.

“It’s not our business,” Peggy Bright, 57, said shortly before Trump spoke to an unusually restless and muted crowd on Saturday night. It makes sense to her, she said, that Russian President Vladimir Putin would want to push back against NATO expansion.

Bright’s sentiments reflect those of one wing of the Trump base — as well as the former president’s early praise of Putin — but they are not universal. In conversations with Trump voters in and around that town, about halfway between Atlanta and Greenville, South Carolina, the spectrum of thinking ran from giving Putin free rein, on one end, to sending in U.S. troops.

That may help explain the inconsistency of Trump’s message when Western democracies have united to condemn Putin, impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on Russia and arm Ukraine.

All along, Trump has blamed Biden for Russia’s aggression, but he has stopped lauding Putin. 

“Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Joe Biden totally failed to deter Russia’s disgraceful invasion of Ukraine,” Trump said. “All of those people are dead. Putin’s heinous attack on a proud and sovereign nation shocks the conscience of every person of goodwill.”

Even Trump is struggling with his past praise and past ass-kissing of Putin, in light of the current situation.

Hmm, do you believe those stupid Russians are falling for all that fake news? Now you see how easy it is to be fooled, even for those otherwise smart Americans.

*****

Hats off to Chris Wallace on his Fox News exit. Wallace an 18 year veteran of Fox News stated in a recent interview: “I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox,” Wallace tells the Times, pointing to the framing of the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection that followed as something of a breaking point. He confirms that he complained to Fox News management about fellow network personality Carlson and his Patriot Purge documentary, which leaned into baseless conspiracy theories that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation designed to vilify right-wingers.

“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” the veteran journalist, known for his moderate appeal, shared. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”

He adds, “Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox. And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”