Thursday, August 17, 2017

CounterPunch Needs To Get a Grip When It Comes to Caitlin Johnstone


Caitlin Johnstone is an online blogger with a journalism degree. She's mainly concerned with the Defeat-o-crats' and the MSM's attempt to gin-up conflict with Russia, and potentially start a nuclear war. She was a Bernie Sanders supporter. (Supporting from afar since she's Australian.)

She has, occasionally, advocated sharing some stories from right-wingers that are critical of the MSM. (I, for instance, loath Tucker Carlson and James O'Keefe, but when the former reduced a Democratic Hillary-bot to stuttering incoherence by asking plainly for evidence about the Trump-Putin hijacking of the USA's non-existent democracy, and the latter recorded a CNN producer admitting that "Russia-gate" was mostly bullshit that they've been ordered to obsess about, it ought to be cause for reflection.)

You see, if you're the sort of person whose priorities bounce around like a pinball: ("Eeek! ISIS is the vilest group of killers on the planet! We have to DO SOMETHING!!! "Eeek! The dictators Assad and Putin are doing something about ISIS! Innocent civilians will be killed!" "DAMN TO HELL the psychopaths creating all those Syrian refugees and causing so many of them to drown in the Mediterranean!" "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in charge of the mercenary-backed rebellion in Syria that has created all those refugees, but they're not Donald Trump therefore they're progressives and our friends!" "Eek! Trump is going to start a war with North Korea!" "Eek! Trump doesn't want a nuclear war with Russia! It's TREASON!!!") Then you'll find yourself forever doing stupid things, believing stupid things, and contradicting yourself and your values on a regular basis.

Trump has ties to the Russia mafia. That's what he's trying to hide. The DNC files were leaked not hacked.

This is the sort of stuff Caitlin Johnstone writes about it. And, for reasons known only to themselves, CounterPunch has decided that she's Public Enemy Number One. It started with a really stupid article questioning her credentials as a journalist (when she's mainly writing opinion pieces) which was written by a fucking psychologist. And it's been continuing on for weeks on end, slandering her as advocating making common cause with Nazis when she's only talking about the same sort of stuff that Glenn Greenwald writes about when he agrees with Ron or Rand Paul about rejecting interventionist foreign policies and state surveillance of private citizens.

"Eek! Did you know that both Ron and Rand Paul are RACISTS!!! Do you want to associate with such scum???"

Meanwhile, mass-murderers Obama and Clinton are your allies?

Caitlin Johnstone has probably slipped-up here and there. Sometimes I have my doubts about her. Especially her having written a book about astrology for christ's sake! But this obsession of CounterPunch to bring her down is unfortunate and makes them look like bitter, irrelevant pompous asses.


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