"Useful idiot" had its origins as the Cold War term for Westerners gullible enough to swallow Soviet propaganda. But the phrase still has currency today, applying, for example, to people willing to buy into Iranian propaganda. People like Joy Reid.

On her MSNBC show today, after praising Iran for having "stepped up" and admitting it shot down the airliner, Reid then explicitly adopted Iran's Trump-blaming position on the matter. Using the identical term as the Iranian regime did, Reid put the onus for the shootdown on Trump's "adventurism."

Stalin could have only dreamed of a fan as fawning as Reid is of the Iranians!

Here's the transcript.

MSNBC

AM Joy

1/11/20

10:04 am JOY REID: And let's just be blunt: Trump’s decision to kill a senior Iranian military leader is the reason Iran was on a war footing near its civilian airport. And while Iran's President Hassan Rouhani stepped up and rightly accepted that country's fault for the horrible tragedy, Iranian officials also noted the accident was the result of a human error caused by US adventurism. In other words, that it was ultimately Donald Trump’s actions that led to the tragedy that killed those 176 people. And no, Donald Trump, we do not believe your rationale for starting all of this. You’ve given us no reason to believe you over the last three years, and we just don’t. Although the dubiousness of the evidence hasn't stopped this country from going to war before. Joining us now is Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. And Colonel Wilkerson, thank you for being here. The tragedy of that airliner, you know, going down now and all of those lost lives just compounds what already has been — what seems to be just a senseless new round of military adventurism by the United States, this time at the hands of Donald Trump.

>> Help us fight back against the media’s impeachment crusade. <<