In which I collect all the examples of this strange mental defect that have caught my attention in the month of August in the seventeenth year of The New American Century.

A NEW MEME?

Vladimir Nosferatuvich Putin

PUTIN IS WINNING THE US ELECTION

Hillary Clinton says “We know that Russian intelligence services, which is part of the Russian government which is under the firm control of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC. And we know that he arranged for a lot of those e-mails to be released.” (Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would call this “hyperventilating” but what’s he know?).

Anne Applebaum informs us: “This time the goal is to disrupt the American election, discredit the process and, if possible, elect Donald Trump as President of the United States. All available evidence now points to Russian involvement in a thorough hack of the Democratic National Committee.”

Speaking of “all available evidence”, the WaPo tells us the lack of “fingerprints” is the evidence; CBS says the presence of “fingerprints” is the evidence. One or the other, I guess: but it’s all “evidence”, isn’t it?

A “scholar of Russian espionage and political subversion” informs us “For the first time since the 1950s, Russian subversion of the American political process has become a presidential campaign issue.”

Jill Stein of the Green Party has been contaminated by Putin.

They’re everywhere: “Putin’s Pawns: Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left .”

And then there’s Donald Trump himself: “an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” A Clinton campaign video lays out the evidence of “Donald Trump’s connection to Vladimir Putin“. “So, you can say Trump and his friend Putin are the founder of ISIS, which probably would be more accurate than calling out the commander-in-chief in that way.” McFaul explains “Why Putin wants a Trump victory (so much he might even be trying to help him)”. Clinton says Putin, Farage and Trump are all together; her campaign chief details the links between Putin and Trump.

But maybe none of this matters, as the WaPo explains; Putin might use Russia’s tremendous hacking power to disrupt the entire election. He’s already sniffing around: “Russians Hacked Two U.S. Voter Databases, Officials Say” and he’s gnawing away at the “newspaper of record“. Maybe it’s already too late: “Vladimir Putin Has Already Won Our Election: It’s time to face the facts: Kremlin spies and hackers are undermining American politics“.

(A small request – can we have a pronunciation closer to vla-DEE-mir than VLAD-i-mir? Americans ought to be able to pronounce the name of their soon-to-be Commander-in-Chief.)

PUTIN’S MIND CONTROL

Just watching RT for a short time can so twist people’s thinking that they have to be put on a remedial course of BBC watching.

Are Putin’s beauties on a secret mission to break up the UK?

Then there’s the Nooscope. Whatever that is. But it’s frightening and sinister. A sort of mental Dracula, I suppose. Fortunately we have Masha Gessen to guide us through the forest “A final fact about Vayno is that the letters of his last name can spell voyna, the Russian word for war. Is this the message that Putin is sending?” Вайно – война, you decide. Maybe Putin’s “gunslinger walk” or Asperger’s affects his ability to spell. (But he could probably find, or create, someone actually named Антон Эдуардович Война if he really tried, don’t you think?) But, as Gessen is a homonym for guessin’, who knows what message is being sent by whom?

The NYT suggests that in Sweden, where actually two thirds don’t want to join NATO, all expressed opposition to joining can only be the work of A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories. (Amusing to consider the three “false stories” the NYT mentions and think: 1) nukes in İncirlik 2) renditions and other things we only learn about later and 3) SOFA – see Okinawa. The NYT should put more effort into its propaganda: this is an insult to its readers.)

MISCELLANEOUS

Time for another Olympics, time for another invasion says Luke Harding. (Bit stale-dated that, but the Para-Olympics aren’t over so there’s still time for Putin to invade somebody. But Harding can recycle the piece in two years.)

Why is Russia in Syria? Don’t waste your time listening to what the Kremlin says: the current Porcelain Cup holder knows it’s because “Russia wants to erase the humiliation of the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s.”

But there’s hope: despite all that Putin has done “Twenty-five years after the great revolution that toppled the Soviet regime, the spirit of dignity and freedom still burns.”

Next month, new collection. The PDS epidemic is very contagious.