I’m supposed to believe the NRA works with Russia?

Cue Twilight Zone theme. If you trace this piece back, you find … the kind of thinking that leads people to believe in ESP. That this gets blown up into a piece by an NYT columnist is amazingly reflective of the absurdity of the times and of the Times. The gist is that Donald Trump, Jr met with a Russian mucky-muck, except here’s the actual description of the meeting from the original CBS report: ‘A source familiar with the meeting says the two men were introduced to each other by a third party and that the conversation only last about two or three minutes. The source says the conversation centered on the men’s mutual interest in firearms and, as far as the source could recollect, there was no discussion of the campaign.’ This same information was repeated in various forms: DT, Jr was having dinner and was asked to speak to a fellow gun lover, they chatted for a minute about weapons, and went back to their tables. If I were an angry person, I’d say this is McCarthyism: the insinuations of malfeasance, even the use of ‘infiltrated’, as in this literal sentence from the piece: ‘Simpson replied that it appeared that the Russians had “infiltrated” the N.R.A.’ This refers to an interview with Congressional investigators in which this marginally reliable Simpson says the Russians ‘infiltrated’ the N.R.A. along with other conservative groups. That’s about as close as you can get to waving a card around claiming there are this many communists in the State Department! The NYT runs ads talking about how they are ‘the truth’ and they run utter garbage that reeks of McCarthyism without any apparent awareness of their own actions. That this then gets turned into a piece about how this might show ‘collusion’ beggars the senses: see the report of DT, Jr’s meeting and ask yourself how you get from a to b. If you connect those, then you need to spend some time re-evaluating how you think.