Just for a moment, imagine that the Time cover above features a different face: not that of the handsome young Donald Trump Jr., but the old one of Bill Clinton, whose every depravity has left him with a withered mask.
The headlines on my imaginary Clinton cover are the same: “Red Handed. The Russia Scandal Hits Home.” My highlighted prompts, however, are quite different:
- $500,000 speech
- Uranium One
- $148 million
- Foreign Clinton Foundation funding
- Rosatom chairman to Putin: “Few could have imagined in the past that we would own 20 percent of U.S. reserves.
Such prompts, of course, stand for a dense chain of complex evidence that quickly branches into a maze of treasonous activities:
- Russian reset
- Skolkovo
- FBI and Army warnings
- Hypersonic missile technology transfer
- Opposition to the Magnitsky Act
- John Podesta and Russian oligarchs being on the board of Joule Unlimited
- 100 million rubles from Putin
- 75,000 shares to Podesta
And, whaddya know, the Podesta Group lobbies for Uranium One. And Renaissance Capital, which paid Bill Clinton that half a mill for a speech, also touts Uranium One stock …
My prompts would require thousands and thousands of words to fill in the ellipses — fact-gathering, once known as reporting, that Time magazine and almost none of its comrades do since it gets in the way of their desperate political hackery.
The Time magazine Trump Jr. cover prompts, however, which appear on the newsstands of what passes for real life, are very different because there is to date little more to the entire “red-handed scandal hitting home” story. Sure, there are details to be noted (and a whole nest of anti-Trump Russian operatives to explore that Time won’t want to), but these elliptical cover lines go no further than the Trump family smear they recklessly and maliciously create.
Call it evil; call it a triumph of deconstructionism. It is another clear sign that this war the media fight is really against the pursuit of the truth.