Last year, Breitbart, RedState, and PJ Media were publishing Yanukovich’s taking points. Paid, or for free.
In light of this week’s mass killings by thugs working for now-deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, last year’s Buzzfeed story (and its predecessor) about how Ukrainian government cash generated stories on right-wing websites seems even more interesting. Either writers for RedState, Breitbart, and PJ Media wrote stories for money, or they were dumb enough to do it for free. So far, they aren’t saying which.
Of course, the oppotunity to trash Hillary Clinton as an anti-Semite for supporting the position of most Ukrainian Jews, and to trash Obama as Putin puppet for opposing Yanukovich (now hoping that Putin will use the Russian Army to return him to power) was too good to pass up.
Footnote And what the hell was the Podesta Group doing working for these thugs?
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
I'm just going to assume that the question about why an amoral bunch of fixers like the Podesta Group would be working for an immoral group of kleptocrats like the Yanukovich Family was just a rhetorical one.
As an aside, has anybody actually inquired of these conservatives whether they took payola or was that just a rhetorical question, too?
Click through. They've been asked, but they ain't sayin' nothin'.
I just did. They uniformly maintain that they didn't take the money. And for these particular bloggers to write idiotic, uninformed things is pretty much dog-bites-man. As is the fact that corrupt loathsome "centrists" like Podesta are flack for loathsome kleptocrats.
Pro-tip: When reading about the internal affairs of a foreign country, trust only analysts who are fluent in that nation's official language.
That is a good suggestion, but how would one know?
This is why blogs are kind of b.s. (Except this one. ; > ) I'm sorry but Old Media is just better. Now, if I can have Old Media people writing on a blog, that's one thing. But this gray area stuff makes me glad I don't bother with most of the web.