Russian media mock the vote
It’s all sex scandals and secret cabals
MOSCOW • With hackers leaking emails, epithet-tossing trolls who flood comment sections and top diplomats who engage in locker-room talk, Russia has already played a prominent part in setting the seamy tone of these U.S. elections.
But as the election wound down and the votes were counted, Kremlin-run commentators intent on showing Russians that elections in the world’s oldest democracy were anything but democratic kicked into full gear. Here’s what we can conclude from Moscow’s media machine onslaught. It’s all one big sex scandal. Every 30 minutes or so, viewers on the state-run, 24-hour news channel are treated to a segment headlined Too Many Pussies. As a raunchy slide guitar plays, pictures of Donald Trump flash across the screen accompanied by his various lewd comments, followed by nude pictures of his wife, Melania, as well as pictures of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton and allegations of other sexual misconduct. It ends with Trump’s voice repeating his lewd comments about women. It’s totally rigged. “This has been the dirtiest campaign in the history of the United States,” Denis Kiselyov, a prominent news show host on state-run Rossiya-24, said. Repeating Trump’s allegation that the fix is in, Kiselyov said, “It seems absurd, but Trump knows what he’s talking about.”
He described schemes that will take place: “Dead souls,” in which the names of the dead are used to vote; “The Carousel,” in which people are bused around to various polling places; and a rebellion by the members of the electoral college who should be voting for Trump, but won’t. The shenanigans in Russia’s first free elections in the 1990s are “child’s play compared to what’s happening in the United States,” Kiselyov concluded. The presidency is a sham. “Whichever candidate becomes president will not be the president of the entire country,” Kiselyov said. “Military industrial complex oligarchs” are the real policymakers, and the president is a puppet of “a special service caste who provide the White House with its information. Even if Trump tried to act on his campaign statements about pulling America back from its overseas military commitments, these dark forces would present him from doing it. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, will do the bidding of these dark forces, a reflection of the Kremlin’s clear animus toward the Democrat.”
Americans have no business telling other people how to run their elections.
“Everything was so disgustingly putrid that when I hear that America is somehow still considered a democracy, it makes me squeamish,” Kiselyov said.