LOOMING DISASTER

Disinformation as in Dezinformatsyia
years, over 40 percent of Canadian teenagers were calling the United
States “evil,” and 57 percent of Greeks answered “neither” when asked
which country was more democratic, the United States or Iraq. In
Berlin, a German cabinet minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, compared
new president George W. Bush to Hitler. Western Marxists, such as
Venezuela’s ruinous dictator Hugo Chavez also leapt into the fray,
gleefully entertaining the United Nations in 2006 with an indirect
(but clearly understood) reference to the American president by saying:
“Yesterday, the devil came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells
of sulfur still today.” By 2008, in the United States itself, some leaders
of the Democratic Party even began describing their own country as a
“decaying, racist, capitalist realm,” unable to provide medical care for
the poor or rebuild its crumbling schools. 3
This brings me to baseball – now my favorite sport – for our
politicians and the media seem to understand baseball much better
than disinformation. The Tampa Bay Rays, a baseball team that won
the 2008 American League championship, was subsequently in a
slump, and its manager Joe Maddon (currently serving as manager
of the Chicago Cubs), asked Seminole tribal leader Bobby Henry
for help. “I guess this guy made it rain in Tampa in the mid-’80s at
some point, so I guess he’s got some supernatural powers,” Maddon
explained. He had also reportedly brought “a python, penguins and
a magician into the clubhouse in the last couple of years to help the
Rays shake their funk.” 4
Hillary Clinton did not bring a rainmaker to Foggy Bottom
when she was America’s secretary of state between 2009 and 2013,
but she performed the equivalent by asking the KGB to help us
fight the war with our old archenemy, the KGB. Her official policy
toward Russia – now run by the KGB – was called “Reset” (erroneously
translated by the State Department as “Peregruzka,” which
means “overcharged”). There are quite a few meanings for reset in
dictionaries, but all tend to signify “restore” – except in Scotland,
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