YOUR RIGHT-WING RELATIVES STILL DON'T BELIEVE TRUMP AND HIS CIRCLE DID ANYTHING WRONG IN 2016

There's a lot of 2016 news out there right now -- "Manafort Breached Plea Deal by Repeatedly Lying, Mueller Says"; "Manafort Held Secret Talks with Assange in Ecuadorian Embassy, Sources Say"; "Corsi Provided Early Alert to Stone About WikiLeaks Release, According to Draft Special Counsel Document" -- but your right-wing relatives still think President Trump and his associates are completely innocent, because that's what they continue to be told by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Here's part of what Limbaugh had to say on the radio today:

Well, well, well, if anybody doubts the political nature of the Mueller investigation, all you have to do is take a look at the news today. For crying out loud, they really want us to believe that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange three times before WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails?

Where’s this story been? If this were true, they would have known this all the way back when Obama and his buddies were spying on the Trump campaign. And we would have heard about this long before today.

... Manafort is said to have lied after reaching a plea deal with Mueller and his Trump-hating prosecutors.... I don’t think Manafort’s been lying about anything. What Manafort’s refusing to do is to compose evidence, make it up!

... they don’t have any evidence that Trump colluded. They’re ignoring the evidence of real collusion that took place here, as you know, between Hillary Clinton and the rest of the people on that side, Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele. All of that is being ignored.

... The idea that they wouldn’t force using all the power they’ve got, Manafort, to make things up or to compose evidence. And if Manafort’s refusing to do it, then this is exactly what I would think would happen. “He’s lying to us. We’re gonna revoke the plea deal. To hell with Manafort.” They’re trying to break him.

... And note something. In none of these stories do you see the name “Trump,” not a single time, not a single place is the word “Trump” mentioned, the president, the candidate. Trump is not implicated in any of this.

... Manafort probably doesn’t know jack. Nobody knows jack because what they are trying to lay the foundation for happening didn’t, unless you go investigate Hillary Clinton.

That's their story and they're sticking with it. No matter what comes out from now on, no matter how much evidence there is, no matter how high up the convictions go, they'll never believe. It's all made up and we'll never persuade them otherwise.

Imagine if, after Richard Nixon left office, a significant percentage of Americans wouldn't even acknowledge that the Watergate break-in had taken place, and wouldn't acknowledge that there was a White House effort to cover it up. I'm not talking about people who insisted that the whole thing was blown out of proportion -- I'm imagining an America in which there was a dispute about the basic facts of Watergate. That's what we're facing. Whatever the truth is, millions of Americans will never accept it. Confessions, convictions, unimpeachable evidence -- none of it will matter. Years from now, there'll probably be political battles over how to portray this era in textbooks, because conservatives will insist none of what we know to be true ever took place.