Christopher Steele – the spy who loved himself

Delicious. Christopher Steele, the single most discredited actor in the entire Trump-Russia collusion nonsense, is set to be interviewed on Monday by ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the single most pompous of all the brood of lying, self-important American talking heads.

I know that there is stiff competition for that first title. After all, Steele had to beat out former FBI director James ‘Higher Loyalty’ Comey and other security state frauds such as John Brennan, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok and James Clapper. But Steele wins, hands down, because his so-called dossier — full of micturating prostitutes and other fantasies — was the stink bomb that really got the Russia Collusion story going.

Remember the dossier is opposition ‘research’, secretly commissioned and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Even James Comey called it ‘salacious’. But that is far too kind. As Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman, every word of it, including ‘and’ and ‘the’, is a lie: fantasy fed by dubious sources to a credulous Steele.

But, my, how that steaming pile of merde rocketed through the news cycle. All the coolest spies are Brits, and here we had a certified, genuine former MI6 spook disgorging stuff that might have come out of a novel by John le Carré. Remember all that semi-coded language and Steele’s habit of typing people’s names in ALL CAPS because it made the document seem so much more authentic.

Nothing in the dossier has been confirmed, much has been disproven. Nearly a year after the man America's pantywaist elite loves to hate left office, you’d think that they would find some new lies with which to entertain us.

But no. As a preposterous trailer for the Hulu original shows, the are jumping into this nonsense feet first. Emetic talking head after talking head tells us how ‘historic’ the dossier and the washed-up spook Steele are. But the only thing historic is the level of gumless credulity swallowing any part the this story requires.

Still, as I said it is delicious, if for no other reason that Hulu and/or Steele have timed the interview to air just when the new James Bond movie premieres. What should we call this competing entertainment? ‘Lie Another Day’? ‘License to Lie’? ‘The Man with the Golden Showers’? I vote for ‘From Russia with Nonsense’, starring Steele, Chris Steele, Agent 000.

At the end of that stupid, wildly over-produced trailer, someone (Stuff-a-lot-of-notes?) says ‘I think that for better or worse Christopher Steele is going to be remembered as the spy who stepped out of the shadows.’ Nope. Steele, to the extent that he is remembered at all, will be known as the the silly, self-important stooge who tried and failed to take down the president of the United States by concocting, aggregating and disseminating a congeries of preposterous lies. An evil and malicious anti-Trump media bought, or pretended to buy it, in order to attack their great nemesis, the man who ripped the mask from their exalted countenances to expose the small, scabrous reality that lurked behind.

Hulu is in overtime hyping the interview. I predict it will be scantily watched and even more scantily heeded. No one cares about Christopher Steele, or George Stephanopoulos, come to that. We shall neither be shaken nor stirred by this cocktail of fiction. With America veering from crisis to crisis — the porous Southern border, out-of-control inflation, backfiring vaccine mandates, an increasingly constipated supply chain — no one is going to want to see this re-run. It was ridiculous the first time around. It will be nauseating a second.