Who whispered in his ear?

The nasty guy routinely says some weird stuff. I rarely quote him because what he says (or tweets) is strange or a lie, sometimes both. It’s almost always too annoying to bother with. But this time a quote is important. He said,

The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you're reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.

Ooh, that’s a head scratcher. I’m old enough to have directly heard the news about the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. I don’t have such a great memory that I remember all that it was about. But I do remember President Jimmy Carter was sufficiently annoyed that he banned American participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympics. I also remember the story, almost a decade later, that the Soviet Union went bankrupt because they couldn’t keep up with President Reagan’s arms race. But this seems weirder than the nasty guy making stuff up.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville lists a few more anomalies pointed out by various people.

Where did this little gem come from? Commenters aphra_behn and kitzytak note the nasty guy doesn’t read, so someone must have told him. This isn’t a GOP talking point. It isn’t even an American or Western European talking point. It probably didn’t come from FOX.

So who has been talking about it? Terry Glavin, writing for Maclean’s, said,

Donald Trump endorsed a revisionist lunacy that is currently being championed by a bunch of cranks at the outermost neo-Stalinist fringe of Vladimir Putin's ruling circle of oligarchs.

And Rachel Maddow laid out

multiple instances — Poland supposedly invading Belarus, Montenegro a risk to start WW3, justification of Russia's Afghanistan adventure — where Trump has parroted Putin propaganda that doesn't (shouldn't) exist anywhere in Trump's normal info sources.

And why now? Glavin again:

They've already managed to cobble together a resolution in Russia's Potemkin parliament that is to be voted on next month. It's jointly sponsored by lawmakers from Putin's United Russia and the still-existing Communist Party.

And we get to the most important questions: Who whispered in the nasty guy’s ear and why get the nasty guy involved at all? I don’t have an answer for this case. McEwan notes:

Again, it's not news that Trump is Putin's puppet and has used the United States' foreign policy apparatus to serve Putin's aims in myriad ways, from undermining NATO to creating a power vacuum in Syria to creating instability on the Korean peninsula, etc.

Which leads back to a comment McEwan has said many times:

The collusion has always been, and continues to be, right out in the open.

We need to find the path of this propaganda and put a stop to it.