Declaring “(Donald Trump) has been tougher on Russia than Obama was in the past eight years combined,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders achieves ‘maximum gaslight’ status, qualifying herself for a position in the Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Hall of Fame

Maybe I’m just imagining it, but I’m getting the sense, watching video of today’s White House press briefing, that we’ve finally crossed some kind of line. It’s like it’s collectively started to dawn on members of the White House Press Corps that, if the kids in Parkland can stand up and push back, them, maybe, as full grown adults, they might be able to do the same thing. Again, it may just be wishful thinking on my part, but when I watch exchanges like this one between White House Spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Jon Karl of ABC News, I start to feel something approximating hope.

This press briefing is not going well for Sarah Huckabee Sanders. #Russia pic.twitter.com/2d26N2NPUY

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) February 20, 2018

Huckabee, for what it’s worth, was really going for broke today, doing her best to rewrite history and cast Trump as a president who has stood up to Vladimir Putin at every opportunity, fighting to protect the sanctity of our electoral system. “(Donald Trump) has been tougher on Russia than Obama was in the past eight years combined,” she told the assembled reporters, dodging followup questions about why, if that’s the case, Obama enacted sanctions against Russia for their election meddling, while Trump still refuses to do so.

To hear Sanders tell it, Trump has never denied that the Russians meddled in the election. He’s only pushed back, according to Sanders, against the idea that his campaign colluded with the Russians, and the suggestion that the Kremlin’s meddling may have played a role in his victory. “It’s very clear that Russia meddled in the election,” Sanders said. “It’s also very clear that it didn’t have an impact on the election, and it’s also very clear that the Trump campaign didn’t collude with the Russians in any ways for this process to take place.” The facts, however, tell a very different story… one of Donald Trump not only denying Russian interference, but actually taking Russia’s side over his own intelligence agencies.

Speaking of which, who can forget that time Trump told us that he’d asked Putin point-blank if the Russians had meddled in our election, received a “no” in response, and decided to take the former KGB spy at his word? [“He said he didn’t meddle. He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew from Da Nang to Hanoi last November. “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,'” Trump said. “And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.”] And how about that time, back in December of 2016, when Trump told Time, “I don’t believe they interfered. That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point.”

In spite of these examples, though, and all of the other instances we know of in which the President questioned Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, Sanders would have us believe Donald Trump when he tells us, as he did two days ago, “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election.”

Everything they say is a lie… an attempt on their part to make it successfully through just one more news cycle, and out of prison. And we need to encourage our journalists not to just begrudgingly accept these lies, but to actively push back. We need to reestablish the ‘rule of truth’ is this nation. Without that, we have nothing.