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Wonkette’s Doktor Zoom has a great piece of mockery on the latest ridiculous and stupid attempt to paint Senator John McCain as a “traitor,” just in time for the Arizona primary election, oddly enough: ‘Oath Keepers’ Militia Loons Pretty Sure John McCain Needs To Be Executed For Being Tortured.

(Notice how these geniuses manage to misspell the word “propaganda” in their flashy YouTube video title. It’s OK, their audience doesn’t care.)

It’s not entirely clear when the recording obtained by rightwing website “Trunews” was made — presumably around the same time as the written confession — but it was broadcast by North Vietnamese radio in 1969 and recorded by the “the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a branch of the CIA that monitored international shortwave and foreign radio broadcasts,” according to Trunews. “Award-winning journalist” and all around slimeball Chuck C. Johnson offered a $10,000 “bounty” for a copy of the recording, which some lucky person somehow located in the National Archives and then somehow copied or filched it. Trunews is actually rather vague about how the recording came to be acquired by them, saying only that “The audio recording was found in a misplaced file in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.” — no mention of a FOIA request there, oddly, so the circumstances of its acquisition are open to speculation.

So gosh, what juicy national security secrets did John McCain spill in the statement, in which he clearly betrayed his country and committed treason, for which he must be executed, according to the Oath Keepers morons? Absolutely nothing: it’s bog standard forced-confession propaganda bullshit that would sound like cartoonishly ridiculous Cold War boilerplate if you didn’t know it was extracted under torture…

I’m not a fan of John McCain, but he’s no traitor.

This is a bag of slime that’s been circulating in the extreme right fever swamps for many years, but the reason why they’re all worked up about something nobody else cares about is because our old cyberstalker pal Chuck C. Johnson apparently paid someone (or so he says) who found an audio recording of McCain’s propaganda broadcast (obtained under torture and threat of death) in the National Archives.

Note that accessing the National Archives is completely free and you’re allowed to make copies of their material. So if Chuck C. Johnson and Pax Dickinson actually paid someone thousands of dollars for that recording, they shelled out a whole lot of money for the equivalent of a library book.

Of course, there’s no way to know if that whole wesearchr thing is a scam, anyway. But if they actually did raise $10,000, some gullible loons got bilked, big time, and Chuck and Pax got a nice payday.