RT: Do American Video Games Cause Suicide Bombings?

How long did it take for the moral scolds to blame the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on video games? Much longer than it took for RT, the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, to blame the Moscow terror attacks on the video game Call of Duty. A good catch from The New York Times' Robert Mackey, who notes that the piece repeatedly reminds viewers that this is an American video game—one that could have inspired yesterday's terrorist attacks (because the 1999 siege of Grozny is a less likely culprit, clearly). The heavy-breathing correspondent is like an unsophisticated Vladimir Posner for the Xbox generation.

Of course, in a time of tragedy, it is always a good time to cart out RT's favorite conspiracy theory monchichi (and paid contributor), Wayne Madsen, who desperately attempts to blame the attacks, which most presume to be the work of radical Islamists from the North Caucaus, on American policy and some 2008 Jamestown Foundation conference on the Circassian nation. Or something.

Watch the full clip only because Madsen's is a perfect example of the paranoid mind, and note the attempt to redirect every question back to the perfidy of Washington, even when it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. The conversation gets really dumb around ten minutes in when Madsen, with the encouragement of a terrifically clueless host, attempts to tie the Heritage Foundation to terrorist groups that blow up Russian airports. And if you hang around until the end of the video you will hear Madsen weigh in on Call of Duty, which is obviously connected to the American military industrial complex!

If you unfamiliar with Madsen's lunatic oeuvre, which might be an Andy Kaufman-inspired piece of performance art, here he is explaining that President Obama is a "CIA creation"; his hilarious "report" that George W. Bush was fond of  getting loaded in the White House (in 2007) and calling his wife a very dirty word that rhymes with "grunt"; a piece exposing Dick Cheney's "coordination" of the 9/11 attacks, published in something call the Tehran Times; and this classic, in which Madsen suggests that the Mossad was behind Elliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal.