You’d think that a journalist, hearing from a reliable, informed source that Russia (a hostile foreign power) had “influenced” (or even tried to influence) an American election to favor Donald Trump (who’d laundered Russian mob money through his Atlantic City casinos), would ask the next obvious question: “Really? Russia actually INFLUENCED the outcome of our election? How exactly did they do that? In what ways? To what ends and effects?” You’d think a journalist would recognize a Woodward-Bernstein-sized opening? There’s already mountains of evidence that indeed Russia DID influence the 2016 election. You’d think American journalists would be the loudest canaries in this coal mine — squawking their heads off that Donald Trump is a traitor who owes Russia (perhaps even Vlad Putin himself) hundreds of millions of dollars!
That’s the hardest thing to wrap one’s head around where our press is concerned. There has been some amazing reporting. But it’s always forced to share oxygen with an overload of “both sides do it” hackery and sheer access-craving cowardice. The TV news media — where most Americans get their news — seems incapable or unwilling to aggregate its own reporting. They see pieces of the mosaic but never the mosaic itself; in fact, they don’t seem to grasp that what they’re staring at is a mosaic.
If America’s news media had aggregated its own story — much like the remarkable Seth Abramson has done — they’d already be miles further along in the narrative. When we get to the part of the story where everything gets fully revealed — and we will — we’ll discover that all sorts of crimes were being committed in real time while we watched. In other words — crimes are being committed right this second that we could be pointing at or better yet stopping.
But our news media keeps restarting the narrative every day from some bizarre square one where nothing we’ve learned exists. Instead, our news media starts its day reporting from a place where Trump’s just “a different sort of POTUS” who doesn’t follow the rules or the norms, calls Mexicans rapists and grabs women’s pussies because he’s rich and “they’ll let him”, where lying isn’t just anticipated, it’s accepted!
From the get-go, our news media poo-pooed the idea that Donald Trump’s presidency was 100% illegitimate. They’ve insisted that We The People “elected” Trump — inventing a narrative to explain how Trump “won” Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. What, oh what, will our News Media do when, at last, they’re confronted with the stone cold truth: by using proprietary polling data (supplied by Paul Manafort) to suppress Black voting (that is criminal right THERE!), Russia made it possible for just enough vote flipping to capture PA/WI/MI’s electoral votes for Trump. Recall — those three BLUE states were “won” by a combined 77,000 votes.
In the face of all that Russian activity — that we KNOW was happening — you’d be insane to think Donald Trump “won” anything legitimately. Well, you’d be insane or a Republican.
Donald Trump has never — not for one stinking day — been the legitimate President Of The United States.
Nothing he’s done has had the actual authority that flows from We The People.
He’s never had the authority therefore to change anything he’s changed, push the tax breaks he pushed, or nominate a single one of the judges he nominated — SCOTUS judges especially. But then, judges and hijacking the judiciary has always been the point of the exercise.
Battening down the judiciary has always been how the RW money (the Kochs & the Mercers) were going to stop America’s “slide” into diversity and a more civilized, socialized form of governing ourselves instead of forcing us into the authoritarian, church-based neo-feudalism of their wettest wet dreams. Russia did not pose a problem for them. It presented a partner.
A partner in crime.
We The People sat here — for bloody years — thinking that either or both Robert Mueller and the FBI were deep into probing Donald Trump’s foreign entanglements — especially his painfully obvious relationship with Russia, Russian gangsters and dirty Russian money. We had no idea that Rod Rosenstein had stuck a shiv in our back. There was no investigation of Trump’s foreign entanglements. Russia has truly been at the wheel of our ship of state from the instant Trump both took and broke his oath of office at the very same instant.
That needs our immediate attention. Our self-destructive pandemic response is part and parcel of every other Russian perversion of our government. It’s meant to disarm us, weaken us and make us look foolish to the world. The goal is keep us on the sidelines for as long as possible while Vladimir does his worst to Europe and the rest of the world. The thing he fears most is an American government that ends his free-for-all.
Vlad knows a day of reckoning his coming. With the Democrats in power, Vlad Putin will become a kind of persona non gratta. We will hunt down every bank account he has an interest in. Remember — Vlad can’t do his banking in Russia — it’s too corrupt. He relies on our regulated, much more trustworthy banks to hide and launder the massive pile of money he’s stolen from his own people.
Every sanction we had on Russia will go back. Plus a thousand more. It is going to suck to be them. They’ll have to take it up with Vladimir.
That scares Vladimir almost as much as being poor.
Russia cannot get to win in any way, shape or form. That shouldn’t be a revelation. Russia worked with Trump for dark, nefarious reasons. Trump worked with Russia for dark, nefarious reasons. The Republican Party worked with both Trump AND Russia for dark and nefarious reasons. They’re all thieves and criminals.
And — in the America that’s about to reassert itself — thieves and criminals never get to keep what they stole including the will of the American People. The intent of our Will was clear as can be in 2016. It’s even clearer today.
It is absurd to argue that America “has to” accept and keep the political consequences of criminal acts — including treason. We absolutely do not — and will not.
There are many hard battles ahead. Doing the right thing is never easy unfortunately but — as we should have learned with slavery — screw up your country’s founding principles at the founding? It will haunt you forever.
We’d be stupid as a Republican to go and make THAT foolish mistake again.