It Is Ok to Say – Thanks Russia!

All over the press, mainstream media, social media, water coolers, and barstools, the talk is about President Trump’s relationship with Russia. Every person he knows who ever spoke to a Russian is being presented as further evidence of collusion with Russia between his campaign and even President Trump himself, to alter the results of the vote last November. A serious charge that, if proven true, should mean more than just the removal of Donald Trump as president. Since the accusations implicate many individuals within his campaign, perhaps the election itself is invalid. However, the documented telephone conversations revealed no evidence of collusion, and the total lack of hard forensic evidence makes proving the charges difficult. In fact, there are significant reasons to discount every justification being made by the press and the government to take the idea of Russian meddling in the US Presidential election seriously.

But there was election tampering, and it all occurred in the US interest with no foreign help. Hillary Clinton actively rigged both sides of the primary. She manipulated the media with the help of the “unbiased” Democratic National Committee (DNC), laundering contributions that were intended for other Democratic candidates in other races. There was also money used by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to create a hidden stash that was used to create social media propaganda and outright attacks on Sanders and his supporters. There are questions outstanding as to the validity of the actual votes counted in the primaries because of red-flag discrepancies between the count and exit polls. On the Republican side, the Clinton campaign enlisted help from various media outlets to minimize their coverage of Sanders and fill in that void with an overdose of coverage of the two most extreme Republicans, Trump, and Ted Cruz.

During the general election, Republicans had already proactively rigged the vote by engaging in wholesale voter suppression of targeted Democratic voters. There was minimal exit polling, which is the international standard used to gauge the validity of the vote. When challenges arose, either the tabulation of electronic votes without a verifiable audit trail or a deliberate conspiracy by both parties to increase recount costs made recounts nearly impossible.

And after all those known improprieties by US interests, we are supposed to get all worked up because the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stated that Vladimir Putin hates Hillary Clinton? That was the actual reason provided by the FBI Director Comey.

When I mention these issues, people tell me to ‘get over it’. Why? The system presented two flawed candidates: a celebrity wife and a man benefiting from inherited wealth. Ever since his father’s death, Trump’s career has been failures punctuated with a few sleazy get rich quick schemes. This election did not feature two capable people, but two corrupt and incapable individuals. Regardless of Russian influence, the damage had already occurred before their involvement. Russia did us a favor, or more. We are just giving them another reason to make a toast and down a shot of vodka.