37 Days Later

It has been 37 days since Donald Trump won the election and guess what?  We are still arguing about the results!  Hillary Clinton supporters, and Donald Trump haters which are not necessarily the same thing, have hit upon a new strategy….blame the Russians!  Mr. Obama and the White House are going along keeping everyone's tempers at full even though there are many questions that should be giving all some pause;

1.  As the Hillary fans and Trump haters point out, Hillary won the popular vote by 2.3 million!  Okay, so if the Russians were behind this why did Hillary win in the popular vote?

2.  The CIA is now convinced the Russians "hacked" the results!  Okay except why is the CIA the agency coming forward with this allegation?  The Department of Homeland Security had been charged with protecting our voting systems from just such outside meddling yet they have been remarkably quiet throughout this time.  Also, if the Russians did hack into our voting systems…exactly how did the CIA determine this?  If any agency has the expertise and equipment it would be the NSA, not the CIA, coming forward with proof.  Again, more crickets.

3.  The Russians hacked into our voting systems!  But why then aren't any state board of elections coming forward?  Even in backwards ass Ohio, where the county and NOT the state controls your right to vote, no county board of elections have been reporting incidents of hacking. Voting systems vary by county (in Ohio alone there are 88 counties).  Russia would have to be be able to hack each individual county, not just the state to insure the results were skewed towards Trump.  In so doing, would not the popular vote also have gone to Hillary?

 (Want to know why we have an electoral college?  Because only recently has technology caught up to where a national voting system could be possible.  Throughout most of the US history, ballots were paper and had to be hand-counted.  There was no possible to insure there would be no voting fraud with paper ballots so each state was responsible for establishing their voting system.  Based on their poll results, electors would then go to Washington and represent their state's results.)

4.  Russian was meddling in US affairs in retaliation against Hillary!  Putin maybe many things but he is not dumb-enough to do something that could easily be traced back to the Kremlin and give the US a legitimate reason to attack Russia!

5.  Vast right wing conspiracy!  In Michigan, voting fraud was discovered…to have been committed by Democratic voters voting for Hillary.

What we have here, to paraphrase my favorite character actor Strother Martin, is a failure of intellect.  Much like the movie "Inception", we are going through a story within a story wrapped up in an enigma.  Trump haters are so desperate to invalidate the results they are willing to suspend any rational analysis of the absence of facts and go chasing down the rabbit hole after Russians.  The White House has tacitly gone down the rabbit hole as well, barring Congress from receiving the CIA briefing until after Mr. Obama's approval.  Our favorite intellectual giants, celebrities, are all calling for electors to violate their own state's results and vote for a third part candidate.

The very people now willing to buy into the CIA unannounced findings are the very ones that were apoplectic just a few years ago about the CIA's findings of WMDs in Iraq that proved to be untrue.  Russia would suddenly have a far greater cyber ability than has ever been experienced in order to have pulled this off.  Why risk retaliation of war or an attack on its own elections if discovered?

No the evidence is too anecdotal to be believed.  Trump's victory is still so unimaginable to most that they would rather believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, or Russian hackers, than in the reality that their fellow Americans chose Mr. Trump over Hillary.  They forget that continuing to deny the results means future elections will constantly be subjected to this type of disbelief and then people will wonder why no one comes out to vote any more.