By Patricia Lee Sharpe
More than deafening. Damning.
I’m speaking to you, Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein. And here’s the problem: I don’t understand your near perfect silence as we assess the nature and effect of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Only Donald Trump’s diehards continue to resist the avalanche of evidence that Russia interfered massively during the period leading up to and following the 2016 election. Only the willfully blind and deaf doubt that those Russian tricks overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump.
Despite Trump’s self-interested claim to the contrary, however, no U.S. intelligence agency has issued an opinion on the bombshell question: did Moscow determine who’s U.S. president today? Meanwhile, the search for clarity is driving Trump crazy.
Whether or not the trump card was Moscow’s, we know for sure that the Russians spent a small fortune to keep Clinton out of the White House, even during the primary season, when Russian operatives schemed to smear Trump’s opponents while promoting Clinton’s competition.
Yes, Bernie and Jill. In addition to hammering at Clinton throughout the 2016 election process, Moscow worked at garnering votes for you during the primaries. Does this please you? If not, why aren’t you vigorously and vociferously supporting the Mueller inquiry? * Is it even remotely possible that your silence means that you are grateful for favors that can’t be acknowledged?
Of course, there were other Hillary-harming complications that had nothing to do with her notorious lack of charisma. FBI Director Comey’s deviously-phrased, suspiciously-timed refusal to prosecute her for longstanding email stupidities, for example. Julian Assange and Wikileaks didn’t help either.
Nevertheless, Clinton won the popular vote by 3,000,000, a victory that was nullified by the Electoral College, which awarded the election to Trump. This is SOP in today’s America. Donald Trump isn’t the only modern President to fall short of a popular majority, although he seems to be more defensive about this entirely-Constitutional absurdity than his predecessors have been.
As if Hillary’s majority vote weren’t hard enough to swallow, the Russian factor compounds the damage to his fragile ego by introducing a legitimacy question despite Trump’s Electoral College victory. Still, the normal reaction to evidence of foreign meddling wouldn’t be dismissal or denial. A self-confident, non-colluding president would throw all possible resources into the job of uncovering Russia’s role and preventing a repeat. Whatever the fallout re votes, history would be kind to such a president.
But Donald Trump needs to be a winner at all costs. What’s more grace and generosity aren’t his strong points. All of which leaves him open to an entirely credible alternate hypothesis, the possibility that he really was colluding with a foreign power to win an American election. The more he schemes to abort the Mueller investigation the guiltier he looks.
Meanwhile, we mere citizens need Robert Mueller to continue his methodical dissection of the Russian-tainted anomalies of the 2016 election. So why, Jill and Bernie, are you not leading the clamor for answers and solutions? And why, have you not unequivocally disavowed all the unwelcome—surely, it was unwelcome!—support you received from Russian operatives? Once upon a time there were credible reasons for idealists on the American left to be soft on Russia. That was before Communist realities relegated all hopes for a workers’ paradise in the Soviet Union to the dustbin of history.
*If you've spoken up and I've missed it, you need to speak a little louder and more broadly.