I’ll Take "Questions that are answered, 'Hell Yes!' for $500, Alex."

I’ll Take "Questions that are answered, 'Hell Yes!' for $500, Alex." 

Is the Pope Catholic? Do bears crap in the woods? Did Vladimir Putin’s interference in the 2016 general election tip the scales for Donald Trump? 

About 70,000 votes in three key states sent Donald Trump to Washington.  Hillary conceded even knowing that she had significantly beaten Trump in the popular vote.  That is the way it works, because the popular vote does not win the United States presidential election.  The Electoral College picks our President.  Mr. Trump got 306 electoral votes and broke the threshold of 270 needed to win the prize.  End of story? No, just the beginning, actually.

The United States C.I.A. has determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that Vladimir Putin, in combination with state-sponsored hackers and Wikileaks, conspired to insert themselves into our election in an attempt to get Donald Trump elected president.  Our president-elect says that that is deceptive and untrue.  Nothing could have swayed his landslide victory!  

Trump is a real estate tycoon with no credentials in US or foreign intelligence.  He does not even want to be annoyed with pesky intelligence briefings, and yet he says with certainty that the C.I.A. is full of bogus information.  What kind of ego-driven man takes his own hunches as gospel over the entire intelligence agency of the most powerful country in the world?

So let’s cut to the chase and look at why I believe that the election was handed to Trump by Putin:  

•128 million people voted in  this election;

•Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a little over 2% or roughly 2,800,000 votes;  

•HRC lost the electoral college vote based on a victory margin of 70,000;  

•If you divide that number (70,000) by 128,000,000,  that means that the margin of victory was by a mere .054 of 1% of the population;

•If distributed with a slight modification of 1/500 of 1% it would have meant Hillary Clinton would have won the presidency.  

Granted, it was a larger margin than that in the three swing states Clinton needed to beat Trump, but it is ludicrous to say that the Russian government, traditionally viewed as our archenemy, spent all that time, money and human resources, to garner only a tiny fraction of 1% of our total voting population for the guy they wanted to win.  No, they went in as hard as they could and swung for the fences.  They knew that tarnishing Hillary Clinton with false information and fake news to, among others, partisan players at the FBI, would stir up trouble and further divide the Democrats, some of whom thought Bernie Sanders should have won the nomination.  And it worked. 

Trump has not been shy about trying to butter up the ties between the Russians and the USA.  He relentlessly went after Clinton on the emails that never materialized and he even called upon the Russians in public to search for them!  It was reported early on in the campaign that Trump had a relationship with Putin...and then he denied it.  Of course there are the verifiable details that Trump has selected his cabinet members who have deeply troubling financial ties to Russian oil. There are a plethora of remarks on the record of Trump praising the leadership of Putin.  He has even gone on the record as saying that Putin is a better leader than his own President, Barack Obama.  There was a time, presumably back in the days to which Donald Trump wishes us to return, that a remark like that would be regarded as treasonous. Suffice it to say, while Trump extolls the virtues of this dangerous world leader, millions of people around the world have felt the Russian lash.

These are dangerous times in which we live.  Putin has involved himself in Russia's oil production in such a manner that by some estimates, Putin’s personal wealth is now at $85 billion.  He is not even trying to hide any of this.  This is the man Trump views as a strong world leader worthy of praise.  

Putin’s critics, the band  Pussy Riot, went to jail for three years for being critical of their praiseworthy leader.  How many of you reading this would have enjoyed watching Obama jail those who questioned his birthplace or calling his family members monkeys?  The precedent (or "president," if you spell like our president-elect in his Tweets) of embracing the values of Vladimir Putin, the man who our entire intelligence community say personally directed an attack on our recent presidential race, is frighteningly misguided. 

So Alex, “HELL YES!” Vlad helped the candidate he wanted to become president to win the prize and no, I did not put that in the form of a question.  You know why, Alex? Because diluting American values downward toward the values of a Russian despot is not a game I wish to play.