Vladimir Putin had a press conference today, and he had a message for us, for the Democratic Party. You lost. Get over it.
“Democrats are losing on every front and looking for people to blame everywhere,” Putin said in answer to a Russian TV host, one of 1,400 journalists accredited to the marathon session. “They need to learn to lose with dignity.”
The Kremlin leader pointed out Republicans had won the House and Senate, remarking “Did we do that, too?”
He also used the same line as Donald Trump in defending the hacking of our election by his intelligence services:
Putin has repeatedly denied involvement despite the accusations coming from the White House, and the Kremlin has repeatedly questioned the evidence for the U.S. claims. On Friday he borrowed from Trump’s dismissal of the accusations, remarking “Maybe it was someone lying on the couch who did it.”
“And it's not important who did the hacking, it's important that the information that was revealed was true, that is important
My response? Same as Leonard Pitts’ column of November 15th: I’m not in the mood for ‘unity.’ At the end of the day, Trump’s still a bigot:
It is time for the country to heal, time for us come together.
Or so people have been telling me since last week when democracy laid the biggest egg in American history. Well, here is my response: I have no interest in seeing this country heal. And I refuse to come together.
Understand: If this were just about politics, I’d never say something like that. No, I’d do what you’re supposed to when the candidate you favored is defeated. Suck it up.
But my anger is not about any given policy of the new president. No, it is about him, about the election of a fundamentally unsound, unserious and unfit man, a misogynist who brags about sexual assault, a bigot cheered to victory by the Ku Klux Klan. I have no idea how to “heal” woman hating and no desire to “come together” with the Klan.
I am similarly impatient with those who say we must give the new president a chance to lead and hope for his success.
Is that what Republicans did for Barack Obama when they gathered on the night of his inauguration and plotted a conspiracy of obstructionism to cripple his presidency? Is it what Donald Trump did when he spent years questioning the veracity of an ordinary birth certificate?
Or Charles Blow on December 12 in Patriotic Opposition.
Nothing is safe or sacrosanct in Donald Trump’s developing governance team, and America had better start being alarmed about it and moving to actively oppose it.
The time for voting has elapsed, but the time for being vocal has emerged.
Let’s take the tally:
He has chosen a man hostile to immigrants and with a complicated — to put it mildly — history on race to be attorney general.
He has chosen a man who is anti-abortion, pro-fetal “personhood,” and anti-Obamacare to be secretary of health and human services.
He has chosen a man who has criticized paid sick-leave policies and opposes increasing the federal minimum wage to lead the Department of Labor.
He has chosen a climate change denier and anti-environmental-regulation crusader to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
He has chosen a vocal proponent of school vouchers to run the Department of Education.
In a way, Trump seems to be trying to destroy these agencies from the inside out, the way a worm slowly devours an apple.
Furthermore, he is stacking these jobs with people who have given him cash.
Or Paul Krugman on December 16th in Useful Idiots Galore:
On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a “useful idiot” serving Russian interests. That may not be exactly right. After all, useful idiots are supposed to be unaware of how they’re being used, but Mr. Trump probably knows very well how much he owes to Vladimir Putin. Remember, he once openly appealed to the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Still, the general picture of a president-elect who owes his position in part to intervention by a foreign power, and shows every sign of being prepared to use U.S. policy to reward that power, is accurate.
But let’s be honest: Mr. Trump is by no means the only useful idiot in this story. As recent reporting by The Times makes clear, bad guys couldn’t have hacked the U.S. election without a lot of help, both from U.S. politicians and from the news media.
The political useful idiots being the vast majority of the Republican Party.
Actual conservatives, by the way, have mostly bolted that Party by now and they are as consistently anti-Trump as is our side. People like third party candidate and #neverTrump Evan McMullin. Or Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post who wrote on December 20:
Dear Mr. Trump,
You won. Welcome to hell.
Anyway, you can now start hanging with Putin. Just don’t look into his eyes, which, apparently, can make you think he has a soul. (It’s an old KGB trick.) You’ll have to figure out how to handle the Vlad and his other pal, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, since the two of them have been mass-murdering the very same people of Aleppo invoked by the assassin. I’m not feeling the love triangle here, but you’re the magician.
Putin influenced our election in three different ways, with his hacking/dump of Democratic emails on Wikileaks. With his fake news assault, magnifying the effects of fake news already out there.
And with his support of American neo-Nazis, who are the most significant element in Trump’s “alt-right” voting base. I recently wrote about this on Kos: The threesome from hell. Putin, Trump & the neo-Nazi "alt-right".
It’s a long read, but the most important thing in it that you might not know is that Putin’s Russia has become a second home to many of our prominent neo-Nazis over the last few years, including infamous neo-Nazi and Republican candidate David Duke — who owns an apartment in Moscow — and a little known but dangerous buddy of his named Preston Wiginton, who spends part of each year in Duke’s Moscow apartment. During the election, these two along with many other Putin backed neo-Nazis did everything they could do to elect Donald Trump.
Angry? I am.
But we need to be more than just angry. We need to defend our American democracy.
A foreign power helped elect our President, and the vast majority of the Republican Party seems to be okay with that.
This is not normal, and we should not accept the normalization of Trump, Trumpism and the Russian hacking of our election. I’ll end with Charles Blow from December 19th, Donald Trump, This Is Not Normal!
The nation is soon to be under the aegis of an unstable, unqualified, undignified demagogue and with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, there is little that can be done to constrict or control his power and unpredictability . . .
The durability of our democracy is not destined. It is not impervious to harm or even destruction. The Constitution can’t completely prevent that, nor can protocols and conventions. The most important safeguard against authoritarianism is an informed, engaged citizenry vigorously opposed to acquiescence and attrition . . .
The fact that a hostile foreign government executed a plan to influence, and therefore irrevocably damage, the bedrock of our democracy is unfathomable. The repercussions are nearly incalculable: it corrodes faith in the process, faith in elected officials, faith in national security, faith in our assumed autonomy.
. . .
I fully understand that elevated outrage is hard to maintain. It’s exhausting.
But the alternative is surrender to national nihilism and the welcoming of woe.
The next four years could be epochal years in the history of this country. They could test the limits of presidential power and the public’s passivity.
I happen to believe that history will judge kindly those who continued to shout, from the rooftops, through their own weariness and against the corrosive drift of conformity: This is not normal!