Opinion by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I started this silly blog in April of 2016 largely because I was tired of not writing. Of course, at the time, the asinine presidential campaign was in full swing and I had a bit of fun opining about it. I expected it to end last November with the election of the Hildabeast. Never in my worst nightmares did I suspect that more than a week after the first anniversary of Trump’s election, the presidential campaign of 2016 would still be going on.
At this point now there have been scores upon scores of conflicting reports about what level of involvement Trump’s people had with Russians and/or Wikileaks and from where the DNC’s files that Wikileaks dumped came. These continuous and conflicting stories have had the intended effect of dividing the nation into two entrenched camps, those who believe “Russia hacked the election for Trump” and those who don’t.
Well, I have decided to start my own series of earthworks and those, who, like me, no longer give any sort of shit about Russia and the DNC leak are welcome to take refuge within from the idiocy raging outside; for, I have come to the conclusion that apathy is one’s best defense at this point.
Why apathy? Because none of this really matters.
The fact is that Hillary Clinton and the DNC colluded to scuttle Bernie Sanders’ upstart campaign – that much is not in dispute. Americans learned about this before the election via Wikileaks – also a fact disputed by none. Another fact that is very much in dispute, but nevertheless is the foundation of my reasoned apathy, is that Hillary Clinton wasn’t defeated in the general election by any information that came from what Wikileaks published, nor by any of the hackneyed and hilarious social media ads paid for by Russian troll farms.
Furthermore, I contend that the continued assertion to the contrary by the Left in general is an insult to the American people. It is an insult to suggest that the very laughable social media ads that Russia paid for influenced a single vote. Furthermore, if Hillary’s underhanded treatment of Bernie Sanders cost her votes from liberals and Leftists, isn’t that her own fault? Hillary is not upset that she invalidated the entire Democratic Primary process, she’s upset she got caught doing it red-handed.
We know the Russians never “hacked” a single voting machine or altered a single vote after it was cast. It’s time to admit they didn’t change any votes BEFORE they were cast by either telling the truth about Hillary and the DNC’s collusion or by paying for silly Facebook ads that garnered only a handful of interactions apiece.
Even if we pretend the worst-case-scenario for Trump is true – that members of his campaign, with Trump’s knowledge, sought help from Russia in hacking the DNC’s servers and in getting that information to Wikileaks, AND convincing Assange to release the files when he did – where is your smoking gun that says the election is invalid? Or, any more invalid than it already ever was? Because it proves collusion with a foreign power in an effort to sway the outcome of an election? Puh-leeze.
We live in a global economy, kiddos. We live in a country run by a corporatist oligarchy. The entrenched, vested interests that run the show because they don’t go up for election every four years, or ever, have interests all over the world and are continually influenced by – and are seeking to influence – the governments of those places. This is big-boy geopolitics. Nations are constantly jockeying among themselves for position as their oligarchs compete for finite resources. The United States has influenced or changed the outcome of MANY foreign elections, usually with overt violence rather than lame Facebook ads.
Yet, the media airwaves and my Facebook feed is all jammed up every day with story after story about Russia and the 2016 campaign. As a nation, we’re somehow more divided than ever, even though the election is more than a year old. When we’re not obsessing over “Russiagate,” we’re bitterly divided on the policy challenges that face the federal government. Obamacare was doomed to fail from the get, and now it is doing so spectacularly and expensively – courage in D.C. is needed to say ‘damn the critics’ and kill it the rest of the way off now. Courage is also non-existent in that town.
Trump is escalating wars Obama shouldn’t have started instead of winding them down in places like Syria. His continued bellicose language on Muslim immigrants and the Mexican border wall is helping exactly no one. Don’t even get me started on his ridiculous preoccupation with Kim Jong Un (besides, the archives are full of that if you’re interested). In short, President Donald Trump is shaping up to be everything we feared President Trump would be – that such is only a shade less scary than what we all knew a Hildabeast regime would look like is slim consolation.
So, as I sit here noodling around on my Charvel and watching Neo-Rome burn, I can only wonder: what greater argument for the comprehensive decentralization of governmental power can be made than the ongoing debacle we’ve been watching unfold for nearly ten months now? Well, that and when will Americans finally be able to tune out all the bullshit so they can actually hear the argument for anarchy our own federal government is so eloquently making?
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