2017 Jan 15^th

John Lewis, the civil rights icon, brutalized and nearly killed by the bigots in Selma Alabama, has claimed on Meet the Press that the Trump presidency is not legitimate. Reince Priebus was outraged about such comments until the program moderator, Chuck Todd, reminded Priebus that his employer, Donald Trump, by claiming that President Obama had not presented his birth certificate, or his school records, had done the same thing to delegitimize the Obama presidency. Priebus had nowhere to go and clearly wished he could be elsewhere.

Does Lewis have a point? Is Trump’s election legitimate? You could look at it this way: He fooled enough people to get elected so we’re stuck with him until he does something that irritates the Republicans enough so they decide to impeach him. They will not be unhappy to do this because the tractable Vice President, Mike Pence, will be waiting eagerly in the wings.

He did fool enough people in the right places to get elected, but never have we had such a huge discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral college vote. The attempts to delegitimize Hillary Clinton began long ago and had Russia’s support. How much of the drumbeat against Hilary Clinton was the result of Russian hacking and then the result to Julian Assange so he could cough it up on his WikiLeaks? What did WikiLeaks ever publish that was damaging to Trump’s campaign?

We have no Idea how these Russians feeds affected the election, but to assume they had no effect at all is silly, so Lewis is right, we have a president courtesy of Vladimir Putin. Soon we will have a Secretary of State personally decorated by Putin, we have a President elect who insisted that the Republican platform committee remove plans to send arms to Ukraine and we have Security Advisor General Flynn who gives paid speeches to RT, the official Russian propaganda network….That’s OK, just move along folks, nothing to see here….

An interesting bit of news concerns the house committee that had been investigating the Benghazi tragedy. Chairman Gowdy, of the House Select committee on Benghazi has finished his investigation. You may remember that this committee kept quizzing Hillary Clinton for eleven hours not long ago. Of course they learned nothing they didn’t already know but it made nice theater and Mr Gowdy got more TV time. Well, Hillary Clinton is no longer a candidate for the Presidency so Gowdy has wrapped up the committee’s work and dismissed it. What’s the point of hammering away at Hillary now that she’ no longer a candidate. What! You mean that this whole charade was just a political witch-hunt? Surely not!