So the question for now is: how much influence did Russia exert in our Presidential election? I listen to and read a wide selection of sources and I have to tell you that there is a common perception that, while our election was not “rigged,” it was most certainly nudged or swayed in the direction that Vladimir Putin wanted it to go: a Trump victory. Our President-elect’s admiring attitude about this vicious, power-hungry demagogue is extremely troubling. I mentioned in an earlier post that, while the Republican Party platform is admirable it was not the product of any input from the Trump campaign but instead put together by a platform committee. The only input from the Trump people, according to a number of sources, was a request to soften the language of how much help we were willing to give Ukraine in maintaining its independence from Russia. The day after the election Trump had an unsupervised half-hour phone chat with Putin, an action with John McCain (bless him!) strongly condemned. Here’s what McCain home state newspaper, the Arizona Republic, had to say:
On Tuesday [Nov. 15], the day after Trump took a telephone call from Putin, McCain, R-Ariz., had blistering words, hinting that McCain intends to continue to push back on Trump in certain matters of national security and foreign policy.
“With the U.S. presidential transition underway, Vladimir Putin has said in recent days that he wants to improve relations with the United States,” McCain, chairman of the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a written statement. “We should place as much faith in such statements as any other made by a former KGB agent who has plunged his country into tyranny, murdered his political opponents, invaded his neighbors, threatened America’s allies, and attempted to undermine America’s elections.”
Over the past week or so there has been talk of Trump making Mitt Romney Secretary of State, an idea that I’m sure had our poor allies breathing a sigh of relief over not having to deal with the egregious Rudy Giuliani. But no actual nomination has been forthcoming. Now the scuttlebut is that in order for Romney to secure this position he will have to apologize for his (completely and totally accurate) assessment of the President-elect back in March, when he called Trump a “phony” and a “fraud,” just to name two. (An article on RedState suggests that Romney give a three-word reply: “Apologize? For what?”) The thing of it is, Romney got raked over the coals back in 2012 when he said in one of the presidential debates that Russia posed the greatest geopolitical threat to the world. So how likely is it that Trump will actually put him in as Secretary? That wouldn’t make Putin very happy. (When I just did some googling on this story to see if there were any updates I found that the leading candidate for Secretary of State seems now to be Tulsi Gabbard, a progressive Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who supported Bernie Sanders during the primaries. As I often say when commenting on the current political situation, “W-h-a-a-a-a-t?” Stay tuned.)
Here’s the link to the excellent article, yes, from the Washington Post, one of those horrible mainstream media outlets:
“Americans Keep Looking Away from the Election’s Most Alarming Story”