An Illegitimate President?

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) has decided to boycott President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration, citing as his reason that Trump is "an illegitimate President."  The stated reasons for his assertion are that Russia interfered with our election by hacking DNC emails and exposing their contents to voters, and FBI Director James Comey's revelation that an additional 650,000 emails had been found on Anthony Weiner's laptop, both coming in the waning days of the Presidential election.  According to Lewis, these factors apparently are what resulted in Trump's electoral victory.

In the interview with liberal TV commentator Chuck Todd of NBC and MSNBC (the media mouthpiece of the Democrat party), Lewis also noted that this would be the first inauguration he's missed in his 31 years in Congress.

John Lewis is a lying partisan hack.

I don't say that to disrespect his status as a civil rights hero.  His partisanship and dishonesty have done enough to tarnish any good he may have done in the past.

See, Lewis has missed another inauguration during his tenure in the House - namely, that of George W. Bush.  His reason?  That Bush was not a legitimate President, because of the imbroglio over the Florida election (which Al Gore challenged in the courts - after he'd already conceded - and lost).

In other words, when a Democrat loses a close election to a Republican - especially if said Democrat won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote, as did both Gore and Hillary Clinton - Lewis pouts, like so many of his party brethren who don't like democracy and can't stand not getting their way.  His motives are purely partisan, and nothing more.

But let's give this civil rights hero-cum lying partisan hack the undeserved benefit of the doubt, and examine his assertions that purportedly support his charge of illegitimacy.

First, the Russian hack.  To date, we the people have not seen evidence of it, but given that the Russians and Chinese successfully hacked U.S. institutions from the Energy Department to the White House (with no strong response from the Obama administration), it's certainly plausible.

Those who state it as fact also go on to say that nothing happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin's knowledge and approval, thus Putin himself must have ordered the hack.

Really?  Nothing goes on in a country with nearly twice the land mass of the U.S., and 144 million people, without its President's knowledge and approval?  Do you think nothing happens in the U.S. without President Obama's approval?  Did Obama know of and approve the numerous hacks of U.S. financial institutions?

Granted, Russia is a very different nation, and Putin a very different leader, than the U.S. and Obama.  But if Putin knew everything that goes on in Russia, the CIA wouldn't have Russian citizens who serve as informants, and I guarantee they do, just as the FSS has American assets (without President Obama's knowledge, at least of who and where they are).

Also, why would Russia want Donald Trump as President vs. Hillary Clinton?  The U.S., under President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, stood idly and fecklessly by as Putin took ever-bolder moves on the world stage.  You'd think Putin would want such a passive leader in the White House, one that wouldn't stand up to him as he continued to reinstate Russia as a dominant global power.  Not a guy who has named tough-minded generals to head the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, another hawkish general as his National Security Advisor, and a West Point grad and Army officer who patrolled the Iron Curtain as CIA Director.

Then there's the fact that Russians also attempted to hack the RNC, but the RNC's firewalls were apparently better, because those attempts were thwarted.  Maybe we should support the party that has proven it can safeguard its information from foreign interests.

If Russia (officially) did hack the DNC - with or without Putin's knowledge and consent - the fact that they also tried to hack the RNC only proves that Russia was attempting to undermine America's confidence in its election process and its candidates, not that it favored one candidate over the other.  That's bad, and we should retaliate (with more than just sanctions).  But it doesn't render illegitimate the fair and proper election of the candidate that won the majority of the electoral votes.

There are those who claim that Trump himself asked Putin to hack the DNC when he made a comment in jest during a July 27 speech, saying he hoped Russia found the thousands of emails that Clinton deleted from her private server, which never should have been used by a Secretary of State.  (Note that Trump indicated that Russia would be rewarded mightily by U.S. media if it did uncover those emails - not that Russia would be rewarded by his administration, if elected.)

Yeah, right.  Trump's going to ask Putin to hack the DNC in front of millions of TV viewers.  I'm sometimes amazed at the complete and utter lack of logic that permeates the left.  I shouldn't be, but I am.

And there are the assertions that Trump is fond of Putin, that he thinks highly of him.  BS.  All Trump said was that Putin is a stronger leader than Obama.

That's like saying that Serena Williams is a better tennis player than me.  Heck, the President of France is a stronger leader than Obama - at least he's not afraid to utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism."

And what about the appointment of Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobil, as Secretary of State?  The left has made much of the fact that Putin awarded Tillerson the Order of Friendship,  Of course, that means that Tillerson will remain friendly to Russia in his new role as head of the State Department, right?.  I mean, in his previous role, his job was to make Russia happy enough to let Exxon Mobil profit from developing Russian oilfields.  Why wouldn't he pursue the same objectives as America's top diplomat?

Again, I'm sometimes amazed by the ... ah, never mind.

The key point is this: I don't know anyone who voted for Trump that was swayed by the release of the contents of the emails that were allegedly hacked by Russia.  However, I concede that some voters may have been.  But enough to carry traditional blue states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?

And what if those emails did sway that many voters?  What, specifically, were they swayed by?  The mere fact that DNC emails were hacked?

No, they'd have been swayed by the contents of those emails, which clearly proved rampant campaign corruption perpetrated by the Democrat Party.  Those contents have never been disputed by the left - not once.  In other words, they're only upset that they got caught, like any common criminal.

They revealed that, under the chairmanship of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC conspired to rig the primary debates to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.  That, after Wasserman Schultz' fall from grace, new DNC chair Donna Brazile obtained debate questions from CNN and provided them to Clinton in advance of the general election debate.  That Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, naively susceptible to phishing, had emails that revealed everything from Clinton's support for a no-fly zone in Syria (which would also make Putin very happy) to Clinton staffers insulting Catholics and Latinos.

As Kevin Bacon said in A Few Good Men, "These are the facts - and they are indisputable."

So if anything related to the Russian hack of the DNC influenced the U.S. Presidential election, it was the clear and compelling evidence of rampant corruption within the Clinton campaign and the Democrat Party structure.

And that's information that voters should have had going into the election.  So if anything, this only shows that Russia cares more about American voters knowing the truth than do the DNC and Hillary Clinton.

On to James Comey.  What the Democrats don't say is that, immediately before the election, Comey made a public statement that the FBI had reviewed all 650,000 emails obtained from Weiner's laptop (I cringe at even using the words "Weiner" and "laptop" in the same sentence), in a mere matter of days - a Herculean, if not impossible, task - and had found no evidence of wrongdoing.

In other words, the FBI cleared Hillary, just as it had back in June.

Now, if voters were undecided walking into the polls, does it not stand to reason that, Hillary having been exonerated not once, but twice, before the polls opened on November 8, they'd have breathed a sigh of relief and cast their votes in her favor?  After all, to not do so would be to question Comey's veracity in exonerating her.  But if they did that, why wouldn't they question his veracity when he made his earlier statement saying they'd found all those emails and were re-opening the investigation into Clinton?

Ah, there's that pesky logic thing again.

After Lewis' interview with Chuck Todd, Trump (inappropriately, in my view) lambasted Lewis on (what else?) Twitter.  The response from the left was immediate, vitriolic - and opportunistic.

At this writing, 68 Congressional Democrats have joined Lewis in a show of "solidarity," pledging to boycott the inauguration.  At least one of them said, "To attack John Lewis is to attack America," referring to Trump's tweet - which was a response, not an opening volley.

Hmm.  Seems to me that attempting to disrupt the orderly transfer of power - a vital and necessary part of our republican (note the little "r," liberals) process - is more an attack on America than is a counter-attack on a partisan hack.

But again, this is pure partisan opportunism.  It gives these left-wing sore losers an excuse to boycott the inauguration, an excuse they'd all been no doubt looking for, because they cannot accept the results of a free and fair election.

Donald Trump won the election.  He won a strong majority of the electoral votes.  He won somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,600 U.S. counties to Hillary's 500 counties.  Hillary won 88 of the nation's 100 most populous counties, which resulted in her three million vote advantage in the popular vote.  Without those 100 counties, Hillary would have lost the popular vote by more than 11 million votes.

Only those in New York, Hollywood and San Francisco believe that the popular vote should decide U.S. elections (and if a Republican had won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote, those leftists would defend the electoral college to the death - if they had the guts to defend anything to the death).
Like it or not, Donald Trump won a free and fair election.  Subsequent challenges to that election found that his popular vote count actually increased in Wisconsin, and that there were polling areas in Detroit - which Hillary carried - in which more votes were cast than there were registered voters.  Had we recounted all states, we might well have found that Trump won the popular vote as well, and that there was widespread evidence of voting fraud in the areas Hillary carried.

That undisputed electoral victory is all that is needed to declare Trump the legitimate next President of these United States.  And those Democrat lawmakers who will boycott his inauguration do so at their peril.  They believe they're safe, as all of them are from districts that Hillary carried (further proof that this is nothing more than partisan posturing).  But Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania looked like locks for Hillary, too.  Americans are tired of politics as usual.  These fake protesters in Congress risk being taken to task in the midterms.

And beyond that, they're irrelevant.  The GOP controls the House and Senate, not just the White House.  These representatives will find themselves fighting a losing cause for at least the next two years, and likely beyond.  All Donald Trump needs to do is to recite a line uttered by President Obama after he was sworn in in 2009, when GOP lawmakers urged him to work with them:

"We won."