We've Been Had. Nobody Wants to Say It. I Just Did.

Having the Attorney General obstruct the obstruction investigation of 45, which is what he's presently doing in real time, is bad enough. But it's still not the most devastating result of all that's happened. Amazingly, we are walking right past it.

We've been had. The 2016 election was rigged.

The Russians changed the numbers. They changed them in the very states in which 45 managed to pull off the electoral upset. They didn't change them in the entirety of each state, but they didn't have to. They did it just enough to tilt the scales.

Nobody's coming out and even seriously suggesting it yet. Discussions are peripheral at best. I'm not sure why. But circumstantially, it's becoming quite obvious.

Let's make some assumptions here:

• 45 will lie about anything and everything. He's at 10,000 and counting. He has no conscience, no integrity.
• The Mueller Report came right out and said that 45's campaign knew that the Russians were dabbling in interference and said nothing about it. In fact, through passivity, it cheered them on.
• 45 and his minions knew the results were tainted somehow. They may not have known how it happened.
• But then, they might have and said nothing. They might not have actually participated, but the discussion between Manafort and Kilimnik is quite telling. They specifically covered battleground states in the Rust Belt: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. 45 won three of the four and barely lost Minnesota.
• They might have done what they're actually pretty good at--covering their tracks. 
• We know that 45 is lying about there being no obstruction of justice; it's right there in the report. How do we know he isn't lying about there being no collusion? The fact that Mueller didn't find it doesn't mean it isn't still there.
• The polling leading up to the election was drastically off--in fact, it's never been as bad since 1948, when the newspapers all but handed the election to Thomas Dewey, instead of Harry Truman, who won it. How could that happen?
• Has anyone forgotten that this has happened before--in 2000, albeit unintentionally? Back then, Zogby polling had Gore winning Florida by 1% on Election Day. Had the balloting process not been messed up, had people actually voted for Gore instead of those who mistakenly voted for Patrick Buchanan, chads or no chads, Gore would have won--and a lot of poor policies wouldn't have been put into motion. Same as now.

There are too many coincidences here, too many places where things happened and seem to keep dangling without context. There's another factor that not nearly enough of us, amazingly, are taking into consideration: Our refusal to believe we could get tricked and undermined like this, that our democracy is somehow so sacrosanct as to be absolutely firewalled, out of respect if not in fact.

We still think of Russians as, well, over there someplace. We still think of all this as spanning a distance. Incredible, isn't it, that so many of us are still unable to bridge that in our minds? Geography is irrelevant now. They're all over the place, just as we can be.

It says here that they got right inside the machines and actually switched the numbers. No, I don't know this for sure. But I know there's enough evidence to institute a clear and decisive investigation. And if that can't be done, I want to know why not.

I want to know why we aren't getting right to the bone of this whole thing. Are we going to just move on and leave it at that? The wrong person might have been elected--literally the wrong one, not because of his dislikability but because the process got invaded and completely undermined. And much chaos would have never surfaced and never been connected with a corrupt person and people who are bent on dissolving the legitimacy of our government.

Let's start beating this drum. Let's demand action. Let's demand the ultimate accountability. Foreigners on this soil are nowhere near as dangerous and destructive as foreigners inside our computers, ruining the legitimacy of the government that rules us. It is the consummate invasion. It must be traced to the source.

We must proceed on the assumption that Russia, a.k.a. Vladimir Putin, arranged to put the wrong people in charge here. Why does 45 kow-tow to him? Because whether he's seen the evidence or not, he knows--he knows that Putin's the one who put him in power. No one needs to say or admit anything. It's the simple understanding that underlies all conversations.

Congressional Democrats, to their credit, are quite busy with a host of investigations. But they, like most of the rest of us, are overlooking the most important one, the one that should transcend all others: The one that may just prove that the president we have should simply not have been there in the first place, as incredible as that may have formerly been.

Nothing's impossible now. Nothing. We need to get used to that reality. No limitation of ethical conduct exists. Now, it's whether they--either 45 or the Russians--can get away with violations of ethics, of our sensitivities, or of the law. That's it.

The known Russian interference, the flooding of our social media with pro-45 propaganda, should in fact be expected by now. Foreign interference in our affairs is as old as the republic itself, though. During the early 1790s, French minister Citizen Genet roamed the country in efforts to disrupt American neutrality during yet another Franco-British war. He not only made public statements inappropriate for a foreign representative, he even recruited Americans to serve with Frenchmen in privateers, seizing British ships and claiming the right to do so. President George Washington was livid and seemingly helpless until Genet reached out in desperation, since the newly revolutionary, guillotine-mad French government sought him for crimes against it--for which he would have surely lost his head (See Ron Chernow's excellent biography of Washington for details, pp. 692-97). Washington, who knew what deportation would mean, cut him a break, and Genet married an American woman and spent his remaining days in upstate New York.

As obnoxious as Genet was, he didn't fraudulently switch any votes. That would be directly undermining the government's legitimacy. I believe that this is what we have here.

What's happening in the Senate right now, as I write this, is not diminished in its gravity. But the direct cheating on the election compromises all of us, even those who faithfully voted for 45. That it hasn't surfaced yet cannot be left to mere history, to be read in some textbook for future generations.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark