What Shouldn’t Oughter

This is already a very cheerful time of the year, but the Lord apparently thought I needed to be cheered up even a little bit more, and so He very kindly arranged to have the Democrats start yelling at us over the startling news that the Russians hacked our sacred electoral processes.

Now I do need to emphasize at the outset that it is our electoral processes that are sacred. As in, America’s electoral processes. It is quite important not to make a mistake here. When it is other nation’s elections we are talking about—those very pedestrian kind of foreign elections—it is simply the case that the same kind of civic dignity and majesty are not exuded by them. It doesn’t waft off of them, the way it does off of ours. I say this merely out of a desire to use off of twice in one sentence. These are antinomian times.

This is why, for example, there is no problem with President Obama interfering with the British Brexit vote, popping up during their campaign in order to do his sanctimonious professor thing—which he admittedly does very well—so that he might inform the benighted British public that a yes vote on Brexit would have DIRE consequences. This was okay because their elections are not sacred the way ours are. And remember that time when Obama sent a bunch of taxpayer money—as in, hundreds of thousands—over to Israel in order to get Netanyahu frog-marched to the nearest electoral curb? Good times. This was okay because Israeli elections are ordinary schlub-like elections, participated in by foreigners. They are not Americans, a point that is often overlooked. These foreigners buy their democracies in bulk at warehouse discount houses. They don’t have the expensive high-end kind of democracy like we do, the sacrosanct kind. And besides, Netanyahu was being annoying to our president, and not annoying our president is another one of our sacrosanct values.

So the current story is that Putin “hacked” our sacred space election in order to help Trump, a candidate who didn’t appear to want war with Russia. Why would he do something like that? But let us leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not this is true. I mean, this is the last month of 2016—why should truth start mattering now? Let us assume for the sake of argument that Putin is guilty as charged. He was behind an operation that broke into the emails of some American operatives and politicians, and then through Julian Assange—say, has anybody seen him recently?—supposedly had these damaging emails leaked to the American public. This had the unsettling effect of revealing the truth about these politicians—in 2016, remember—and nobody quite knew where to look. American voters usually know the truth about their leaders, but not out there in its underwear like that, covered in goose bumps.

And so, even taking the account at face value, we are talking about a leak, not a hack. Leaking is where you obtain access to some documents and let a bunch of people see them what shouldn’t oughter. Hacking is where you send your cyber-pirates after the electronic voting machines themselves, jiggering the ones and zeros so that your favored guy in the election comes out ahead. But, you see, Putin’s forces didn’t do that. Hillary’s people did.

Thanks to the quixotic recount efforts spearheaded by Jill Stein, we discovered that there was in fact massive voter fraud in—for starters—Detroit. No Russians there though . . . just a lot of imaginary Democrats voting. Like magic. They didn’t even have to go down to the polls. They just stayed at home, and their wishes went down there and voted. Several times. Now since they were imaginary voters, one could make the case that they were imaginary Russians, but—Occam’s razor—I prefer the theory that the imaginary voters were natives of Wayne County.

So for the Democrats to be yelling about a rigged election right about now is why we need words like chutzpah. Before the election, back when Donald Trump declined to say whether he was going to accept the results of the election—knowing, for example, that precinct workers in places like Detroit had been limbering up—he was given a national Lecture by the Appointed Scolds, and they were Insistent that it was Necessary to accept the Results of our Free and Very Fair (and Sacred) Elections. Otherwise, Democracy would Fail from the earth, and we would become as the Beasts that Perish.

Of course, the election then went the other way (Rom. 9:17). This was because Putin had spies on Hillary’s staff, and because her medicos were giving her these weird injections all the time, what with one thing and another, it was a matter of no consequence to sneak in an extra injection that made Hillary allergic to cheese, which ruled out campaigning in Wisconsin, as much as she wanted to. There are layers to this, people. Didn’t you know that Putin used to be KGB?

But when the election went the other way, somebody flipped a switch. What was unpatriotic to the core to question in October became the highest civic responsibility to question in December. The election surprised the Heck out of the Hubris of Hillary—such that the candidate treated her hotel room like she was Keith Moon, or maybe even Keith Richards. Then rioting mobs freaked out, then it was James Comey’s fault, and then delegates to the Electoral College were threatened, and now it is the Russians threatening the sanctity of our hallowed democracy.

These are the same people who will ensure you are branded on the forehead with an R for Racism if you support Voter ID laws that would help eliminate voter fraud. “Our electoral process is secure. Nobody is committing voter fraud. How dare you require picture ID for voting? There is no need for identification security at the polling stations, you bigot.” I mentioned earlier our need for words like chutzpah. We also need words like schadenfreude.

And because this election has been the fruit-of-the-month club selection, with all the cherries, these are the same people who set up an unsecured cardboard box server for Hillary so that she could run her dirty foundation email business while she was Secretary of State and not have the American public, at the end of the day, be aware of said business. Those who are as concerned about cyber security as they are now pretending to be—just a suggestion—ought not to set up a system where the Russians could just stop by and pick up whatever they wanted. The Russian defense could be, “We thought she wanted us to take the emails. They were all right there. She practically left them out on the front porch.”

Boil it all down. The Hillary case amounts to this. The Russians had no right to reveal how corrupt and dirty they were being. And if the Russians did reveal it, they had a moral responsibility to be even-handed, and do the same thing to Trump. But maybe they tried to do it to Trump, and there was nothing there but pictures of beauty contest contestants. Or maybe all the dirt on Trump had already been revealed. Or maybe the Russians don’t have the obligation to be bipartisan whistleblowers. It is Putin, after all.

So the Democrats are all about accepting the results of the election. Unless they lose, and they think that the shameless media is willing to be just as shameless as they are. Then they do . . . well, what they are currently doing.