Ah, the Christmas season. Democrats and their propaganda organs (formerly known as the mainstream media) are full of Russia love. The sly, elfish Vlad Putin being the principal recipient.

It’s an outpouring of love based on speculation and “sources” at the CIA -- and Kwanzaa-knows where else -- that the Russians hacked the Clinton campaign. Russki chicanery, we’re assured by the Washington Post and New York Times, helped Donald J. Trump secure the White House. Putin, you see, has been outed as a triple-secret ally of Trump. Journalism isn’t dead, after all.  

This is humbug, of course. But useful humbug for Democrats. They just can’t explain how so charismatic a nominee as Hillary Rodham Clinton could have lost to the reality star buffoon and Augusto Pinochet wannabe, Donald J. Trump. So Democrats test-marketed blame angles until settling on one that seems to work best.

Continuing to heavy-up on fingering Deplorables for Hillary’s crash and burn risks too much backlash. Millions of Deplorables, that is, who forced the Democrats’ Blue Wall to come crumbling down. Rebuilding the Wall requires easing up on the white working class in Michigan and Pennsylvania, for instance. Fake news is more subtext. Racism has legs, but it indicts not just Trumpians and Republicans but those darn formidable Deplorables.

On the other hand, Russia is far away. A land of onion domes, vast steppes, and Buffalo-like piles of snow. Putin lacks a broom, but has a sorta Wicked Witch of East persona. You know, poisoning adversaries, invading the Ukraine, and generally thugging-it-up with his comrade oligarchs.

Whether or not Putin’s antics really bother Democrats is another story.

Putin’s pedigree is communist in origin. KGB and all. Murder -- targeted and mass -- conquest, and thuggery were hallmarks of the defunct Soviet Union. Lots of Democrats, dating back to the 20s and 30s, weren’t much fussed about reports of Lenin’s and Stalin’s oppression and mass butchery. Some even served as Russian agents in FDR’s administration. That’s covertly, if the clarification is required. 

Come the 70s and 80s, why, Democrats and their leftist intellectual fellow travelers were bruiting the notion that there was “moral equivalence” between the USSR and U.S. Let’s not get so uppity about Russian communist brutality and aggression, went the argument, when we -- well, Democrats, actually -- had a sad history of slavery and lynching blacks. Our attempt to subjugate Vietnam (led by “bad” Democrat LBJ) made Russian dominance of the Eastern bloc, the Berlin Wall, the quelling of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the 1968 Prague Spring appear small potatoes.

Mother Russia, though, stripped of its communist gloss, doesn’t hold the allure to Democrats and the American left as in days of yore. The USSR, closed and tightly controlled, was the stuff of Western leftist fantasies (or, if you prefer, useful lies).

Remember the old leftist spin about the USSR being a “workers’ paradise?” Equality, fraternity, and vodka for all! The USSR was the land of a bright industrial and technological future. The “New Man” cometh -- or some such gender-bias drivel. Amongst many progressives, the Soviet Union was the beacon of modernity in the gloomy world of Depression Era America. The Hitler-Stalin Pact was just a bump in the road to a glorious future.  

Putin’s Russia is more transparent. Russia is squalid -- not that it wasn’t under its communist masters, but commie rhetoric and gullibility masked reality. Putin, whatever his nostalgia for Russia’s communist era, knows that red is deader than Trotsky amongst the proletariat. He’s hitched his wagon to hoary Russian nationalism, to a bare-knuckled advancement of Russian national interests. To hell with the workers of the world uniting. 

Putin’s at odds with globalism, the ism that’s now fab (though faltering). It incorporates many of the elements of socialism and communism. Hence, the progressives’ embrace of globalism and their recoil at Putin’s antediluvian “Russia First” approach. Putin has become an exquisite villain to tag with Hillary’s defeat. And, critically, to try to wrap Putin’s alleged villainy around Trump’s neck. Without Putin serving as a confederate for Trump, the Putin angle loses much of its punch and value to Democrats.

The Democrats’ aim, as with George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, is to delegitimize the coming Trump presidency. Their deviousness and venality is KGB-worthy.     

Let’s dispense with this factoid. The Russians try to hack the U.S. 24/7. But Uncle Sam works at hacking the Russians -- unless Sam is a boob. Let’s hope not. The Chinese are in the hacking game, too. The list grows from there. Every nation, every pernicious political movement (think ISIS), and every crime outfit around the globe hacks away.  

But let’s reiterate that there’s no evidence that Russia hacked the Clinton campaign. If there is, it hasn’t surfaced. Above all, there’s zero evidence that any attempts at hacking by the Russians impacted the outcome of the presidential contest.

This from Hillary Clinton in a December 16 CNN report titled, “Russia challenges US to prove campaign hacking claims or shut up”:  

Clinton said Thursday night that Putin's alleged involvement in the hacking of Democratic organizations during the 2016 election stemmed from a longtime grudge the Russian President has held against her. [Italics added]

Perhaps Vlad is chaffed that when the Clinton Foundation -- for a price -- helped grease the skids with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to approve the sale of a big portion of U.S. uranium mining interests to the Russians, he didn’t get a big enough kickback? Money disputes cause grudges, right?

The Wall Street Journal reports on December 16 that it appears the Russians attempted to hack the Republican National Committee, too. They failed to breach RNC computer networks. Republicans had superior security. Just how incompetent are Democrats if Russians did hack their networks? 

It’s useful to recall that Hillary provided the Russians -- and the rest of humanity -- with a hacking-rich environment. Hillary’s private servers contained an untold number of highly classified national security-related emails. Perhaps law-breaker Hillary doing so whetted the appetites of Russian hackers. Another way of putting it, Hillary’s breaches of national security via her private servers were like putting out honey: the flies came. The flies -- Russians and everyone else -- then went buzzing around for more sweet stuff through porous Democratic computer networks.

If Democrats and MSM propagandists can speculate, why can’t we?

So, in Putin the Democrats have their Grinch. They’re trying mightily to link Putin to Trump in a conspiracy to swipe the presidency from the deserving, if trembling, hands of Hillary Clinton, the very first ever woman president and globalist-village champion… who will not be.  

Fate has its vagaries, bad and very good.