As the interminable, months-long Robert Mueller investigation on collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia continues to wend its way to some unpredictable, unsatisfying conclusion, one is struck by the notion that there are wildly differing standards of acceptable behavior for the two parties at play here.

Trump’s unlikely, unforeseen victory over the Deserving Inevitable First Woman was met with what can only be described as horror and disbelief by Clinton’s hordes of see-no-evil supporters. Spearheaded by an unprecedented, non-stop attack by the liberal media, the goal of liberals everywhere has been to undermine Trump’s election victory and render illegitimate his presidency. It’s almost as if the liberal half of the country is waiting for the football equivalent of a “holding“ call that will negate the previous play. For the non-football-savvy, let’s paint the scenario: It’s a tight game. Time is running out. The Patriots need a big gain to keep their drive alive and hopefully score a touchdown. Under pressure and narrowly eluding tackle, Tom Brady completes a long pass to a Patriots receiver who scores the game-winning touchdown as time expires. Game over. Patriots win.

Not so fast. The on-field referee signals a foul against the Patriots -- “holding.” The Patriots’ game-winning touchdown is called back and the Patriots are assessed a penalty instead. The game is not over. The Patriots do not win.

This is what Hillary’s supporters have been hoping for ever since election night: that somehow, Trump’s victory would be officially negated and disallowed, giving Hillary the win. The liberal media, her party and the 60 million who voted for her just cannot -- will not -- accept the outcome of a fair, democratic election. Had she won, the election would have been fair and democratic to them. But since Trump won, the result must be invalid, the process fraudulent.

The Democrats’ first tack was the popular vote gambit. Hillary supposedly “won” the national popular vote by 2.8 million. This proves to them that she actually won the presidency and Trump’s win is bogus. Of course, there was no contest for the national popular vote, therefore it’s not something that either Clinton or Trump could have won or lost. No game was played. Hillary’s four million-vote margin in CA overcame Trump’s one million-vote margin in the rest of the country and gave her the overall popular vote margin, but that’s meaningless. The 2016 election is Exhibit A in explaining why we have an Electoral College system of determining the winner: so that populous, overwhelmingly one-sided states -- like California -- can’t determine the election results over the tightly-contested intent and wishes of the rest of the country.

Trump’s popular vote margin in the other 49 states (1 million) was fairly big by recent standards. Remember, in the close, controversial 2000 election, the big brouhaha was that Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 500,000 votes nationally, yet Bush won the Electoral College. Trump’s margin in 49 states was double what Gore’s was. However, in the intervening 16 years, California has moved so far to the Left that the Democrats’ numerical vote margin there is utterly unrepresentative of the country as a whole.

There were predictable calls by many Democrats to “Abolish the Electoral College” following Hillary’s loss. Lost upon their simplistic thinking is the fact that a national contest based upon the raw countrywide popular vote would engender completely different campaign strategies on the part of the contestants. Republicans would spend far more time and money in California and other liberal states (like MA and NY) than they do now, when the outcome in the liberal state is a forgone conclusion. If the goal was to maximize Republican voter turnout and the numerical vote total, they would campaign accordingly. It’s highly likely that the Democrats’ normal huge CA margin would be reduced considerably. At this point in American demographic/immigration history, the Democrats would still win California. But by four million votes? Doubtful. In a popular vote contest, all bets would be off. That’s a completely different game, and that game was not played in 2016.

The Electoral College game was played in 2016. Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Florida -- states that Barack Obama won easily in 2008 and 2012 -- were won by Donald Trump in 2016. There had to be some nefarious outside factor that caused this. Donald Trump could not have beaten Hillary Clinton in a legitimate, head-to-head contest among the American people. He could only have won by cheating. He obviously colluded with the Russians and they “influenced” our election process and swung the results over to Trump. Exactly how the Russians did this -- the precise mechanism of Russian interference, the exact counties that they forced into the Trump column that would have otherwise gone to Hillary, how and where those counties added up into state wins for Trump, which states they were, by how many votes -- none of that is ever specified. It’s all covered by a blanket, vague, all-accusing charge of “collusion.”

And so, this nebulous, amorphous, unprovable-therefore-undeniable charge of “collusion” (itself an undefinable, we’ll-know-it-when-we-see-it charge) has taken hold among the Democratic Party, buttressed and supported by the liberal media. The popular vote vs. Electoral College angle is a dead end: That Electoral College is our law, black and white, it’s happened before, there’s no fruit to be gotten from that tree. The Democrats dropped that approach pretty fast, after their obligatory howls of the College’s inherent unfairness.

But collusion? That is a great vein of anti-Trump publicity gold, just begging to be mined again and again. With the liberal media’s help, the Democrats have pushed the Trump administration into appointing an “independent counsel” -- Democratic partisan Robert Mueller -- to investigate the matter of the Trump campaign’s collusion with the Russians.

For 11 months, no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion has been uncovered. None. Mueller has stacked his staff with rabid Democratic operatives, but they’ve still not unearthed anything concrete having to do with Trump, the Russians, or the election. In almost a year of frenzied, intense searching, the Democrats have found nothing of substance directly tied to Trump.

However, now it has come to light that Hillary herself engaged in, um, “highly-questionable pre-election behavior” with the Russians, Uranium One and with her so-called charitable Clinton Foundation. It looks as if the Foundation was a pay-to-play scheme designed mostly to launder money and line the Clintons’ pockets. We can thank the “secondary media world” of Fox News and some social media corners for this new information. Certainly the “primary” mainstream liberal media world of the networks, CNN, GMA, the major papers, late night TV, Trending on FB, etc. don’t want to touch this.

(Definitions: “Secondary” media is a media source that must be intentionally sought out. No one sees or hears Fox News or Rush by accident. “Primary” media is media that reaches everyone, whether they seek it out or not: The TV at the gym or airport (CNN). The NY Times thrown on the breakroom table at work. Late night TV. Everyone is reached by some “primary” liberal media, but “secondary” conservative media only reaches those who seek it out. Huge difference.)

For the Democrats and their allies in the liberal media, no amount of unethical behavior is too much or out of bounds as long as it results in a Democratic win. There is no type or amount of cooperation with a hostile foreign adversary that is deemed unacceptable as long as the liberal politician wins. No potential crime is pursued, no Independent Counsel is appointed, there are no breathless ‘above the fold’ or top-of-the-hour breaking stories of supposed wrongdoing when it’s a liberal politician in question. For Democrats, in the eyes of the liberal media, the ends always justify the means. To them, no matter how shady the Democrat’s means, the end result of a Republican winning high office is just too unacceptable to let a Democrat’s questionable ethics, inconsistency or immorality stand in the way. For example, there is virtually no primary liberal media coverage of the corruption trial of Democratic Senator Robert Menendez. Because he’s a Democrat, the average person hears nothing about this matter. The liberal media always protect the Democratic ‘brand.’

Hillary can sell our country’s nuclear security to our mortal foreign adversary and line her pockets with ill-gotten fortune, as long as she’s elected president and preserves racial/ethnic/gender quotas, allows illegal immigration, and continues to allow unfettered access to late-term abortion. To the liberal media, any behavior on her part that enables those outcomes is fine.

The standards to which conventional Republican candidates are held by the liberal media are quite different than the standards to which Democratic candidates for high-level national office are held. The standards for “unconventional” Republican candidates -- like Donald Trump -- are not only different, they’re pretty much nonexistent. The liberal media seemingly make up the “standards” for Trump as they go along, their only goal being that they can always point to Trump falling short of their ever-moving target. Republicans would do well to recognize what kind of candidate they have at any given time and conduct themselves accordingly in a pre-emptive fashion.