For Democrats and their flunkies, history is all bunk unless it is self-serving.

The reason history is bunk to the Democrats is because history is a ledger of their perennial infatuation with monsters of the left – Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Fidel – including Putin, until it serves their interest to turn on a dime, as opportunists do, against those whom they were peddling a moment ago as friends and allies. 

Take Putin, for instance, when Obama and Hillary were signaling "reset" with Moscow, and Obama whispering to then-Russian president Dmitri Medvedev in 2012 while the mic was hot to let Putin know that after the election, he would be much more flexible in dealing with Moscow's autocrat.  Then came the presidential debates of 2012, and Obama harangued Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, for daring to point out in his campaign that Russia was a most threatening enemy of American interests.

All this history is bunk for the Democrats and their media shills.  Then there is the larger and more debilitating factor in the present-day culture of the United States, as in Canada, that history is not taught seriously and objectively as a core curriculum in our schools and colleges.  What passes for history is more or less a mishmash of left-wing ideological constructs or narratives to relentlessly indict "white folks" for all the wrongs done to the "colored folks" in America and around the world in the pursuit of capitalist-imperialist profit.

But Hillary Clinton's 2016 defeat needed explanation other than the simple admission that she was a terrible candidate, insulted the intelligence of ordinary Americans, and called them "deplorable," and that the stench of her and her husband's record as grifters sickened just about every hardworking American man and woman apart from the coastal elites and their hangers-on.  Moreover, eight years of Obama was enough to sicken enough Americans across the flyover country.  To give another four to Obama's handpicked successor was a bridge too far.

Hillary's defeat in 2016 to Trump was not a surprise to anyone who understood the reality of American politics and culture at the ground level.  I predicted to my friends in Canada Trump's win on the day in June 2015 he took the escalator down in his Trump Tower to announce his candidacy.  The only people surprised were those who take mainstream media pronouncements as credible.

So the Democrats and their flunkies had to fabricate an excuse for Hillary's loss.  This they did, since they own the mainstream media.  Three weeks before the 2016 election, in mid-October, Obama pompously declared that Trump should stop whining about the election being rigged, for no single party or agent, Russian or otherwise, could tamper with it.  Obama never asked, or wanted to know, what the DNC had done to Bernie Sanders in rigging the Democratic primaries in handing Hillary the nomination for 2016.

All of the above in a twinkle of an eye was set aside by Obama and his intelligence agencies, and the fabricated story of Trump-Russia collusion has been peddled ever since Hillary's deserved defeat to delegitimize Trump's presidency and remove him from office.

At the bidding of the Democrats, the media cast Vladimir Putin as a demon.  The very same Putin with whom Obama and Hillary were set to do business, to be flexible, to make money as grifters – Bill had been paid by Putin's henchmen $500K for a half-hour talk in Moscow while Hillary was the secretary of state, apart from the Uranium One deal that remains unexamined by the FBI and DoJ folks bent on chasing a fake "collusion" story about Trump and Putin – was airbrushed into a horned monster.

This is the pathetic shambles of the story about Trump's collusion with Putin, which culminated in the Helsinki summit with the spin that Trump has coddled Putin while neglecting America's interests and honor.  Democrats are brazen liars and sodden paramours of tyrants and autocrats of the left.  This is nothing new.  And they keep getting away with their corrupt liaisons with left-wing thugs only because they have shills in the mainstream media providing ample cover for their lechery.

Putin is a thug, and the Russian Federation is a failing entity, though armed with nuclear weaponry.  But Russia is no longer the Soviet Union bestriding a divided Europe, a military superpower in a bipolar world of the Cold War years.  The situation has fundamentally changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Russia is now a country with a declining population of 140 million people.  Europe is now a united continent of nearly 500 million.  The Russian economy is less than half of the economy of Germany.  Add to this picture the weight of the United States, with a population of nearly 330 million people and an economy more than thirteen times the size of the Russian economy.

So what do we have in terms of the one-sided balance between the West and Russia?  The West has a population nearly six times the size of the Russian population, and  the combined economy of the U.S. and the E.U. is more than twenty-four times the size of the Russian economy.  And it is this Russia that the West has to fear more than the Soviet Union?  Only in the imagination of the Democrats and their flunkies!

But no adult in a room has ever gotten empty-headed teenagers raving and ranting to calm down, take a deep breath, and examine rationally whatever makes them hysterical.  The Democratic Party is now more than ever the party of the raving and ranting teenagers, readily unhinged, drugged out and freaked out, and incapable of critical self-reflection.

History exists despite the disregard by Democrats and their flunkies of history.  The history of the Democratic Party in embrace of the Bolsheviks and their monsters, particularly Stalin, goes back to the Democratic icon President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The historical record of FDR's relationship with Stalin's Soviet Union is one gross and shameful story of an American president's infatuation with the Russian tyrant.

The hysterics of Democrats and their flunkies over President Trump's summit with Putin in Helsinki are, if ever Freud was needed to explain this psychologically, nothing more than projection.

Salim Mansur teaches in Western University, London, Ontario and is author of The Qur'an Problem and Islamism (2017).