At a rally in July of 2016, candidate Trump said, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you can find Hillary's 30,000 missing emails."  That sound bite was the justification for Mrs. Clinton's claim that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.  She never alleged that Trump and Russia somehow rigged voting machines to steal the election.  What she did allege was that the Russians hacked into her and the DNC's computers, extracted embarrassing emails, and passed them on to WikiLeaks for publication.

Mrs. Clinton never claimed that the published emails were fake.  Her objection was that the true but embarrassing emails were obtained illegally.

In fact, it is not clear that the emails were hacked by Trump; by Russia; or by a DNC campaign worker who was later murdered in Washington, D.C.  So, at worst, Trump might have been guilty of doing to Mrs. Clinton what Democrat activists had been doing to him: hacking and leaking embarrassing information.  On that basis, the Democrats have, for four long years, claimed that Trump stole the 2016 election and is an illegitimate president.

Now let's turn to 2020. On October 24, 2020, on the podcast Pod Save America, Joe Biden said, "We're in a situation where we have put together — and you guys did it for President Obama's administration before this — we have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."  While it might be reasonable to chalk up that gaffe to Biden's obvious mental impairment, he did say it, and we have the sound bite to prove it.

Perhaps more damning is a sound bite from a January 2018 appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations.  At that appearance, Biden discussed his success in getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired.  That prosecutor was investigating a Ukrainian energy company where, by coincidence, Joe Biden's son served on the board of directors.  As an aside, Biden's son was extremely well compensated for that gig.  In Joe Biden's own words, "I'm leaving in six hours.  If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money."  "The money" was reportedly a cool billion dollars.

Let's compare the Trump and Biden sound bites.  The Trump sound bite, at worst, suggests that Trump colluded with Russia to hack and publish accurate but embarrassing emails.  As an aside, why would Russia do that?  If Russia had gone to the trouble of hacking Mrs. Clinton's emails, and found embarrassing information in them, the Russians would have kept the information secret and used it to blackmail her.  On the other hand, if they just wanted to embarrass Mrs. Clinton, they could have made up a phony dossier about her without going to the trouble of hacking into her computer.

On the other hand, the Biden sound bite does not sound like collusion.  It sounds more like extortion.  Joe Biden threatened to withhold a billion dollars from Ukraine if Ukraine refused to halt an investigation that would certainly have revealed politically damaging information about the Biden family.  It worked.  In Biden's own words: "Well, son of a b----.  (Laughter.)  He got fired."

The point is that when Democrats win, they claim there is no way the election could have been stolen.  At an October 2016 joint press conference with Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, Barack Obama himself said, "There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even — you could even rig America's elections."  However, when they lose, Democrats latch onto the flimsiest of excuses for overturning an election, as in 2016.  And they drag out their resistance for years.  For four years we heard about Russia, Russia, Russia.  We had to put up with a $40-million special prosecutor investigation that turned up unpaid taxes, unreported taxi medallions, and entrapment of Trump campaign workers.  Note that that entire propaganda orgy began barely one month after Obama's October 2016 statement that American elections could not be rigged.

Where are we now?  Since the Biden camp gives the appearance of having won the election, no "serious person" can consider the possibility that the election was stolen.  No mention of fraud is allowed on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  YouTube will not allow any video challenging the official election results.  If the election were really fair and honest, you would think the Biden camp would welcome the opportunity to prove that it was.  However, if the Biden camp really wanted to prove that the election was fair and honest, they would have made sure Republican observers were present whenever votes were counted.  They were not.  If the Biden camp really wanted to prove that the election was fair and honest, they would have made sure that signatures on ballot envelopes matched voter registration signatures.  They did not.  If the Biden camp really wanted to prove that the election was fair and honest, they would have purged the voter rolls of dead people, people who no longer lived in the state, and illegal aliens.  They did none of that.  Yet they desperately hope Trump-supporters will not act like Democrats.

Time will tell.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.