Will people who once would have deplored U.S./Russia tie now be Trump's biggest partisan backers?

It seems that President-elect Donald J. Trump has picked a corporate executive-type person to be secretary of state, and now we’re hearing the allegations that this person is a Russian sympathizer, of sorts.
 

Who's who in this relationship?

Which also combines with the weekend news reports that say the Russian government, in what seems to be its own warped idea of a prank meant to display the inferiority of the Democratic way of life, managed to cause enough havoc with computer hacking to alter the Election Day results of a month ago.

WE’RE NOT SURE just how, or to what degree. But the implication being that some will now believe that Russian premier Vladimir Putin had more of a say in Trump being able to defeat Hillary Clinton than did the will of the voters.

If this were the old days, I’m sure we’d be hearing all kinds of hostile rhetoric and threats calling for the impeachment of Trump before he could even be formally confirmed by the Electoral College and Congress as U.S. president.

We might even hear talk of “commies” and all the other Cold War-era trash talk. Except that technically, Russia isn’t Communist any longer.

Heck, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics hasn’t existed in decades. There are young people who cast their first ballots in this year’s election cycle who would have no first-hand concept of what the Soviet Union was.

AND AS FOR some older people, they are inclined to think there is no real difference.

Particularly since Russian head Putin does date his own government service back to the USSR (which wasn’t just the subject of a Beatles song that itself was a takeoff on all-American Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.”).

If Trump/Putin are Robin/Batman, was Clinton some sort of Catwoman turned good?,

For Putin was a one-time head of the KGB and an intelligence official within the new Russian Federation.

My point being that it astounds me that the ideologues of our society who once would have been scared out of their wits out of the very mention of Russian influence within our government are now going to be the ones who will speak out the loudest in Trump’s defense.

 

CONWAY: Does she believe anything she says?

AFTER ALL, HE’S the guy with the “Make America Great Again” vision that mostly consists of ignoring anything that white people don’t particularly feel like addressing.

Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway officially denounces the talk of Russian influence over the elections as “laughable and ridiculous.” Because I’m sure the last thing that she’d want to admit is that Trump is more than capable of falling for the nefarious pranks of a potentially-hostile nation.

As for the new secretary of state, he’s the former head of Exxon-Mobil. Rex Tillerson has been CEO since 2006, and Trump says he likes the idea that he has negotiated deals for that company with foreign governments – including Russia.

Of course, he’s been used to negotiating deals that could focus on a certain bottom line that would benefit the stockholders of his own company – and certainly didn’t have to take into account the concerns of the United States of America as a whole.

ALTHOUGH IT SHOULDN’T be a surprise. If you think about it, Trump is a corporate-minded person who is inclined to think government gets in the way of his own business dealings. Why shouldn’t he be expected to pick a batch of corporate-minded people.

That’s what the people who managed to give Trump a majority of the Electoral College vote should have realized they were creating for this country’s leadership when they marked their ballots for Trump accordingly. They voted for “Robin” to Putin’s “Batman.”

 

CLINTON: Did Russia "fear" her?

I’m sure the ideologues, now that it suits their partisan interests, will claim that the past is the past and that we’re all friendly with Russia, even though British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Saturday to the BBC that Putin’s interests are in propping up his own nation and that the U.S. shouldn’t be so eager to treat it as an equal partner.

Then again, a Trump presidency was eager to aggravate China by talking openly with Taiwan just a few weeks ago and now says he doesn’t feel bound by the “One China” policy the U.S. has held for years – making me wonder if that was merely because the Chinese government didn’t offer similar assistance in his desire to beat Clinton. And whom we should now think of as the “real American” whose presence the Russians would have feared!

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