Putin is now -- suddenly -- everywhere.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The media keep hyping the Democrats’ desperate rationalizations for blowing an election they thought was in the bag. Voting-machine tampering, a treacherous James Comey, internet “fake news,” FOX News on every bar and pool hall television set, “deplorable” racist dunces in fly-over country, and now the Rooskies have the Dems and their NeverTrump Republican fellow travelers in a never-ending hysterical tizzy.

The Washington Post and the New York Times, ad agencies for the Democrat Party, “report” that an anonymous intelligence officer told some Senators that the “consensus view” of the CIA is that the Russians hacked the DNC emails in order to give Trump an advantage in the election. Rational people will wait for more conclusive evidence than an assertion by an anonymous leaker of classified material. But determining the Russians hacked the DNC is easier than factually establishing their motives. If the CIA really has evidence that proves Russia’s intent to benefit Trump, it should publicize it and let us make up our own minds.

We should also note that the FBI doesn’t agree with the CIA, asserting that no such definitive evidence exists. California Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee agrees. “There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it,” Nunes has said. And isn’t it curious that progressives who for nearly half a century have routinely demonized the CIA as a “rogue elephant rampaging out of control,” in the words of Democrat Senator Frank Church in the seventies, now find the agency the epitome of reliability and truth?

This Russia-hacked-our-emails excuse, however, is particularly preposterous and tin-eared. Does Hillary Clinton really want to bring up computer hacking? She violated the law by passing classified materials over an unsecured server, which almost certainly was hacked by several foreign governments, including Russia. Now she wants us to believe that hacking the email chatter of her staffers and dirty-tricks henchmen is more serious and damaging to our national security than what the Russians probably got off her server?

But the Russians interfered in the election! Democracy is at risk! This is the “political equivalent of 9⁄ 11 !” the Huffington Post screeches.

To believe that, you’d have to believe the leaked chit-chat of the DNC and Hillary’s staffers convinced about 100,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to vote for Trump instead of Hillary. You’d have to believe those voters ignored Hillary’s 25 years of lying and money-grubbing, her pay-for-play State Department, her utter lack of any vision or policy prescriptions other than decrepit progressive bromides, her lousy campaign, her questionable health, her lack of trustworthiness, and her intentionally putting national security at risk with her private server, but then balked at her flunkeys’ trading snarky gossip and pulling dirty tricks on the Sanders and Trump campaigns. And let’s not forget that harping on who hacked the emails or why is not as important as their content––not because they changed the election, but because they revealed the sleazy tactics and sordid chicanery of the holier-than-thou DNC.

Even the Times admits that “there is no evidence that the Russian meddling affected the outcome of the election or the legitimacy of the vote.” Then what’s all the fuss about? Russia, China, Iran North Korea, and no doubt other countries are continually trying to hack our corporate and government computers. And they regularly try to influence our elections, as Lloyd Billingsley wrote recently about Russia, which has been at it for decades. Even our allies try to influence our elections, like former British Prime Minister David Cameron, who called Trump “divisive, stupid, and wrong” for suggesting isn’t such a good idea to let in immigrants from countries that breed jihadist terrorists.

What’s really preposterous, though, is the claim that Russia wanted Trump to win rather than Hillary, who some deluded neocons think is some sort of foreign policy “hawk” preferable to the “isolationist” and “inexperienced” Trump. Yes, the same “experienced” Hillary who plumped for the NATO removal of Gaddafi from Libya, leaving behind a Darwinian jihadist jungle awash in weapons, and creating the conditions that got four Americans murdered. The same Hillary who hand-delivered a plastic “reset button” to the Russian foreign minister, symbolizing the new era in Russo-American relations. The same Hillary who was Secretary of State when Obama threw the Poles and Czechs under the bus over missile defense to placate Putin; when Obama skedaddled from Iraq and created the vacuum Russia filled; when Obama, now demonizing Vladimir, asked then Russian president Dmitri Medvedev to reassure Vlad he would be more “flexible” after the election.

The Obama-Clinton-Kerry team’s bone-headed supplication of Putin has ended up with Vladimir dominant in the Middle East, free to bomb civilians, prop up the butcher Assad, and empower Iran, the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. But we’re supposed to believe that a Hillary presidency, certain to continue the same policy of retreat and appeasement, scared Putin so much that he hacked the DNC to get Trump elected, all because Trump made a few nice comments about him? Putin has shown he’s much more ruthless and savvy than that, and much too smart to believe that he could actually use the juvenile patter of the DNC’s emails to influence enough voters to change their vote and swing the election to Trump.

This latest bout of hysteria by the Dems no doubt won’t be the last. It will just shift to Trump’s cabinet picks, as we’ve already seen with the slanderous attacks on Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions, or the ginned up paranoia about nominating three generals in his cabinet, even though Obama did too. In fact, we can expect this duplicitous bluster and partisan tantrums to continue for most of Trump’s presidency, as it did during Nixon’s, Reagan’s, and George Bush’s. That’s how progressives roll politically, convinced as they are of their right to rule and the self-evident superiority of their policies. Those who think otherwise aren’t just wrong, but evil. The sooner Republicans recognize this reality, the sooner they’ll drop the phony bipartisan comity and fight with every weapon in their Constitutional arsenal.