The hypocrisy is almost palpable as fuming Clintonistas and their news media chums chase some grand fantasy about blocking Donald Trump from the White House and saving the nation because, they claim, pesky Russian hackers interfered in the recent election on his campaign's behalf.

In a raging snit seldom seen among our betters; they are threatening, cajoling and harassing hapless members of the Electoral College; hatching a half-baked scheme to deny Trump the 270 votes he needs to win and toss the election to the House of Representatives. They are busy planning this; plotting that. The evil Russians, they whine, unfairly tipped the election, pushing voters to Trump, undermining perhaps our most cherished institution, a free and fair election.

Nonsense. There is little, if any, tangible difference between what Wikileaks did in releasing information about the Clinton campaign – obtained by Russian hackers, the CIA claims – and what the news media does every day: Unearthing often embarrassing secrets, or getting them from confidential and sometimes sketchy sources, and making them public. The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Pentagon Papers is but one example. The Washington Post and the Watergate scandal is yet another in a very long list.

It has not been alleged any of the Wikileaks-released information in the Clinton disaster was incorrect or fabricated. The details simply embarrassed the Clinton campaign and some in the news media caught red-handed with their thumbs on the scale. Further, there is no evidence the disclosures influenced the election; that they drove herds of Clinton voters to switch in midstream to vote for Trump Hillary Clinton made it too easy to vote for him.

Perhaps the most incredible assertion from folks on the left in their post-election fit of pique is Russia somehow broke the norm in trying to screw up the works. It makes you wonder how many moons orbit their planet. Every nation that wants to survive does it; most assuredly we do, and worse.

Just from records available, covert involvement in other nations' affairs keeps the CIA, now unsurprisingly the left's darling, very busy. Nobody, at least nobody who can or will talk about it, is even sure how many insurgencies, interventions, coups, plots and assassination attempts the U.S. has engineered. Various compilations indicate there have been a bunch.

My favorites? The attempt on Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar and the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. Admittedly, we have not always been good at this sort of thing. More recently, the Obama administration slipped a group in Israel more than $300,000 and it used the dough during last year's election in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a guy Obama dislikes immensely.

Foreign Policy magazine a few years ago listed seven successful and confirmed coups with U.S. fingerprints all over them. There was Iran in 1953; Guatemala, 1954; the Congo, 1960; the Dominican Republic in 1961; South Vietnam, 1963; Brazil, 1964; and, Chile in1973. Those are just the ones everybody agrees on.

The website Salon, in a piece headlined "35 countries where the US has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists," lists nations from Afghanistan to Zaire where we not only meddled, but did much, much more. We armed. We trained. We funded labor unrest, paid for protests, ran propaganda campaigns. We meddled in elections, caused riots, started revolutions. We nation-buiilt.

William Blum, was a State Department employee in the 1960s and is a U.S. foreign policy critic. He wrote "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II." On his website, he lists 57 "Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War." Asterisks on his list denote success. His list has 37 of them, with some nations having more than one.

Of course, Russia, and, Lord knows who else, is working every day to reshape the playing field here and around the world – just as we are. If the CIA is right, if the Russians hacked the Democrats' emails and passed them on, shame on them and shame on us for not anticipating they would, being prepared and having a response.

Despite the uproar, the Wikileaks releases likely had a negligible effect, if any, on the election outcome other than tarnishing a halo or two. The Clintonistas know that. What makes them furious is they lost – something inconceivable to them sans skullduggery.

Reality is that Trump is president because enough Americans rejected Clinton's idea of the United States to elect him. In throwing a tantrum to block the will of those people, her supporters simply are making it easier for Republicans the next time around.

And they are undermining the very institutions they profess to revere.

Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communications.