Democrats never admit they lose elections because the voters reject their platform. No, it always has something to do with the Republicans cheating, or benefiting from cheating or thinking about cheating. It's what's behind the current obsession with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Russia, and it's deranged, illogical and is leading them down the path to irrelevance.

Look at Ronald Reagan, who twice won the presidency in a landslide and by fewer than 10,000 votes narrowly missed becoming the only presidential candidate man to carry every state since the nation assumed its current configuration. He didn't win, said the liberals, because of double-digit inflation and an economic malaise and a display of incompetence by Jimmy Carter on most all issues, foreign and domestic; he won, they said, because someone stole Carter's briefing book and gave to GOP operatives before the two candidates debated.

This charge, as silly now as it was outrageous then, was actually investigated by a congressional committee. So too were allegations that then vice-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush and Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey had traveled to Paris in the closing days of the 1980 election for secret talks aimed at preventing American hostages from being released before voters could go to the polls. Had they been, it would have been an "October surprise" that probably would have secured for Carter a second term in the White House.

The kind of folks who believed these stories are the same ones who denied until they were blue in the face there was any truth to rumors President Bill Clinton had a sexual relationship with a White House intern young enough to be his daughter. To some it's all a matter of cognitive dissonance, defined in the dictionary as being "a state of psychological conflict or anxiety resulting from a contradiction between a person's simultaneously held beliefs or attitudes."

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The reality is a lot more simple. It's just that they're sore losers who sometimes won't accept the results of an election that didn't go the way they wanted if the stakes are high enough. A lot of Democrats still believe, for example, that Vice President Al Gore won the 2000 election because George W. Bush "stole" Florida. This despite Bush having been proven the winner in every subsequent recount scenario conducted by the press except for the carefully chosen recounting only of the ballots the Gore campaign selected.

Strict adherence to these mythologies does not good politics make. Ask any Republican consultant in good standing how effective all the questions about Barack Obama's birth certificate were in actually beating him. It didn't help Hillary Clinton, in whose orbit some believe the rumors originated, or John McCain (who actually renounced them) or Mitt Romney.

There are plenty of Democrats, specifically those in positions of party leadership, who refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election. Their sensibilities are so offended by Donald J. Trump they will seize on any story or rumor, not matter how small, to demand impeachment, removal from office by other means or to call on his appointees to resign almost before the U.S. Senate has confirmed them.

Part of this is about keeping the base fired up and part of this is about preserving the influence of Obama appointees within the executive branch for as long as possible. That's understandable. What's not is how some of them seem to really believe the Russians swung the election to Trump.

Take the latest report, which suggests Attorney General Sessions "lied" to a Senate committee about contacts he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States. If you read the question from Minnesota Sen. Al Franken which led Sessions to say "no," it seems evident Sessions was telling the truth within the context of the exchange, which involved meetings the attorney general-designate might have had as a representative of the Trump campaign and not in his official duties as a United States senator.

Sessions' has been dinged on this by an awful lot of people, including Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill who quickly tweeted out she had "never" had a meeting with the Russian ambassador. She was later, as they say on Capitol Hill, forced to revise and extend her remarks.

Another Democrat who took to the ramparts was Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose demand the attorney general resign was treated as breaking news. Why it was is unclear, since she waged an effort that led to her losing her speaking privileges on the Senate floor for a brief period of time trying to stop him from being confirmed. She didn't want him to get the job in the first place, so her call for him to step aside is not exactly an earth-shattering revelation.

The point of this all is not to suggest national Democrats are crazy as much as it is to show they've misplaced their priorities. While they're raving about Russia and the Trump D.C. hotel and how unfit his cabinet nominees might be, he's proceeding with his agenda to "make America great again." He's setting aside Obama executive orders and stopping regulations and proposing major spending cuts to force a kind of reorganization of the federal government. He's turned the corner on immigration, he's standing up for law enforcement and he's making believers out of a lot of people who, before the election, could never imagine him president. He's benefiting from bad strategic and tactical decisions his opponents have made, as is the GOP-led Congress, which has seen its approval rating rise according to a few polls as business has started getting done once again.