Have you ever noticed that when Democrats lose a national election, it’s never their fault? We began this century with faulty butterfly ballots and the Al Gore campaign demanding recounts in certain Democrat strongholds. Then, four years later, Democrats were blaming Diebold voting machines for stealing Ohio from John Kerry. But everything was on the up-and-up in 2008 and 2012 before Russia began meddling in our elections in 2016 and beyond.

With perhaps the weakest incumbent president in history this time in Joe Biden, the blame for losing in 2024 is already being seeded, and once again, Vladimir Putin will get the lion’s share. According to a breathless report from NBC News that’s long on speculation and short on actual evidence: “Russia is already spreading disinformation in advance of the 2024 election, using fake online accounts and bots to damage President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, according to former U.S. officials and cyber experts. The dissemination of attacks on Biden is part of a continuing effort by Moscow to undercut American military aid to Ukraine and U.S. support for and solidarity with NATO, experts said.”

Don’t you just love those things “experts say”?

While the evidence has been weighed and found lacking — historian Victor Davis Hanson has a great explanation of this — that doesn’t stop the media from trying to maintain the perception that Donald Trump is either a Putin stooge or is being financially blackmailed by the Russian dictator. (Never mind that an American court is doing its own bang-up job of trying to financially destroy Trump.) As The Federalist’s David Harsanyi notes: “There were congressional investigations. There were leaked tax returns. Every major media organization in the nation spent an inordinate amount of time and treasure trying to expose Trump’s alleged sedition. This is why [Nancy] Pelosi is compelled to frame Trump’s alleged treachery as future quid pro quo. It’s certainly difficult to disprove future events.”

Meanwhile, on the Biden side of the ledger, the laptop saga that was hidden from view in the run-up to the 2020 election was withheld because it “sounded like Russian disinformation.” That was the BIG Lie used to squelch reporting of the original New York Post story and much of the Right’s commentary on it. And it was done to help Biden win. Now, we have a regime dripping with corruption.

Another droplet in the case against Biden came with a new accusation from the aforementioned New York Post. While the paper does caution that the source, Jason Galanis, is a convicted felon speaking from prison, it’s another string that ties Joe Biden to Hunter’s business dealings.

“I was present when Hunter Biden called his father on a cell phone and put the call on speaker,” said Galanis, noting that among the guests were “Yelena Baturina, her husband Yuri Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow, and Devon Archer.”

“The vice president said ‘hello’ and some pleasantries of ‘Hope you had safe travels,’ and then seemed like he wanted to bring the call to an end by saying, ‘OK then, you be good to my boy.’ Hunter responded by saying, ‘Everything is good, and we are moving ahead.’ The vice president said something about ‘being helpful,’ and Hunter ended the call by saying that he was going to call his father later.”

Well, talk about Russian interference! But this story will be ignored by the rest of the media, and if anyone brings it up, it will be called old news from a sketchy source.

It’s a given that other nations have their preferences for America’s leadership, just like we do in affairs of theirs. In his Farewell Address, George Washington cautioned us to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” but we’re too intertwined globally to turn back now — and the rest of the world won’t listen to his advice, anyway.

Thus, it’s up to us to discern and seek out foreign influence in our elections. This was something the media used to do with some impartiality, but now they focus on Donald Trump and ignore decades of foreign influence on the Democrat Party.

Hanson gives us an apt conclusion: “As this year’s election nears, expect the Russia! Russia! fantasies to heat up again to mask a failing administration and its indefensible record of a lethally open border, inflation, crime waves, foreign policy implosions, crackpot energy agendas, the weaponization of our institutions, and deteriorating race relations.”

It’s becoming a choice of what we have now and what we had before the real foreign influence of the pandemic ruined our economy. There’s no guarantee we can get back to those good times with Donald Trump, but we know our direction with Joe Biden will continue to be straight downhill. We don’t need Russian propaganda to figure that out.