The incredible "group-think" that has seen the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, President Obama, the Clinton campaign and most of the corporate media braying that Vladimir Putin scandalously upended American democracy and threw the election to his favored candidate Donald Trump is based on a ludicrous premise.That premise: that the election went Trump's way because several tens of thousands of voters in a few states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin -- switched away from Clinton to Trump because of an alleged (and factually unproven) Russian "hack" of Democratic National Committee and of Hillary campaign chair John Podesta's emails.

According to this conspiracy theory -- and that is what it is -- the "Russian" hack, with the results allegedly passed on to Wikileaks, and the resulting release of emails that showed that the DNC had conspired to throw the primary election to Clinton, and that revealed the contents of Clinton's secret sycophantic quarter-million-dollar speeches to Wall Street banks, explain those narrow Trump wins in three key swing states.