Deplorably wanting throughout the presidential campaign, the major national media have behaved no better since the election. They’ve become pliant, and abject failures in their duty to the American people and democracy itself, in an array of ways.

First is their Pavlovian response to Trump’s transparent “dog whistle” technique. It hasn’t required much skill by Trump to send news hounds romping off on a noisy chase after any illusory bunny. Example: his tweeting about the “Hamilton” flap and “Saturday Night Live” (congratulations to SNL’s Pete Davidson for his appropriate response). The news hounds barked up that false tree for days while news was sidelined and buried of the extremely important $25 million settlement of the lawsuits against the fraudulent Trump University.

The settlement meant that Trump got away with defrauding over 5,000 students at $35,000 each for $175 million by settling for $25 million. Notwithstanding the tacit admission of guilt involved in a settlement, count that result as a $150 million profit for Trump and no one in the media seems to think there’s anything untoward about that coming from our “president-elect.”

Then, what about election day, itself? Just days before the FBI reported finding conclusive evidence of Russian hacking rudimentary operations involved in conducting the elections in Florida and Illinois, but since then, not a peep.

This is highly suspect given the degree to which everyone, including both the Clinton and Trump campaigns, went into election day with conclusive results of all their polling, believing that it would be a veritable landslide for Clinton.

It’s not enough to note that Trump used the “dog whistle” technique to preempt every single case of new evidence against him by accusing Clinton of the same thing (such as repeated “Crooked Hillary” allegations when no proof was there, and “Immoral Bill”). So, when Trump began to insist that the election would be rigged, that should have set off at least some alarms.

Important election day anomalies stare us in the face, beginning with an outcome that was vastly different than anyone – the media, polling websites and both campaigns – saw coming. This was not based on educated guesses, but the most exhaustive polling ever.

Also, the outcome was decided by results in four states that were, relatively speaking, “off the radar” everyone was focused on. Expected to be the most crucial undetermined outcomes were in Ohio and North Carolina. Instead, the outcome was determined by states where everyone projected Clinton to win, most surprisingly Michigan and Wisconsin, but also Florida and Pennsylvania.

Suspiciously, the margins for Trump in those four states were virtually identical, in each case about one percent, an anomaly in itself.

A Hollywood Reporter reporter told blogger Bill Palmer this week that Bannon singled out those four states last July saying Trump would win them all. While none of this constitutes proof, it should justify enough concern to spark a serious investigation, if only to put such questions to rest. Where is it?

In all this, by far the most egregious irregularity has been the unprecedented role of a major foreign adversary, the Russians. And then there’s the almost treasonous role tampering with the election by top levels of the FBI, and the so-called “Alt-Right” (aka the Fascists).

That Trump is Putin’s “Manchurian candidate” constitutes the United States’ single biggest national security crisis since the British-backed South tried to secede in 1860 or British agent Aaron Burr assassinated Alexander Hamilton and almost became president over 200 years ago.

Since “detente” in the 1970s eased U.S. immigration limits on Soviet emigres, the Soviet KGB muscled thousands of criminal Russian Mafia figures into the U.S. In conjunction, it flushed its leftist influences in the U.S. The FBI foolishly bought into this. Unleashed were physical attacks on the old Communist Party U.S.A. by the so-called National Caucus of Labor Committees, a product of the late 1960s Columbia student strike that went through a left-to-right transformation in the mid-1970s.

The self-destruction of other outdated KGB assets (Jonestown) helped clear the field for the 1980 “Reagan Revolution” and the unimpeded revival of what became Putin’s KGB-influenced Fascist far right movements since.