Hillary Clinton

The mainstream media is trying to hide Hillary Clinton's deplorable performance at the presidential debate Wednesday night by focusing on Donald Trump's comment that he will wait until election night before deciding whether to accept the outcome.

One of those streaming voter opinion polls that was on TV during the debate showed massive, overwhelming support for that position from Republican and Independent voters, while the Democrats didn't like it much, which means the media didn't like it much. So what? Too bad.

Why would any sane office seeker concede their position on anything weeks before a vote when one of the mainstays of their campaign is that the process is rigged and voter fraud is widespread? The media was reporting across the spectrum in the days leading up to the debate that Trump had no proof of his accusations, which in itself is an outright lie.

There already have been reports of illegal aliens and long-dead people voting in early voting states so how much more "proof" does he need? Hopefully, by drawing early attention to the issue it can be curtailed.
Donald Trump

But there is a bigger matter to discuss here; what happens when candidates should withhold their concession and instead meekly accept an outcome that not only is fraudulent but by its nature disenfranchises millions of voters?

Case in point is not the extended claims by Democrat Al Gore in 2000, who simply could not believe that the country didn't think he was as cool as he thought he was, but rather the unfortunate decision by Richard Nixon in 1960 not to contest the election night results and to concede to John F. Kennedy. Nixon had been presented with credible information of massive voter fraud and manipulation in Illinois, West Virginia and Texas, home of the soon to be vice president Lyndon B. Johnson.

Nixon determined that contesting the election would be bad for the country and allowed the results to stand. The results ultimately included the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's assassination, Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War and decades of unrest.

Nixon was elected in 1968 on a promise to end the Vietnam War, which finally occurred not by the military victory that was within his grasp as early as 1969, but after he left office in disgrace in 1974. The fall of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to murderous rampaging communists resulted from two cowardly acts of Congress, the Case-Church Amendment of 1973 and the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 that pulled all support from South Vietnam.

As a result some 3 million people were butchered by the communists, 2 million South Vietnamese fled and were dubbed Boat People by the media, who basically ignored the 300,000 deaths reported by the UN Commission on the Status of Refugees and Displaced Persons. The media also ignored the 160,000 deaths in communist concentration camps that the media called "reeducation camps," and hid the savage genocide in Cambodia's killing fields, where millions died, until it was too widely known to ignore.

It was in the Kennedy/Johnson years that the seeds of the drug epidemic that still afflicts millions of Americans sprouted, along with a near universal breakdown of morals that led to the spread of venereal diseases on an epidemic scale and ultimately brought about incurable sexually transmitted diseases including herpes and AIDS.

Would all of this have happened under Nixon? Not likely. It is entirely possible that other issues would have arisen in those Cold War years, but Lyndon Johnson never would have been president and that in itself would have been far better for the country than the hell that he brought about.

So, should Donald J. Trump willingly discard an opportunity to challenge a fraudulent election vote? No. Never. He is not the first presidential candidate to keep his options open, and he won't be the last.

But he is today's candidate, challenging the establishment, vowing to Drain the Swamp that is today's government, and he is certain to face myriad attempts legal and illegal, fair and foul, to keep him from becoming president and making good on his campaign pledges. He should hold firm until the last legal vote is counted, and every illegal vote is discarded.