Election after election, Americans sat idly by as decent candidates who challenged the status quo were shunned and dismissed by the media as unelectable. All the while, demagogues on power trips were continually thrust into the limelight as the only viable options. Well, the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

Exactly how nonsensical the 2016 presidential election could get — and how far mainstream media would go to distort facts and significance — received a resounding answer this week, thanks to Wikileaks first massive disclosure of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's hacked emails and the oh-so-convenient twin reminder from the DNC via the media that Trump said some awfully lewd and disgraceful shit some 12 years ago.

While the two campaigns are now lobbing barbs at one another over the supposed revelations (the sensible among us knew all along to be true), the corporate media presstitutes busied themselves condemning all things Trump — while pretending not to notice the ginormous implications of any number of eye-popping disclosures about Clinton found in the Podesta leak.

Let's face it, America — we're doing it wrong.

Perhaps this first installment of Julian Assange's long-awaited October Surprise should have fallen in our laps in the nascent stages of Clinton's bid for the White House. Perhaps the Washington Post — in virtual certain coordination with the DNC and/or Clinton campaign — should have let slip the repulsive Trump video when he first began to lead the field of GOP presidential hopefuls.

Perhaps Hillary's perfect track record of fabrication, mendacity, near — if not outright — criminal behavior, and interminable list of scandals should have nullified any integrity for the presidency in the American public's collective mind, if not landed her behind bars, years ago.

Perhaps Trump's laughably false reputation as businessman extraordinaire, despite a history replete with scamming, conning, shortchanging, failing to pay, lawsuits, swindles, bankruptcies, and, oh yeah, those not-at-all worrisome underage rape allegations and the aforementioned statements, from his own mouth, about forcing himself on women against their will, should have prohibited any intimation of hopes for the White House before the thought ever crossed his mind.

Apparently none of these matters occurred to any of the players involved — or, maybe they did — and strategy dictated their timing less than a month prior to the national election because, at this point, it's too late for America to reverse its idiotic, failed-from-jump-street course toward utter disaster.

We're not only speeding toward the edge of a perilous cliff, but arguing over who should steer the wheel — leaving no one competent enough available to man the brakes.

It's additionally entirely possible control of the wheel won't matter, considering the current driver's obstinance might first divert us into full-scale world — if not nuclear — war.

War, it should be noted, that will be funded through debt and with our tax dollars.