Matt Taibbi joins the WTF is really going on crowd.

I have been arguing that yet another major misinformation campaign has been going on passed on very thin and dubious information backed up by little or no evidence. Something as dangerous as a country attempting "roll-back" or "regime change" if you prefer via cyber warfare requires some hard evidence. The 13 page document released was a full of basically hot air encapsulated in jargon and conjecture and nothing else. A document this vacuous being used as supporting evidence for diplomatic reprisals should send up warning flares visible to anyone even half awake. Yet the New York Times thundered as if it was all the evidence required, just as they did with WMD that lead to the fiasco that is the Middle East today.

Now back to the Taibbi article a few points stand out:

War rhetoric.

Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham noted the "small price" Russia paid for its "brazen attack." The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, said Thursday that taken alone, the Obama response is "insufficient" as a response to "attacks on the United States by a foreign power."

Building up the outrage

The "small price" is an eyebrow-raiser. Also, like the WMD story, there's an element of salesmanship the government is using to push the hacking narrative that should make reporters nervous. Take this line in Obama's statement about mistreatment of American diplomats in Moscow:

"Moreover, our diplomats have experienced an unacceptable level of harassment in Moscow by Russian security services and police over the last year."

The desired result;

As noted in The Intercept and other outlets, an Economist/YouGov poll conducted this month shows that 50 percent of all Clinton voters believe the Russians hacked vote tallies.

This number is nearly as disturbing as the 62 percent of Trump voters who believe the preposterous, un-sourced Trump/Alex Jones contention that "millions" of undocumented immigrants voted in the election.

The obvious

But we've been burned before in stories like this, to disastrous effect. Which makes it surprising we're not trying harder to avoid getting fooled again.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

Americans really should be asking some basic questions:

1. Assuming the Russians did "hack" the Democratic Party emails and released them and by the way nobody has disputed their veracity, how did a party's own words bring them down?
2. How did part of the story move from merely accessing emails via a phishing procedure lead to accusations of hacking voting machines and hence the tally of the actual vote.
3. After basically accusing the FBI of being a Republican Party agent against Hillary how have they suddenly become a reliable source.
4. After decades of CIA lies, dirty tricks and misinformation that lead to war, carnage and war crimes they are now believed without question.

It is déjà vu all over again.

My only observation/conclusion in all of this thus far:

• If our democracy is sufficiently weak as to be overturned by the release of actual campaign emails then should we not be looking at our democracy's stability itself?
• If it is that weak then there is something fundamentally wrong with our system itself, perhaps?
• Is the something more nefarious going on here? [Think NDAA 2017]

Our own governments record as a reliable source has been, by its own actions, discredited for decades. Our own governments foreign policy with respect to "roll back/regime change" has been the cause of "why do the hate us" for the same period.

The result of all the propaganda has been that the propaganda itself is taken as valid almost without question. The first question to ask is who owns the media that you rely upon as a source...... The illusion of choice.

People seem now to believe extraordinary claims, justifying extraordinary reactions, without the extraordinary evidence they actually require.

Cyber-warfare can be as at least as harmful as physical warfare itself, and it doesn't even require a farcical AUMF to be launched. It could also lead to actual physical conflict/war.

Anyone pointing out the lack of actual evidence is being labelled as borderline traitorous, does this sound familiar? Ah yes and not that long ago either.