@Linda Wood
believes a majority of Americans are as dumb as a sack of hammers and if they throw out enough nails, the stupid fucks will be willing to start hammering at them.

What really concerns me is that I think they are correct in their assessment.

even if there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who can read this as you do and see that it is absurd and that it doesn't involve "the" Russians or any Russians, can it be shown to be enough for our ignorant homeland security personnel to launch a nuclear attack because it's a cyberattack? And as they describe it, cobbled together to involve crucial infrastructure, can they make the case that they made the mistake of seeing it as a major attack on our ability to survive and therefore worthy of a nuclear attack on Russia, even if the IP address was wrong?

Well intentioned but less informed than the teenagers you refer to, can they still claim they understood it to be a major cyberattack and launch? That's the question this raises for me. They don't have to be accurate, they don't have to be geniuses, they don't even have to be well-informed or even knowledgeable about what they are doing. They just have to be fired up and ready to kill.

@CB
he is a Russian bear. So I saw him as such. But then I looked him up, and it turns out he is a California black bear and from Yosemite California. No tourist. No tourist from Russia. Just a native Californian. So there.

@CB

@snoopydawg

The thing that all the #Russiagaters seem to have lost track of is that Russia Actually Has Weapons of Mass Destruction -- Lots and Lots of them.

I mean if it's this serious, shouldn't the director of homeland security be giving a press conference on this?

Sheesh, how much longer until it's Putin has WMDs!?

Hey, maybe if they do say that then people would wake the Hell up!

@MrWebster

Consortiumnews has an informative article by Natylie Baldwin.

Acceptable Bigotry and Scapegoating of Russia
March 15, 2018

Over the last year and a half, Americans have been bombarded with the Gish Gallop claims of Russiagate. In that time, the most reckless comments have been made against the Russians in service of using that country as a scapegoat for problems in the United States that were coming to a head, which were the real reasons for Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016. It has even gotten to the point where irrational hatred against Russia is becoming normalized, with the usual organizations that like to warn of the pernicious consequences of bigotry silent.

The first time I realized how low things would likely get was when Ruth Marcus, deputy editor of the Washington Post, sent out the following tweet in March of 2017, squealing with delight at the thought of a new Cold War with the world’s other nuclear superpower: “So excited to be watching The Americans, throwback to a simpler time when everyone considered Russia the enemy. Even the president.”

Not only did Marcus’s comment imply that it was great for the U.S. to have an enemy, but it specifically implied that there was something particularly great about that enemy being Russia.
...
A common theme in all this is that Russia is a bad country and Russians can’t help but be a bunch of good-for-nothings at best and dangerous deviants at worst. Indeed, according to media depictions, sometimes they manage to be both at the same time. But what they don’t manage to be is positive, constructive or even complicated. Sipher knows that the average American has been deluged with this anti-Russian prejudice, as reflected in his challenge at the end of his initial tweet about the largest country, geographically at least, in the world: Name something positive.

Countering the Negative

Most people know, at least in the abstract, that few individuals or groups are purely good or bad. Most are a complex combination of both. But many – including those who normally consider themselves to be open-minded liberals – have allowed their lizard brains to be triggered by the constant demonization of Russia in the hopes of taking down Trump whom they deem to be a disproportionate threat to everything they hold dear. So as a counterweight to all the negative constantly pumped out about Russia and to take Sipher up on his challenge, I will list some positive things about Russia and the contribution of the country and its people to the world.
...
The 2016 election showed that the Democrats faced a sleeping giant that had been awakened – one that the Democratic Party had helped to create for decades by enabling lower living standards, outsourcing of good-paying jobs, the proliferation of low-wage jobs, unaffordable education, lack of health care coverage, public health problems, and decrepit infrastructure.

Consequently, there was a demand for meaningful policies that would help average Americans, policies that polls show they want. But mainstream Democrats will not deliver on such policies, like $15/hour minimum wage, Medicare for All, and pulling out of our wars and investing the money saved in jobs and infrastructure. They won’t deliver on these things for the same reason that Republicans won’t deliver on them: because their donors don’t want them to. But they are not going to admit that to the American people who were going to keep demanding, so they needed a scapegoat and a diversion.

It’s a cheap trick that the political elite is using to appeal to the basest instincts of their fellow Americans while shoring up support for their most reckless tendencies in the area of foreign policy.

Yah, funny. You read the original. It is surprising how many people yelling conspiracy have never read the original quoted material. I think the logic sorta follows this

Hacking is nefarious.
Russians are nefarious.
Therefore, the Russians are hackers.

Russian owns anything nefarious. So something nefarious happened at some power plant, therefore it was the Russians.