I'm outraged.

In case you've been living under a rock, this last election was marred by attempts to influence it by an organization outside our government. They engaged in a campaign of obtaining, producing and releasing information meant to harm one candidate, ingratiate themselves with another candidate and other elected officials in a brazen attempt to improve their access to our government, and to mislead and depress citizens to the point where they voted for their favored candidate instead of the other, or simply didn't vote at all.

This campaign of lies, deceit, and treachery is just outrageous. How can we trust the integrity of our system of elections if we allow this to go unpunished? The very sanctity of our nation is at stake. When we allow an outside entity to have such deep and wide impact on our elections, it undermines the credibility of our government. If we do nothing, it signals to other entities that "hey, it's okay if you mess with our elections--we don't mind, in fact we like it please do it again."

The culprits must be brought to heel before they can further damage the our brand as a leader of democracy. Their influence captures our elected officials and effectively makes them puppets of external influence. Some might argue that they're just people, too, trying to get some attention from our government like anybody else. Or they might argue that their influence is bad, but what are you going to do? Our laws can't really stop them from doing it. But this is just an incredible breach of public trust that will eventually leave lasting, potentially irreparable damage to the credibility of our government and electoral institutions.