DrafterX wrote:I think the Right's denial of Russian hacking was against the insinuation of Trumps collusion... And that they did manage to effect the election results.. there's a big 'No' on both of those so far...
And that begins to get the reason that its impossible to find a reasonable discussion about any of this. To me, there's at least four very different questions that must each must be answered...and answered, to a great degree, independent of the other three. Unfortunately, the model for noisy rhetoric today prevents such a discussion...
1. Did the Russian government take actions to (or support/endorse actions to) hack into any OFFICIAL election office/material, etc?
2. If yes, did such action have ANY effect on the outcome of any US election?
3. Did Trump, or any Trump surrogate work directly with the Russians to actually affect the election - whether to provide info to, request specific hacking targets, receive 'sensitive' info recovered by hacking, etc?
4. If the answer to previous question is yes, but not Trump, personally...did Trump know, direct, neglect to stop, etc...those actions?
I just cannot understand how the conversation gets so fucked up so quickly....."Russians wanted a certain election result>>>Russians hack stuff>>>Trump won>>>Trump musta had the Russians hack the election his way"
Part of it is probably partly because some that (still) don't 'accept' that Trump could have possibly won unless he cheated. I suppose that clouds objectivity about anything related to the election. Personally...I think that the Trump team got way too cozy with Russians prior to the election...or in their past lives...and I believe that Russia probably hacked DNC...(and probably RNC and other stuff)....but I don't think Russian actions affected the outcome of the election and I seriously doubt that Team Trump did anything truly nefarious like trying to get Russians to throw him the election. Maybe, I just have too much blind faith in our electoral processes, but it's going to take some REAL facts to convince me otherwise.