If only there was something we could do about this:
Russia’s efforts to interfere with last year’s U.S. presidential election were “wildly successful,” former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Tuesday, and are still bearing fruit today in the form of continued infighting at the highest levels in Washington.
"Their purpose was to sow discontent and mistrust in our elections. They wanted us to be at each others' throat when it was over," Rogers said, according to Reuters, at a panel discussion hosted by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "It's influencing, I would say, legislative process today. That's wildly successful."
It's long been true that Russian hacking efforts against other nations have been an effort to "sow discontent and mistrust" in those elections. It's a cheap way of discrediting democracies for a crony-filled government trying their level best to avoid democracy happening to them. But whether or not we on this side of the globe ended up "at each others' throat" due to their meddling depends entirely on us. One would presume the natural American response to learning that a foreign power was attempting to bend one of our elections would be anger, a demand to know the whole truth of the situation, and an attempt to block such things from happening again. It ought to go without saying, yes?
So if the two parties are "at each other's throats" because one of the parties—the side that, in this particular instance, gained from the foreign efforts, is conspicuously blocking, delegitimizing, and slow-walking attempts to investigate and publicize the extent of what happened, then that's no longer Russian meddlers doing that. That's us.
Meanwhile, former national intelligence director James Clapper is still trying his level best to convince fatheaded lawmakers that this new aggressiveness in international election tampering, whether it comes from Russia or from anyone else, is a Big Freaking Deal and maybe everybody should shut up for a minute and contemplate the ramifications of that.
"This is the most assertive, most aggressive and most directly impactful of any engagement that they have had in our elections," Clapper said. "They have to regard what they did as a huge success. They've been doing it in France, and they'll do it in Germany."
Welcome to the internet age, a golden era of cheap propaganda and data warfare. This genie isn't going back inside its bottle—not now or ever.