Look, folks, here's the deal: the Dems keep coming at President-elect Donald Trump with what hasn't been proven but is U.S. intelligence agencies' 'best guess': that Russia hacked into the Hillary Clinton campaign's and the Democratic National Committee's emails. Before you get on my butt about use of the term 'best guess', keep in mind that they've said that themselves in other words. Also please keep in mind that this is the same "intelligence establishment" which told George W. Bush in 2003 that there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq (actually, I have it from a separate source that there was evidence found of the previous presence of nerve gas. My guess is it had been moved, probably to Syria). According to some of those same intelligence officials, the Russians also attempted to hack the Republican National Committee but were unsuccessful. But this isn't just about emails. The Dems are also claiming that the Russians planted "fake news stories" to influence U.S. public opinion. Note that the Dems are carefully avoiding claiming that the actual vote was tampered with.
Most of us nowadays get our news either from t.v. or from the web. I firmly believe that most of the people who get their news on the web know that much if not most of it is plainly slanted but factual and some of it is to varying degrees outright false. We know that you have to be able to separate the fact from the fiction. No one tells you this, but I will: the newspaper media have the same thing in their history! It was called "yellow journalism" and it was prominent if not prevalent in the late 19th century. Writers would "hype" a story into something it wasn't. Sometimes they would be told by their editors to concoct a story "out of whole cloth" (or they'd do it on their own). Yes, once in a while we're going to have a nut case who's going to kill a bunch of people because he believes the pizza parlor they were in is the front for a child trafficking operation {Considering some of what we see in America today and the recurrent rumors of just such a thing existing among our nation's elite (at least since the 1980's) isn't it worth at least an investigation before we consider the person nuts?}. Nonetheless, most of us are smart enough to know that especially if we're reading one of the many news or commentary blogs or one of the lesser-known web news sources that we really don't know where our news is coming from. It's not like the old days when I could go to the dock at the local newspaper at 1:30 a.m. and get that day's paper, sometimes even warm to the touch from the printing presses. Our news comes in a stream of electrons. Chances are we don't know the name of the company or individual which or who produces our news source. Even if the name of the publisher is mentioned, we don't know if it's correct. A website can easily be faked. About the best that a person can do is look up the ownership of the website's domain and investigate from there. So, we have to ask ourselves, "Has this been corroborated by other sources? Does it seem likely or even plausible, considering what I know of the situation?" We also know fully that even if a story is true, it may be slanted. Its' source, in terms of authorship, publishing and/or nation, may not be what we think or what we would like. As for Vladimir Putin, he's an important world leader. If he has something to say, I want to hear it. Whether I believe it will probably depend on how well it stacks up against what I know of the situation.
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