All of a sudden, it seems as though the CIA has come to be regarded as an unquestioned, direct distributor of undiluted Revelation. To listen to CNN or to read the Washington Post, one would think that the assurances of unnamed CIA officials citing undisclosed investigations amounted to unimpeachable truth, as if John Brennan had, atop Mt. Sinai, in tattered robes and dusty sandals, received the evidence for Russia’s supposed “hacking” of our election from God Himself. This despite the CIA’s woeful track record of telling the “truth.” This despite the fact that in the 1980’s, the CIA lied about the Contra's running cocaine. This despite the fact that the agency lied, repeatedly, about the effectiveness of the interrogation (read: torture) techniques employed in the aftermath of 9/11. Or how they’ve lied about the amount of civilian casualties sustained through the drone campaign. And let’s not just pick on the CIA. Indeed, they aren’t the only agency with a less than sterling record for truth-telling; let’s not forget former NSA head and human-turtle hybrid James Clapper's blatant lie to Congress, a crime for which he has never faced any consequences, about whether or not the NSA was spying on the American citizenry. In short, if all you have are the unsubstantiated claims of an American intelligence agency, then you should probably dig a bit deeper before making any proclamations.

I’m not saying that Russia didn’t try to meddle in our election. For all I know, they did hack into the DNC and RNC, and they did publish the information gleaned from the former in order to tip the scales in Trump’s favor. All I am saying is that, right now, we have no evidence for this beyond the pinky promises of notorious liars.Let’s set aside, for the moment, how rich it is, coming from the United States, to be loudly moralizing about the integrity of elections in a country with among the lowest voter turnouts of any developed nation and widespread, systemic voter suppression and possibly massive levels of election fraud. Or how hypocritical, and outright cynical, it is for the U.S. to be loudly denouncing the meddling of one country in the elections of another, when such meddling is, forgive the cliché, as American as apple pie. Let’s just focus on why the major media outlets, and in particular Democratic Party officials, are latching on to this story and not letting go, like renegades on the bottom of a speeding train.

To start, let’s take the media. Anyone who knows me knows that I despise them, but to outline every reason why this is so would require an entire article. But this behavior they’re exhibiting with this hacking ordeal is so typical of them, it is as if someone took all of their shortcomings and egregious failures of journalism and distilled them into one gelatinous, vaguely sentient ooze. The more cancerous of our national representatives are already calling for aggressive action against Putin and Russia, and the media is just blindly following along, like the dutiful apes they are, potentially leading us into another disastrous conflict, only this time, it will actually be with a nuclear armed power, not just a theoretical (to put it as nicely as possible) nuclear power. Just as they did with the War in Iraq, Wolf Blitzer, Chuck Todd and the gang will wring their hands over the dire warnings of the war-hungry and the powerful, take their claims blindly and without any further inquiry, and watch gleefully as their ratings soar.

But the real offenders here are (as ever) the Democrats, who, desperate to blame the outcome of the election on anyone but themselves, are now frothing at the mouth. Surely, Hillary Clinton couldn’t have lost because of the disdain she showed, repeatedly, for the dispossessed (excuse me, deplorable) citizens of this country. It couldn’t possibly have been that her campaign repeatedly ignored calls for help from their campaign workers in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, states where she was guaranteed to win, right? No, absolutely it didn’t have ANYTHING to do with the full extent of the Clinton’s and their Party’s corruption being exposed (by the evil Russians!!! OMG!!!). It certainly had nothing to do with how, in a populist year, and in the midst of a populist fervor, the Party, at every turn, undercut and undermined the populist candidate, and when that was exposed, the person who spearheaded said undermining was given a top position in the Clinton campaign. There’s no way in the world the Democrats lost, and have been losing for years, because they offer nothing but words and half-measures (and even that “half” in half-measures is being generous). And it definitely had nothing to do with the fact that the policies of Clinton’s husband were in many ways to blame for the misery of the people who put her opponent in power. No, it was that evil, rat-faced Vladimir Putin and his gang of ne’er do wells. THEY are to blame. Not themselves. Its never themselves.

I am by no means a supporter of Donald Trump. But I am not a Democrat either, nor am I a liberal (I’m a leftist, but that is beside the point here). And until there is concrete, incontrovertible evidence that Russia and Putin did indeed interfere with our elections, I will not join in with the drums of war.