Like every single hotly publicized Russiagate "bombshell" that has broken since this nonsense began, Mueller's indictment of 13 Russian social media trolls was paraded around as proof of something hugely significant (an "act of war" in this case), but on closer examination turns out to be empty. The always excellent Moon of Alabama recently made a solid argument that has also been advanced by Russiagate skeptics like TYT's Michael Tracey and Max Blumenthal of The Real News, pointing out that there is in fact no evidence that the troll farming operation was an attempt to manipulate the US election, nor indeed that it had any ties to the Russian government at all, nor indeed that it was anything other than a crafty Russian civilian's money making scheme.
The notion that a few Russian trolls committed a "conspiracy to defraud the United States" by "sowing discord" with a bunch of wildly contradictory posts endorsing all different ideologies sounds completely ridiculous in a country whose mainstream media spends all its time actively creating political division anyway, but when you look at it as a civilian operation to attract social media followers to sock puppet accounts with the goal of selling promoted posts for profit, it makes perfect sense. James Corbett of The Corbett Report has a great video about how absolutely bizarre it is that public dialogue is ignoring the fact that these trolls overwhelmingly used mainstream media like the Washington Post in their shares instead of outlets like RT and Infowars. As a scheme to acquire followers, it makes perfect sense. As a scheme to subvert America, it's nonsensical.
There is currently no evidence that the Russian government interfered in the US election. But it is worth pointing out that if they did they had every right to.
Actually, yes. Of course it does. Clearly. That isn't a "whataboutism", it's an observation that is completely devastating to the mainstream Russia narrative. If it's okay for the CIA to continuously interfere in the elections of other countries up to and including modern times, it is okay for other countries to interfere in theirs. Only in the most warped American supremacist reality tunnel is that not abundantly obvious.
Every country on earth is absolutely entitled to interfere in America's elections. America is responsible for the overwhelming majority of election interferences around the world in modern times, including an interference in Russia's elections in the nineties that was so brazen they made a Hollywood movie about it, so clearly an environment has been created wherein the United States has declared that this is acceptable.
Imagine this:
A guy in a cowboy hat runs into a bar and starts punching people. Most of them just rub their sore jaws and hunch over their drinks hoping to avoid any trouble, but one guy in a fur cap sets down his vodka and shoves the man in the cowboy hat.
The man in the cowboy hat begins shrieking like a little girl. All his friends rush to his side to comfort him and begin angrily shaking their fists at the man in the fur cap.
"Hey, he punched me!" says the man in the fur cap.
"That's a whataboutism!" sobs the man in the cowboy hat.
Can you imagine anything more ridiculous?
Yes, obviously by asserting that it is acceptable for the CIA to meddle in other countries' elections, the US has created an environment where that sort of thing is acceptable. If Americans just want to embrace their American supremacist bigotry and say "Yeah we can do that to you but you can't do it to us cuz we have big guns and we said so," that's at least a logically consistent position. Crying like little bitches and behaving as though they've been victimized by some egregious immorality is not.
Dov Levin, an academic from the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University, has calculated the vast scale of election interventions by both the US and Russia.
According to his research, there were 117 "partisan electoral interventions" between 1946 and 2000. That's around one of every nine competitive elections held since Second World War.
The majority of these - almost 70 per cent - were cases of US interference.
And these are not all from the Cold War era; 21 such interventions took place between 1990 and 2000, of which 18 were by the US.
If Americans don't like election meddling, they need to demand that their government stops doing it. As long as it remains the very worst offender in that department, the US is entitled to nothing other than the entire world meddling in its elections.
I shouldn't even have to say this. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Don't dish it out if you can't take it.
Duh.
Comment: Caitlin Johnstone's podcast on the topic: America's Election Meddling Would Indeed Justify Other Countries Retaliating In Kind