Thank You, Russia

When I first saw the title to this article, linked to by antiwar.com, I thought it might be someone writing, as I did earlier on, that we should thank the Russians for getting involved in Syria thus taking the weight of the fight off U.S. shoulders. Nope, he was dealing with accusations of Russian hacking, and thus interfering with, our elections. He makes a good point that if the Russians did anything in that regard, we should be thankful:

"If the state-sponsored Russian hackers did something truly malignant, like messing with election results, then yes — that’d be a severe breach and warrant substantial retaliation. But as it stands, the sinister Russians are accused of illuminating American voters as to the activities of the country’s most powerful political actors. The revelations made via WikiLeaks shined a light on all manner of fraud, deceit, and malfeasance. Would it have been better had voters not received access to this information? Who did it harm, other than a small group of political functionaries like Podesta and Wasserman-Schultz? Didn’t the American polity actually profit as a result of these hacks, given that they were provided important information about a presidential candidate that would have been otherwise suppressed?"

Yep. They gave us transparency the candidates would rather have hid. What's wrong with that?

He also points out there would likely be little fuss made if Trump was the target of those leaks:

 "Would people be wailing just as vigorously if Trump’s operatives had their emails hacked and published, or would that be lauded as a worthy dissemination of material in the public interest? I think U.S. Democracy can survive the successful phishing of John Podesta’s gmail account."

I agree. We probably wouldn't have seen anywhere near as much indignation if Trump had been targeted. As it is, we found out stuff about Clinton she wanted kept mum. I'll go out on a limb and say that's a good thing and the Russians probably deserve our thanks. 

Addendum: L. Neil Smith gives his take on the supposed hacking. He's not buying the government version:

 "What is more than possible is that somebody gained information from inside the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton campaign, and released it, providing the American public with information that persuaded them to change their vote. Whoever did that (always assuming that it was actually done) did nothing that the average news reporter doesn’t theoretically want to do, and he deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom, not prosecution for having done it."