Russia literally committed an act of war against us, and Trump voters think we're all only complaining because we're butt hurt Hillary lost.
This has nothing to do with Democrat vs. Republican, and anyone who cannot see that is a moron.
Putting party before country, the way the GOP and many Trump voters are doing, is treasonous.
A big part of the reason Russia is so aggressive with us is that they know we would have to be utter morons to actually fight them. What we are doing now with sanctions and diplomatic pressure is about the limit of what we realistically can do with Russia.
Not necessarily. We probably have just as sophisticated, if not more sophisticated cyber weapons than Russia. The difference is that we're generally worse at our defenses, which is what allows these kinds of attacks to happen. That being said, I would be astounded if we didn't have some big-ticket cyber weapons ready in wait for a US-Russia conflict greater than what we see today in 2014, but still short of full-scale kinetic warfare.
Consider, for a second, it's the next Moscow mayoral election. Polls have been consistently tight between a Putin-backed candidate and an opposition activist. After massive reports of vote-rigging and ballot stuffing, the entire vote tabulation system goes offline as votes are midway through being reported. The system constantly reboots, and there is no way to access any of the data collected. Eventually, the next day, officials can access the system only to find that all the data has been erased permanently. Instead, they switch to hand-counting ballots. An hour after this starts, however, the power goes off. Etc.
Our long game is not to dislodge the Putin government by force, but to erode the public trust, in other words, exactly what they did to us in 2016. Putin's end game wasn't explicitly to get Trump elected (it was a nice side-benefit), but to make sure that no Republican will ever again accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president, and to a lesser extent vice-versa. More generally, it was to conform to Putin's overarching narrative of democracy being some idyll, that can never actually exist in the real world.
