The men I listed are examples of powerful Americans who are abusers of power. Franken is among them. The US media pretends that senators, presidents, etc., deserve some sort of bizarre deference. They do not, and we'd all be better off if they were assumed to be scoundrels.
When in the last 20 years have the U.S. media treated politicians with kid gloves? I've been reading about sex scandals and unduly harsh accusations of "hating women," "being secretly Muslim," "dumbest president" (Bush Jr.), etc.
I've been warned that HN mods do not like it when I comment to a lot of different replies all at once, so I'm going to attempt to respond to your various comments in one place.
I think your general approach is reasonable and thoughtful, and so I want to be careful to reply in a way that comes across as respectful of your views. This may get a bit long, but I'm curious about your thoughts.
On the subject of the US media treating politicians with kid gloves, with a special case of NPR. We have a number of highly partisan "entertainment news" companies that constantly amplify the smallest and silliest aspects of the other party, because it entertains their readers/viewers/listeners.
But the question to ask is whether any of these "entertainment news" companies threaten the status quo in any way. In other words, does Fox news existence make it any less likely whatsoever that the Democratic party will hold power roughly half the time over the next century? The answer is, absolutely not. Correspondingly, does the existence of MSNBC or CNN make it any less likely that the GOP will not hold power for roughly half of the next century, or that there will be a significant redistribution of wealth and power in the US? Absolutely not.
The metaphor I'd use is that the status quo moves like a rapid train along an unwavering trajectory. The status quo means powerful people stay powerful. The vast majority of the partisan fray that we observe is absurd (sex scandals, secret muslimness, etc.) and distracts people from issues of substance. By distracting people from issues of substance it strengthens the interests that benefit from the status quo. A lot of people watch one or the other partisan "news entertainment" networks and consider themselves well-informed, and outraged (appropriately) about the right things.
NPR plays an interesting role. It offers a lot of serious, high quality content. I t even reports calmly about many of the scandals and situations that make other news outlets reveal their partisan stripes, but one thing remains constant. NPR does not question the legitimacy of US institutions whatsoever. During the time of the financial crisis it had extensive coverage of what the banks did, how greed and negligence contributed to the crisis, etc., but did not shine a critical eye on the role of regulators and poorly designed (and poorly enforced) regulation on the crisis. NPR can deliver in-depth coverage, but it always pulls back before questioning certain sacred cows.
When you think about it, NPR's behavior is functionally similar to the highly partisan "entertainment news" fray. It helps to focus attention on things other than fundamental problems with the status quo and its institutions.
To dig a bit deeper into this example, the proper response to the financial crisis would have been to fix the broken regulatory system that allowed the dangerous combination of inadequate underwriting requirements and regulatory capture that created the impression of some firms being "too big to fail". Either would have been easy to fix, but instead the "fix" was to simply socialize some of that risk by having Taxpayers buy some of the risky assets, artificially inflating prices and preventing market forces from correcting enough to cause more widespread firm failure.
Even if asset support was warranted as a stability measure, the core incentives enjoyed by banks, insurance companies, and iBanks have remained generally unchanged, and attention was focused on compensation plans rather than on broader firm and industry incentives to socialize risk, which is ultimately what had been going on. Further, accounting irregularities in the GSEs were largely ignored. This process reveals the extent of regulatory capture and looks a lot like corruption. At the very least, transparency is lacking, and news organizations have been silent about it, preferring to focus on sensational stories about executive pay, etc.
On the subject of RT's coverage of Ukraine, my point is just that one could not expect "Russia Today" to report in an unbiased way on the Ukraine, so I'd be skeptical of any of its coverage of Ukraine, no matter what it said. Russia has an incentive to convey misinformation about Ukraine that does not exist for other topics. On US stories, RT has an incentive to write true stories about unflattering things, since overplaying its hand would result in widespread skepticism.
On the subject of the Crowdstrike data, etc: I referenced the homeland security report because it is considered the official roll-up of all available information that leads many to believe a specific narrative about Russian meddling. The Homeland security report referenced the crowdstrike report as a significant basis for its finding, and alluded to additional evidence but did not provide any in the unclassified document (or in the classified one, as far as any of us know).
The linking to GRU seems tenuous at best, and while your statement that even experts make mistakes is true, and while Kaspersky uncovered bits of the Equation group, I think we need a model that reveals the probabilistic reasoning and assumed incentives of each of the parties involved in the narrative in order to get an accurate perspective on what happened. Without that, the narrative implies various intentions that may only be accidental, with the actors instead having much more selfish/local motivations.
In my opinion, the likely scenario is that there are a lot of unsophisticated people doing phishing all the time toward any address that will bite. I receive phishing messages periodically, and several years ago received notice from Google that my account is being attacked by a state actor (whereupon I turned on 2FA).
Chances are if you are phishing for Gmail accounts and you find one that has links to .gov addresses, there is someone in the Russia you can sell it to. Surely if some American teenager hacked a Russian citizen's email and found information relevant to intelligence work he/she would be able to find a buyer for it in the US.
When we read about "links" between entities, what does that mean? I know of cases where the FBI has made deals with "former" hackers, allowing them to avoid prison by helping with various investigations, etc. So does that mean that a hacking org that one of these hackers used to work for is "linked" with the FBI? Context matters. We are hearing one side of the story, but more importantly hearing only one side of a highly politicized story.
As for the Russia story in general, relating to the alleged intention of Russia to meddle in the US election, there are a lot of people who are hand waving and pointing to "links" that don't check out. Suppose Wikileaks received emails from some third party who was not Russia and who WL did not know to be Russia. And suppose Russia gave the emails to that third party. WL claiming not to have received emails from Russia is true, so WL's credibility is not on the line even if there is hard intel making Russia the source of the emails. But for some reason due to the political nature of this issue, partisans are making all sorts of claims about WL's motivations. There are similar claims about RT's motivations being thrown around, but very little actual data. Of course RT will publish stories that are broadly favorable to Russia and Russia's interest. I don't think anyone would expect otherwise. Of course WL would publish juicy information, no matter where it came from and no matter if it came from an adversary of the US or a partisan within the US. Nobody would expect otherwise.
All of the above is perhaps an aside. I guess what really matters is whether one thinks Google should be in the truth business. I guess with advertising as the main source of revenue, Google is ultimately in the influence business, since what advertiser would buy ads if they did not create influence. Since not all ads are conversion-oriented, much of Google's revenue must come from broader, branding campaigns which are meant to create mindshare for certain ideas over others among a target population.
So maybe all this amounts to is Google giving US Government some free brand marketing for it's American Exceptionalism campaign, which is itself much older than Google.