ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

The Principle of Parsimony wins again.  "Russian Twitter Trolls Did Not Throw the 2016 Election to Trump."  Recall, dear reader, there were only twelve Russian spies.

Yes, [Donald Trump] did outwork all the Republican establishment hopefuls during the primary, and he did outwork Hillary Clinton, and it didn't take a Russian operative to put "basket of deplorables" and the other hectoring, condescending material into Mrs Clinton's fundraising and campaigning.

But is anyone really surprised, let alone scandalized, that foreign intelligence services do what foreign intelligence services do, which is to say, steal secrets and plant stories?  If the Soviets, er, Russians, didn't do that, that would be reason to send generals to gulag and bust colonels back to sergeants.  And there are likely more than twelve spies, er, intelligence officers, working that project.  And if Democrats were careless with their internet security, relative to Republicans, well, that's business.

Further, does anybody believe that Bernie Sanders supporters wouldn't have figured out that the Democratic National Committee was rigging things for the Dowager Empress, even without John Podesta's leaked e-mails, no matter who got them, or how they got them?  Cripes, I had the story in August 2015, before a single caucus took a vote.

Taken together, I evaluate the situation as intelligence services doing what intelligence services do, voters doing what voters do, and Mr Trump outworked Mrs Clinton.  Never attribute to malice what can be more easily ascribed to overconfidence.

Reason's Robby Soave offers a supporting argument.

This observation is well-supported by a few key findings. Just 1 percent of Twitter users absorbed about 70 percent of the so-called Russian disinformation, meaning that a tiny fraction of overall users encountered actual Russian trolls. These users were overwhelmingly partisan Republicans; there is no reason to think that masses of gullible swing voters who might have voted for Hillary Clinton were hoodwinked by Russia and opted for Trump instead.

Again, dear reader, you saw it here first.

Doesn't make it right: doesn't excuse the GRU, or whatever they call it these days, that CIA does it better; doesn't even make a case for moral equivalence. [Attempting to influence elections is] what intelligence services do. At the margin, it's probably not easily-influenced voters that carry the day.

I know I repeat myself: Stalin would have purged those twelve spies for their ineffectiveness. Robby Soave, again: "[T]he amount of time, money, and effort Russia spent on influencing social media users was a drop in the bucket compared with the work being done by the Trump and Clinton campaigns themselves, as well as the attention being paid to the candidates by U.S. media outlets."  If anything, the confirmations from these recent studies suggest a lack of intellectual curiosity among the pundit class.  "The news probably came as a surprise to many readers; unfortunately, mainstream and liberal consumers of political news have been conditioned to believe that misinformation—often of foreign and Russian origin—is the source of countless modern maladies. But time and time again, data tell a different story."