You asked if he should be punished, actually, which I answered. The fact that it's a matter of public interest doesn't change that a crime was committed.
It literally does change it. I asked about whistleblowing (which, by US law, it would be illegal to retaliate against -- not that stuff being illegal has ever stopped Obama before :^)), and your answer conveniently stripped that away. If this makes no functional difference for you, just tell us you think whistleblowing protections should be repealed and be done with it.
I don't think Obama is defending every action the US has done either. You're trying to appeal to hypocrisy, which I don't deny. The US is a hypocrite, but that doesn't make it wrong in this instance.
I'm taking it farther than that. It's not just that the USA is a hypocrite. It's also not just that Obama, personally, is a hypocrite. What makes this truly hilarious is that one of Obama's crowning achievements was undermining and destabilising multiple nations' governments through similar means. It's a particularly amusing sort of hypocrisy.
He might not, no, because his party won, and that would be bad of him, and Trump supporters would be right in being upset.
*shrug* All I can say to that is "nope", to which you can probably not say much more than "nope" back. Agree to disagree?
Just a question, but do you criticize Trump for the same things when he, for instance, accepts calls from Taiwan? The US shouldn't just lay down and take whatever foreign governments throw at it.
Given that one of the key overtones of the Trump campaign was "haha fuck China", it's more a case of him doing exactly what he promised. I strongly suspect that he deliberately set the call up, although my response when that happened was that of enthusiasm, not of criticism.
This just sounds like climate change denialism at this point, to think that foreign espionage to influence an eleciton is the same as a "gravity gun"
Once again you misrepresent what I said. It was an exaggeration meant to illustrate a difference in how we think, and blatantly not a direct comparison - that's why I went for an abstract claim instead of, say, nukes. Looks like it worked
too well - we've unearthed a whole bunch of differences, just not the right one.
Ultimately, your position is religious. There exists something you cannot see, touch, experience, or perceive in any way. BUT IT EXISTS I PROMISE!! It's bad and dangerous to disbelieve it, and it's unfair to demand proof. This magical thing has achieved things that have previously been thought impossible, and I can reassure you with
great confidence that it's all totally true!
especially when you yourself admit the US has done the same thing in the past.
Yes, the fact that we've observed similar things in the past gives us something tangible to compare this claim against. It is perhaps the most damning piece of evidence suggesting that American intelligence agencies are simply lying. The very important thing to learn from this precedent is that we only know that it happened
because the US openly admits their meddling and takes pride in it. There was no mysterious totally-true-but-plz-no-peeking proof that the victims of US attacks held. And no, American cybersec experts aren't far enough ahead of the rest of the world to explain this anomaly away.
To be clear: It's completely possible that the FBI/CIA/NSA have achieved a previously unprecedented feat while simultaneously failing spectacularly to disseminate it to the general public; but it's an unintuitive interpretation of the situation which goes against the evidence we
do have at our disposal.