The story of the Russian hacking of the 2016 elections in this country gets deeper and murkier with every telling. In fact, it's becoming rather like the old tale of how to tell someone their cat has died. As I recall, it goes like this:

A man who lived at home with his mother and pet cat went on a trip to Europe. Before he left he told his best friend to tell him of any emergencies. A few days into his trip, his cat slipped while climbing the roof, fell off and died. His friend immediately texts him with the message: "Your cat died!" In a few hours he was back home, having cut short his trip in grief. When he saw his friend he yelled at him, "Why didn't you break the news to me slowly? You know how close I was to my cat! You could have sent a message 'Your cat climbed up on the roof today', and the next day you could've written, 'Your cat fell off the roof' and let me down gradually that he died." After a quick memorial service, the man left again to continue his trip. A few days later he gets a text from his friend. It read, "Your mother climbed up on the roof today."

The structure of the joke is that, no matter how carefully you lead someone into tragic news, sooner or later, Mom ends up dead. I'd say that we're about one day away from someone telling us that American democracy has climbed up on the roof.

First, there was no Russian hacking of Democratic e-mails. Then, there was. Then, there was no Russian hacking of electoral software. Then, there was. Then, it was only an isolated kind of thing. Then, Reality stepped in and we discovered it was more thoroughgoing. On Tuesday, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, pushed the cat a little further out onto the eaves. From USA TODAY:

"I don't believe they got into changing actual voting outcomes," Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said in an interview. "But the extent of the attacks is much broader than has been reported so far." He said he was pushing intelligence agencies to declassify the names of those states hit to help put electoral systems on notice before the midterm voting in 2018. "None of these actions from the Russians stopped on Election Day," he warned.

A month ago, nobody at Warner's pay grade even was talking out loud about the possibility of "changing actual voting outcomes." Now, Warner's saying only that he doesn't believe anyone did that. Meanwhile, in Florida, there are reports that bring the generalities down to local specifics. From the Tampa Bay Times:

Election supervisors in Citrus, Clay and Pasco counties told the Times/Herald Tuesday that they got the emails, but they did not open them. It's unclear whether the cyberattack was successful anywhere else in Florida… Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley said the malicious message was in his agency's inbox on Oct. 31. "I didn't open it," Corley said. "Phishing emails? We get them all the time. I can't tell you how many people in Nigeria want to give me $8 million." He said every suspicious email is forwarded to a "quarantine" email address. Clay County Supervisor of Elections Chris Chambless said his office got a copy of the phishing e-mail but it was stopped by an anti-virus filter. Tallahassee-based VR Systems quickly warned counties about the attempt in a Nov. 1 email to all 64 counties that use its software. "I looked to see if we had it in our system, and we didn't, and quite frankly, I made that assumption then that our quarantine system did its job," said Chambless, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.

Dear America, your government went out on the roof today.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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