If, as you're reading this, you're wondering whether the Russians hacked into America's computer systems and changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election so that Donald J. Trump ended up the president-elect, take a deep breath. They didn't – but that hasn't stopped the commentariat that populates liberal media from walking right up to the line of saying so, hoping more than a few Americans will draw that conclusion.

The story that kicked it off, which appeared over the weekend in The Washington Post (and which former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described Tuesday in a speech at The Heritage Foundation as "a lie") injected the discussion of Russian hacking into the post-election analysis, with predictable results. The people who didn't plan for Trump to win and are having a difficult time accepting that he did are acting like the so-called "birthers" who thought Barack Obama was born outside the United States. They're looking for a quick and easy way to upend the election results.

The hacking story is a lulu. It takes a little kernel of truth – that the Russians did indeed ping and probe America's most sensitive computer systems in search of useful information – and layers around it enough gobbledygook to make a mountain out of a molehill. It's an accusation brought to fruition after the election in order to create doubt about the legitimacy of Trump's victory. It amounts to what The New York Times reported Sunday is a new interpretation of old information.

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How solid is the information? According to those who do on the record, not very.

"I am not saying that I don't think Russia did this,' Nada Bakos, a top former CIA counterterrorism officer and not a Trump fan according to the magazine told Newsweek. "My main concern is that we will rush to judgment. The analysis needs to be cohesive and done the right way." (It's also worth noting that the FBI reportedly doesn't share the view attributed to some within the CIA by The Washington Post.) Yet rushing to judgment is exactly what the folks in the partisan propaganda press are doing. They're discussing openly in a news context the possibility Russian hackers changed the outcome of the election – without explaining how – and asking people to discuss the ramifications if it's true.

This is how it becomes "fake news," to use the term of the moment, which does not need to be entirely "fake" or "news" in the traditional sense to qualify. Speculation is sufficient as the speculation becomes the story, sort of like what happens when you ask someone when they stopped beating their wife.

Yes, the Russians hack. So do the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans and pimply faced kids in the science lab at Carnegie-Mellon when there's nothing good on television. Poling and prodding in cyberspace is part of 21st century warfare, a place where by all accounts America has fallen well behind.

If Russians did hack into the computers at the DNC or the Center for American Progress, a left-wing group housing the Clinton White House in waiting, isn't that the real story? Isn't it newsworthy that the Obama administration again failed to secure American cyberspace from probing by foreign intelligence services? There have already been several high profile hacks on his watch, such as the one into the U.S. Office of Personnel Management federal employee database that were costly and damaging. There may be more that were worse, but no one for the moment is saying.

All that needs to be stopped. The bipartisan calls for an investigation into cybersecurity breaches, real and rumored, conducted through regular channels is an appropriate first step to getting at the real issues. What we shouldn't do is shoot the horse while we're putting it before the cart, as some commentators seem intent on doing, by turning this into a discussion of the Russians possibly stealing the election from Hillary Clinton.

You have to follow the conversation very closely. Even if no one has yet alleged directly the Russians used computers to hack into electoral systems and changed votes, the Trump-haters are happy to let the idea percolate. The language coming from the talking points is just ambiguous enough to put that idea into the minds of the electorate – so much so that a group of electors (the people who will actually vote for president and vice president next week) are demanding a security briefing before they exercise their constitutional responsibilities. What you're probably not hearing is that 39 of these electors, including the daughter of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, are Democrats pledged to vote for Clinton.

Team Clinton is piling on. "Each day that month, our campaign decried the interference of Russia in our campaign and its evident goal of hurting our campaign to aid Donald Trump," Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said Monday. "Despite our protestations, this matter did not receive the attention it deserved by the media in the campaign. We now know that the CIA has determined Russia's interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump." Liberal columnist Paul Krugman even called this a "tainted election" and said Trump "won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention" from Russia and FBI Director James Comey. "Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election?," he wrote. "Yes."

In fact we don't know that. Krugman, Podesta and others may have inferred from stories in The Washington Post and elsewhere or they could have just made it up. It's really just a lot of woulda, shoulda, coulda, more sore-loserism than cogent political analysis. It's high drama for sure – and Krugman is taking it even higher – but it has little connection to reality.

What Team Clinton can't admit is they ran a bad campaign focused on things important to her liberal friends in the ACELA corridor and the Wellesley alumni association rather than what the American people wanted. She hung on until the end – until the undecideds broke for Trump, and in a very big way. No matter how big their doubts about him, Clinton just could not close the sale with the voters who mattered.

Perhaps it might have been different if she'd campaigned in Wisconsin once or twice. She didn't – and Trump won the election, fair and square. A lot of people don't like it but a lot of people do. And they appear to be growing in number by the week.