Let’s start with this:  I am against the death penalty.  However, for Dylann Roof I’m not exactly going to march in the streets.

Likewise, I am all for benefit of the doubt qualifications in journalism when a story is unproven and maybe unprovable.  Can we know for certain whether Trump’s administration has direct connections to Putin and Putin guided and helped the Trump campaign (other than the hacking of the electorate with fake news and the Wikileaks e-mail dump, which we can be pretty certain of)?  Maybe, maybe not?  Can we know if Putin and his operatives have compromising materials on Trump?  No, not likely.  Although it feels like we ALL have compromising information on Trump, it’s just that he doesn’t have shame and his followers have lost all sense of propriety.

However, Trump has so trafficked in smears and innuendo, so profited from stating things about his opponents as facts that clearly were unfounded allegations that I cannot possibly feel any qualms about such tactics being used against him.  Justice ain’t always swift or hygienic.

Every reference to “crooked” Hillary.  Every time he mentioned something written in an e-mail, not even written by Hillary Clinton and inferred something criminal.  Every time he stated that “we know” something is dirty, when we did not know any such thing.  The entire “lock her up” gambit.  The Comey letter which Trump touted as “they wouldn’t have sent this if they didn’t have big big stuff” when they hadn’t read the e-mails at all.

No.  If Trump gets tarred with golden showers the rest of his miserable life (despite the irony of him being a germophobe) it would be just fine by me.

Live by a lack of good faith and decency and die by the same.

All that said.  Josh Marshall notes that a lot of what’s in it is checkable and the reliability of operatives of our allies like MI6 is knowable.  The press should not “alledgedly” this to death – fair mindedness means allowing that intelligence services don’t throw this kind of stuff around willy nilly.