Media troll Max Boot is desperate for attention. After jumping the shark by making his Dem switch public, he keeps amping up the hysteria. And the Washington Post, equally desperate, keeps printing his nonsense.

“Max Boot: Without the Russians, Trump wouldn’t have won”.

That’s the headline. The concluding paragraph reads.

“Even if the Russians had failed, they still attacked our democracy. Yet they didn’t fail: Trump won. Russian disinformation wasn’t the only factor in the outcome and was probably less importantin the end than FBI Director James B. Comey’s announcement 11 days before the election that he was reopening the Clinton email investigation. But Watts concludes: “Without the Russian influence effort, I believe Trump would not have even been within striking distance of Clinton on Election Day.” That is the inconvenient truth the Putin Republicans won’t admit.”

Speaking of inconvenient truths, Boot’s conclusion clashes with his headline. His article is a word salad of jumbled factoids, claims and conspiracy theories. That’s why he’s reduced to nonsense like this.

Russia also hacked voting systems in at least 39 states, and while there is no evidence that vote tallies were changed, Russians may have used the stolen data to target their social media or shared the results with the Trump campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that “in a small number of states” the Russians may have been able to “alter or delete voter registration data,” potentially disenfranchising Clinton voters.

The media’s commitment to fact-checking is truly stunning.

While the intelligence agencies are silent on the impact of Russia’s attack, outside experts who have examined the Kremlin campaign — which included stealing and sharing Democratic Party emails, spreading propaganda online and hacking state voter rolls — have concluded that it did affect an extremely close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, writes in his recent book, “Messing with the Enemy,” that “Russia absolutely influenced the U.S. presidential election,” especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin was less than 1 percent in each state.

Watts appears to be the only “expert” whom Boot quotes. But Watts isn’t an expert in anything relevant to the question. Increasingly, neither is Boot, who seems to be going down the Louise Mensch pathway of trying to pander even more loudly to the left than the left itself is.