> We should shut down Russian infrastructure as retaliation.
How about, instead of causing harm to innocent Russian people by such pointless escalation, the US makes a serious and meaningful effort to secure their critical national infrastructure. As they should have done in the first place.
I was an adult, and I remember the experts on TV (and print and other media) debunking the “experts” you refer to, often in near real time. And, unlike the latter, the former often had the receipts (fairly literally, in the case of the debunking of the “Winnebagos of Mass Destruction”.)
I was also an adult, and the fervor over WMD was unreal. And not just WMDs, but stupid shit like "Freedom Fries" and "These colors don't run". The spike in nationalism was awful to behold.
> I was also an adult, and the fervor over WMD was unreal
Sure, the fervor was, as were lots of emotional aspects of the post-9/11 wave of Islamophobic hysteria. And certainly the opinion and commentary programs of the major TV news networks were often engaged in that (Fox, of course, but also MSNBC and CNN, both of whom reacted to Fox in the early 00’s even before 9/11 by chasing the bias in Fox opinion/commentary — not so much actual news — which definitely contributed to their slant and the reinforced the national post-9/11 mood well pay the beginning of the Iraq War.) This effect was smaller in the print media (but even greater in blogs, which were taking off as the new distinctly online media and didn’t tend to segregate fact and commentary or otherwise act like traditional media.)
That’s why the widely disseminated debunkings of the WMD propaganda in news coverage were also widely disregarded, but there has since become a revisionist narrative which pretends that the WMD propaganda was generally presented as unquestioned fact and contrary information suppressed by the news media.
>If we shut down Russian infrastructure and Russian civilians get caught in the crossfire, the Russian government can blame themselves
A very naive statement. The Russian government doesn't work like that. They NEVER admit they were wrong. They don't care about civilians. They have culture of complete denial, even in the presence of indisputible facts. They will say US attacks on Russia is yet another proof of US' hostile, aggressive behavior towards Russia in a greater geopolitical game (especially when presented proofs of Russia's involvement are pretty weak, like "the hacker group never attacked Russian infrastructure" - I bet they never attacked North Korea either), giving Putin an excuse to crackdown on opposition and restrict/reduce Russians' freedom/human rights even more, further militarizing things and increasing attacks on US infra.
Actually strengthening security is the only proper solution, to make that kind of attacks futile and unprofitable. It's usually not some ingenious attacks but just simple negligence of the targets.
How about, instead of causing harm to innocent Russian people by such pointless escalation, the US makes a serious and meaningful effort to secure their critical national infrastructure. As they should have done in the first place.