It's not "just like" that because people in the Bush administration were pressuring the CIA to say the thinnest of evidence proved he had WMDs and was trying to get nukes then repeated the claim again and again.

Cut to 2016 where none of the intelligence branches claim Russians "hacked the election," they claim they hacked the DNC and other political organizations for political ends. There's no evidence that anyone in the Obama administration pressured the CIA, let alone multiple other intelligence branches to make those claims. There have been concerns that Russians tampered with voting machines themselves but they only things LEOs, intelligence branches, and other representatives of the Executive branch have been saying is when they've looked, they've found no evidence that it happened. So, not like "Saddam has WMDs" 14-15 years ago.

It's being used as a shield for the DNC leaks (eg, make the issue that the leak happened, rather than e.g. that the government deliberately played down the Benghazi attacks, DNC had already chosen Hillary as the nominee and was working to undermine Sanders), and to delegitamise the new administration, in the same way Iraq WMD was being used as an excuse to build the US's position in the Middle East.

Those are not analogous at all.

Russia and the US are allies and both produce propaganda to propagate the myth they are not. It helps keep Americans unfocused. The anger (misplaced anger really) is used to divide the America people and help them forget about the banks that profited in the 2008 financial collapse and the massive war industry that requires endless conflicts in order to keep its masses employed:

http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen...

The CIA has admitted before congress that it places adverts in magazines and has refused to answer questions on whether or not they do so on TV as well.

I agree with you entirely. It's exactly like the WMDs. We are in an era where social media networks are talking about filtering out real/fake news. This should worry everyone. "Simply don't use Amazon/Google/Facebook" is less of an option when these industries as so big they control the distribution (and therefore the narrative). Who determines the algorithms on what is real and fake? (I hope it's not the people who created Postini/Google's spam algorithms with its insane false positive rate).

It's not limited to America. We don't live in the Iran/China/Saudi 1984 where governments actively censor content (and consequently, most of the citizens know they are being censored). We live in that other version where lies and facts are mixed into all of our news and content so it's impossible to tell what is real, and what is propaganda.

Career politicians always divert the public's attention and engage scaremongering to hide the fact that they are in fact incapable of managing the economy. They do this to stay in power. If nothing else works, blame the <insert other country, ethnic or religious minority here> and start a war.

Just look at Turkey's Erdogan. He's blaming an expat preacher and his followers for the coup in order to tigthen his grip on institutions and the media, arrest HDP (Kurdish moderate left wing party) MPs and leaders, ultimately leading to PKK (Kurdish commie extermists) reemergence. Putin is a role model for him.