Years ago, retired Dallas Cowboys Quarterback turned Monday Night Football announcer, Don Meredith, would often sing “The Party’s Over” when a big NFL team had no hope of winning.  To wit:

Welp, I believe I can hear him singing even now.  The Supreme Court just denied to hear Paxton’s idiotic lawsuit to throw out millions of votes in 4 states, subvert democracy and install Trump as dictator.  Paxton, Abbott, Patrick, Cruz, and 17 US representatives from Texas sided with sedition rather than honoring their oaths of office.  SCOTUS said no. Alito, along with Thomas, dissented, of course.  Here’s the order:

Yesterday, over 100 members of Congress signed on to Paxton’s lawsuit seeking to disregard the elections apply for a pardon in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia and hand the WH back to Trump who was soundly defeated in the popular and electoral vote.  In addition to Ted Cruz’s offer to argue the case in the unlikely event that the SCOTUS took up the case, here are the pols from Texas who betrayed their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution, deciding to pledge fealty to Trump instead.  These clowns are safely gerrymandered in, so are not the slightest bit interested in upholding the Constitution or serving their constituents; they are only interested in staying in office.  History will not be kind to these guys.

Rep. Kevin Brady

Rep. Michael C. Burgess

Rep. Michael Cloud

Rep. Mike Conaway

Rep. Dan Crenshaw

Rep. Bill Flores

Rep. Louie Gohmert

Rep. Lance Gooden

Rep. Kenny Marchant

Rep. Randy Weber

Rep. Roger Williams

Rep. Ron Wright

First, here’s the good news – since the election, CNN is beating Fox News in average viewers.  Now the bad news – Fox and CNN both are losing to Newsmax.  Why?  Fox isn’t “Trumpy” enough for the red hats, but still unwatchable for normal people.  Newsmax and an even worse OAN have taken over the alt-right folks who are abandoning Fox in droves as more of their anchors have acknowledged that Trump has no chance of stealing the election from Biden.  If you’ve never watched Newsmax and OAN, don’t bother.  By way of description, if Fox News is manure, Newsmax and OAN are nuclear waste.  They have created a Superfund site of toxic and deadly conspiracy theories, gross exaggerations, and freeform lying.  And Trumpists lap it up. Since the election CNN has averaged 1.73 million viewers, more than double a year ago. Fox News Channel averaged 1.56 million and MSNBC 1.53 million viewers.  More important, Newsmax, a safe haven for delusional Trumpists to hide from gravity and arithmetic, Newsmax beat Fox for the first time ever.  Newsmax commentators, even today, continue to peddle the lies that Trump is going to prevail over Biden.

Newsmax and OAN (as well as some remaining Fox programming) engage in prodigious lying, creating toxic propaganda that has now made it impossible for normal people to engage their viewers in any kind of productive debate.  In recent days, I’ve attempted discourse with several people, and it’s like arguing with an audio recording that’s running backwards.  These folks have bought in to the Dominion fairytale, the suitcases full of ballots narrative, and even the new “Office of the President-Elect” story ignoring the decades of the use of that term.  Even talking to these folks is exhausting because you simply can’t make any progress.

Even though Trump will soon be hiding at Mar a Lago and fighting criminal and civil charges in New York, the damage he inflicted and made recovery of our democracy even more remote.  I personally don’t see a route to recovery.

A great opinion piece in the NY Times this week by Bret Stephens drew a direct parallel line between today’s Team Trump and the German army’s defeat in 1918.  The commonality is the term Dolchstosslegende, which literally means “stab in the back myth”, and was used during the remilitarization in Weimar period after WWI.  The myth goes like this – when the German army was being routed all over northern Europe towards the end of the war in 1918, it was actually winning, and corrupt politicians stabbed the military in the back by signing an armistice with the Allies to end the war.  That lie was used thousands of times by Hitler and his henchmen as they seized power from the “schemers” (politicians and Jews), proclaiming they were restoring Germany’s honor and greatness.  Sound familiar?

Dolchestosslegende is precisely what Trump, Rudy, and his merry band of deplorables are using against Americans to steal the election from a duly elected President, Joe Biden.  And the amazing feature of this myth is that it really doesn’t matter if the lies are blatantly false; it proves that if your repeat an outrageous lie enough times, people will believe it.  Trumpland is so inured to receiving lies that they are simply accepted, even though they are pure farce.

And that is the point.

You can say one thing about Donald Trump.  He commits his crimes in plain sight of the American people.  He fires officials who dare disagree with him; he fires officials who tell the truth; he engages in quid pro quo using the full force of the federal government for is own personal gain.  He engages in nepotism, daring anyone to challenge him; he lies when it’s easier to tell the truth.  He’s now decapitated the Pentagon, putting his loyalists in place most certainly there to either destroy evidence or stonewall investigations of Trump’s malfeasance.  AND, at this hour he has Michigan legislative Republicans in the WH to twist their arms to subvert the Michigan election and throw their electoral votes to him.  So let’s be clear here – Trump and his merry band of criminals knows there’s no voter fraud in the election.  They have failed in all the swings states where they have alleged fraud.  Now that those efforts have failed, Trump is now just trying to steal the election by convincing (bribing) Republican state legislatures to disenfranchise their own constituents and throw the electoral count to him.  In a word, Trump is instigating a coup against the new President, Joe Biden, who has been duly elected in both the majority of voters and electoral votes.  He’s doing that because he’s staring at a long stretch of hard time once he loses the shield of the presidency.

Trump has bent, broken, ignored, and subverted so many laws, regulations, traditions, and customs that nothing is normal.  He understands nothing but brute force, doesn’t give a shit about the Constitution, and doesn’t care if you live or die.  This is all about Donald Trump and only about Donald Trump.  If you don’t like what you’re seeing, here’s John Cornyn’s and Ted Cruz’s phone number.  It’s long past time they should have gotten off their fat asses to do their Goddam jobs, but I’m certainly not holding my breath.

John Cornyn – 202-224-2934

Ted Cruz – 202-224-5922

Trump’s doing exactly what we predicted – lying, rage tweeting, threatening his “allies” to not get out of line, denying all access of the incoming president to briefings and transition documents.  And tonight, he made good on his threats, firing Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of DHS.  Krebs crime?  He spoke truth that this election was the most secure in US history and that there was no question as to outcome.  In a rage and abject denial, Trump canned him tonight.

Trump has no path to legal occupation of the WH, so what we’re facing in a few short weeks is a Constitutional crisis.  Trump has no regard for the American people and is totally self absorbed in his own sulking and scheming to steal the election from the American people.  Every hour he doesn’t step aside should be a month added to his prison sentence after all this is over.  What he doesn’t realize?  He’s guaranteeing criminal prosecution every day he continues his charade of Truth Decay.