Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American

In the mid-1980s, the aides to the president of the United States committed serious crimes in their efforts to send sophisticated weapons to a state sponsor of international terrorism. The president of the United States likely committed impeachable offenses. We were told to get beyond it, that the "country" couldn't afford another presidency crippled by its own crimes so soon after Richard Nixon had hobbled his. We got beyond it. We moved on.

In 1998, the House of Representatives impeached a president on the most spurious of grounds and full in the knowledge that the charges had no chance of prevailing in the Senate. There were many grand and glorious speeches on the floor of the House about the rule of law and about the House's constitutional duties. It was a proud moment and many an ambitious young politician thumped his chest over the righteousness of his cause. By 2000, nobody in the political party that had brought the charges even mentioned it any more. We got beyond it. We moved on.

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In 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States interfered in a presidential election in an extra-constitutional and unprecedented way. It essentially installed a man in that office who had lost the popular vote by half-a-million and likely had lost the crucial state of Florida, too, which would have denied him a majority in the electoral college. From all sides, even from the candidate who was so badly wronged, we were told that "the country" needed to "heal" from this terrible crisis, even though the country seemed to be rocking right along. We got beyond it. We moved on.

In 2008, we elected a president after eight years in which the country's moral foundation had been winnowed away by faceless bureaucrats and torturers in black sites in Thailand and shipping crates in Bagram, and eight years in which much of the national wealth was stolen by brigands in expensive suits on Wall Street. The new president was a good man. He wanted to look forward and not back. We got beyond all of it. We moved on.

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In all of these matters, both subtly and directly, and by many of our institutions, including the press, we were encouraged to think of ourselves as frightened children and our democratic republic as something made of candy glass that would shatter from the vibrations if our constitutional engines were revved up too highly or if they performed their essential functions too vigorously. We were convinced that our faith in our values was a fragile and breathless thing that would collapse if exercised too strenuously.

We were persuaded that we were far too delicate these days for the kind of brawling politics in which this country had been born, and for which the Founders had set up the Constitution to maintain something resembling boundaries. We were fed cheap junk food instead of actual information until we developed a serious jones for it. Our belief in our counterfeit national innocence was that with which we washed it all down. We became a fat and lazy excuse for a democratic republic.

So don't tell me to be surprised by the blockbuster story that The Washington Post published about the involvement of the Russian government in the 2016 presidential election. This kind of thing has been a long time coming.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton's chances. "It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected," said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. "That's the consensus view."

(By the way, I warned El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago months ago that he was fcking with the wrong executive editor, but would he listen?)

Do I believe the story? Of course, I do. Do I trust the CIA? Not implicitly, but I trust Marty Baron, and he wouldn't have come within 10 miles of publishing this story unless he was extremely sure of its sourcing and its material. I also believe the story because of the truthless and lame-assed rapid response that came from the Trump transition team.

These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again.'

Every dipthong of that is a lie. The election was barely a month ago. Trump's victory in the Electoral College was one of the slimmest in history. And, as for the shot at the CIA, it's important to remember that a lot of the great work done by the McClatchy newspapers and others that debunked the case for WMDs in Iraq, the stories that nobody in the elite political media cared about at the time, also came from the intelligence community. Generally, intramural pissing matches among intelligence services are a boon to investigative journalism. For example, what was Mark Felt's motive for going to Bob Woodward on Watergate if not Felt's dissatisfaction with the way the FBI and the local federal prosecutors were handling the case? That statement is so transparently false and evasive that it inadvertently confirms what the Post reported.

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And the fact remains that the embryonic Trump administration is lousy with Russian connections, right up to the oil baron who is expected to be nominated as secretary of state. (Did you know that Paul Manafort lives in Trump Tower? I didn't.) The fact remains that the president-elect was noticeably touchy about his relationship with Vladimir Putin throughout the campaign. ("No puppet. You're the puppet." A legendary moment in American political rhetoric.) The fact remains that Putin is an authoritarian thug with no qualms at all about getting what he wants when he wants it, and the fact remains that Russian international ambitions do not change whether the government is Tsarist, Communist, or oligarchy.

The fact remains that we do not know fck-all about those to whom the president-elect owes money. The fact remains that, in October, the director of national intelligence accused the Russian government of hacking political organizations in this country. The fact remains that, less than a month ago, the director of the National Security Agency said pretty much the same thing, on the record, as the Post story reports that the CIA believes. Many facts remain. Many, many facts remain.

But, again, it seems, all of these facts that remain were less important than a desire to keep the real, grungy reality hushed up, lest it frighten the children. This is the most distressing passage in the Post's story.

In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia's role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals. And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as "the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process." The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests. According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics. Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow's hands.

This president has been a good one, probably the most progressive politician we've seen in that office since LBJ was kicking ass in 1965. But he has made mistakes, and every single serious mistake he's made has been because he assumed good faith on the part of his political opposition, misjudged the depth and virulence of his political opposition, or both. It's 2016. Why would he still believe Mitch McConnell would act with dispassionate patriotism instead of partisan obstruction on anything? Why would he believe it of anyone in the congressional Republican leadership? Hell, he even admitted as much in an interview on NPR last July. I respect the president's confidence in the better angels of our nature, but those angels have been deathly quiet since 2009.

And, glory be to god, this bit:

Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow's hands.

And there we are, again, children of the candy glass who can't be trusted with the truth. Don't "rattle the public's confidence" in the final stages of an election by telling them that the Russians have monkeywrenched said election. Goddammit, that's what you're supposed to do! You're supposed to have an informed electorate and you're supposed to be able to trust that the electorate is mature enough to handle anything that unsettles its confidence. This is the same nonsense we went through when The New York Times sat on the domestic spying story in 2004 because it didn't want to affect the election. If you're a newspaper, you're not supposed to care if you affect the election. Did the president really buy this lame excuse from the congressional Republicans? If he did, that's quite sad.

If you're a newspaper, you're not supposed to care if you affect the election.

So, what is there to do now, at the end of a week in which we not only saw these revelations, but also watched as an executive branch was forming that seems to leave us with a Gilded Age cabinet presided over by James Buchanan? Let us assume for a moment that our constitutional institutions are as strong and functional as they are supposed to be, and let's assume for a moment that we, as a self-governing people, are as strong and as functional as we need to be. What would happen next is that the Electoral College would function as it was designed to function and as its function was explained by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68:

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,'' yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.

The electors would look at the accumulated evidence and deny the president-elect his mandate. As a strong and functional constitutional republic, we would withstand the lycanthropic yowling of the lunatic supporters of the president-elect, and we would not take on ourselves the timidity that would be pushed at us by various politicians and elements of the elite political media. The decision would then go to the Congress which would have to certify, or not, the decision of the electors. This would be a hard political decision, but making hard political decisions is why these bastards got elected in the first place.

As long as we've taken up residence in the Neighborhood Of Make Believe, let's assume that the Congress counts the electoral ballots and nobody gets the required 270 electoral votes. Nobody is talking about overturning the results and handing the election to Hillary Rodham Clinton. The House then picks the president and the Senate, the vice-president. One possible outcome in this scenario likely would be President Mike Pence. (I know, I know. But play along.) Maybe we end up with a modern version of what happened in 1876. In any case, I think that, if we're going to have a constitutional crisis, dammit, we should have one according to the Constitution.

The electors would look at the accumulated evidence and deny the president-elect his mandate.

There is something profound in the moment through which we presently are living. We are a month away from inaugurating a manifestly unqualified and ethically unfit man as president of the United States, a man who has lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, who already is reneging on almost every promise he made while campaigning, who steadfastly refuses to be transparent about who holds the note on his finances and who is on his way to raising conflicts of interest to stratospheric levels, and who now may very well be the willing bobo for a foreign dictator.

The situation is the most stark challenge to a free people that has arisen in my lifetime. We have political and democratic muscles that have atrophied from disuse that now have to be called upon immediately to rescue the republic no matter how many people find that to be too rowdy and inconvenient for their refined political tempers. We have institutional safeguards that have rusted from neglect, but which still work if we're strong enough to turn the handles. We are in the deep, dark woods now. We all are, in a very real sense, survivalists.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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