Let’s call it what it is. The Democrats are attempting to engineer a coup. If we were south of the border (to the extent that we have one) there would be tanks surrounding the palace, gunfire in the streets.

On November 8, Donald J. Trump won the presidential election fair and square on the basis of rules that have been in place for more than two centuries. By putting pressure on Republican electors not to vote for Trump, Democrats are trying to overthrow that legitimate election for scam reasons that are more out of Duck Soup than out of the political life of an advanced, industrial democracy. In the current sorry drama, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is Rufus T. Firefly without the charisma. And a lot less funny. (And by the way, the content of some of the emails Republican electors have been receiving should make it crystal clear which party is truly the party of hate.)

The idea that an untold but decisive number of voters who planned to cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton then decided to vote for Trump because of something the Russians did cannot be supported. Those dots cannot be connected. It’s a total non sequitur. To find as cynical and baseless a political scheme as this, one must go back to the fire at the Reichstag. Should it succeed — it isn’t likely to — it would almost certainly lead to the biggest American crisis since the Civil War.

Is it not obvious that if any voters decided not to vote for Hillary Clinton because of what John Podesta said in emails supposedly made public by the Russians, it was because of the vile and condescending things Podesta said in those emails, not because the Russians made those emails available (if in fact they did)? And why in all the argle-bargle about this in the media hasn’t any national reporter thought to ask this question?

The Democrats like to ham it up about how much they believe in and provide political transparency. In those emails, they got more transparency than they wanted. They made it crystal clear that the progressives who dominate this far-left party have contempt for a large chunk of the American electorate, specifically including Catholics, and by implication all Christians who take their faith seriously.

If it turns out that the Russians really tried to tilt the election in favor of Trump — though it has never been made clear why the Russians would favor a president with a spine over a continuation of the invertebrate Democratic foreign policy — then there should be consequences for them. And we should find ways to ensure that this does not happen in the future. But even if this shameless hustle fails Monday, as all reasonable Republicans and Democrats should hope it does, we should never forget that the Democratic Party in 2016 attempted to overthrow a legitimate presidential election. They attempted a coup. Shame on them. There should be consequences for them, as well as for their allies, the Russians.

The list of unindicted co-conspirators in this attempted coup is long. Of course there’s the mainstream media, which largely ignored Podesta’s damaging statements, and downplayed the Russian story until Trump won the election, and are now playing it as the largest story in history. But then we expect the MSM to be an arm of the Democratic Election Machine. As are the Hollywood airheads who are on the Hillary Uber Alles train. (If I thought, without a script, Martin Sheen and Mike Farrell were bright enough to pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, I would worry about them.)

Then there’s CIA director John Brennan and President Obama, who hint darkly that the Russians somehow turned this one around but decline to say exactly how. They’re sad cases. But then Obama has been a sad case for eight years. When Obama ran for the White House in 2008 he promised he would “fundamentally transform America.” If the attempted coup he has lent his support to should succeed, he surely will have fulfilled this promise. He never even attempted to say, “If you like your country, you can keep your country.”