I don't care what Robert Mueller's published conclusions ultimately are—Well, yes, I do, but never mind—as long as he gives me and the rest of the nation something approximating one straight line through the Great Grimpen Mire that is El Caudillo Del Mar-A-Lago's skeevy relations, his skeevy retainers, his skeevy business practices, and his skeevy undertakings with skeevy folks of many skeevy lands. I just want to be able to get from A to Z without disappearing entirely into a watery grave.

I came to this conclusion on Wednesday while watching Ari Melber interview Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., the original Swift Boater and the original Birther, and someone whom American politics easily could have done without for the past three decades, a ratfcker's ratfcker who's left a trail of slime behind him a mile wide. Anyway, Corsi told Melber that he had hired on as his attorney one Larry Klayman, a litigious maniac whose own experience in fouling the public discourse goes back all the way to the pursuit of Bill Clinton, and whose reputation in the legal community is roughly that of tularemia.

Larry Klayman The Washington Post Getty Images

I don't need Larry Klayman and Jerome Corsi in my life. (I was having a hard enough time keeping straight the difference between Jerome Corsi, truthless vandal, and the late Jerome Kersey, a perfectly fine onetime power forward for the Portland Trailblazers.) I don't need this 15-car chain-reaction pileup of crazy in my life. I've observed American conservatism through almost every stage of the prion disease, since Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkey-brains in the mid-1970s. I've watched with grim fascination as the conservative movement began to develop an incredible auxiliary of political ne'er-do-wells, and as the conservative media became a comfy spa vacation spot for liars on the grift and idle paranoids. But Larry Klayman repping Jerome Corsi brings us dangerously close to critical mass. Seriously, run for your lives. Don't look back.

Mueller has the capacity to excise a good deal of the damage done by the prion disease carried into the body politic by this small universe of crackpots without whom modern conservatism—and the Republican Party—would have very little life force at all. But I'd like him to do it in as clear and direct a way as possible. As interesting as side-trips down the multifarious tributaries of the conservative River Styx might be, the initial response to every major political scandal of my lifetime, at least from the Republican side, has been that the scandal was too complicated for us ordinary unfrozen caveman citizens to understand. This generally prefaced the argument that some entity called The American People is too tender and delicate a flower to be troubled by how demonstrably crooked their leaders are.

WIN MCNAMEE Getty Images

The Republicans tried this on Watergate, and the only reasons they didn't succeed were John Dean's memory and the White House tapes. They had much better luck with Iran-Contra, arguably a more serious set of crimes, because of all the foreigners involved in the scandal, and all the money and weapons laundering involved in the scandal, and because their stonewalling tactics had improved over the intervening years. They also had a future president—Poppy Bush—to protect, so they were not inclined to toss the rapidly failing Ronald Reagan overboard.

So, inevitably, This Is All Too Complicated led to This Has Gone On Too Long, which led to The American People Need Closure. The Watergate cover-up, thank God, failed between steps two and three. Iran-Contra succeeded because people were not inclined to learn who the Sultan of Brunei was, nor did they care to learn the difference between Manucher Ghorbanifar and a hole in the ground.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton, by contrast, got all the way to the Senate at least partly because it was so easy to understand that the Republicans pursuing it were able to deny the Democrats these three basic rhetorical tropes that had saved the Reagan people in the late 1980s.

Mary Anne Fackelman-Miner Getty Images

So what I need from Mueller is a series of straight, bright lines. No side trips. Resist the temptation to rid American politics of the likes of Klayman and Corsi, except as a welcome side project of your main purpose, which is to demonstrate that the president*'s 2016 campaign was corrupted by foreign influence, and that said influence was a direct result of his thoroughly corrupt business relationships overseas, which themselves were occasioned by the fact that his business dealings in this country were so thoroughly corrupt that no American bank would give him a loan.

One, two three. One unbroken string of corrupt actions leading inevitably to a corrupt presidency*. Mueller's job is not to cure the prion disease completely. It's to relieve a few of the more garish symptoms after which, Republicans, heal thyselves.

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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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