I despise Donald Trump but the thought of a Biden victory makes me want to gargle anti-freeze. Mostly because of Russia-gate but the whole brunch thing really grates on my nerves too.

With Russia-gate, liberals have been in a hysterical state of resistance to President Trump for the last 4 years, going so far as to embrace deep state actors like the CIA and FBI. Meanwhile it’s been apparent that the corporate media is in cahoots with an avalanche of stories claiming Trump is literally a secret agent for a hostile foreign government.

For those of us who hate Trump but also are dismayed by these dangerous actions, we will have to deal with the aftermath if he loses to Sleepy-Joe. The same liberals who brought us Russia-gate will feel emboldened. All of the crazy stories about Trump being a Russian agent for decades, the insinuations that he a Vladimir Putin were gay-lovers, all the fantasies and deceptions that obscured far more than they ever revealed about the country’s actual problems — all of it will have been vindicated. Because it will have been done in service of accomplishing the desperately-craved goal of removing Trump.

Trump is routinely decried as a singularly menacing destroyer of democracy, at once a Russian agent and a Nazi, if that actually makes any sense. But the damage his opponents have done with Russia-gate is arguably far more significant and will reverberate long after he’s gone.

If Trump goes on to lose the election— barring some unforeseen shift or major polling error — then we’re just hours away from the final vindication of the Resistance’s tactics. Trump may not deserve another term on his own merits. But a loss for Trump is nonetheless a win for the lunatics who’ve spent four years subjecting the rest of us an unceasing tsunami of freakish nonsense.

For instance, there’s California Democrat congress-critter Adam Schiff, who’s been the outspoken leader of the witch hunt. Sometimes hinting that he’s seen intelligence he can’t speak of publicly, Schiff has repeatedly made statements that later proved false. In March of 2017, he told Chuck Todd, “I can’t get into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now” that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 election. He would continue making statements like this for nearly two years, until information was declassified showing that Schiff early on had been told in secret testimony, by people like the aforementioned Clapper, “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”

Moreover, Russia-gate was cynically used by the Democrats as a way to obscure the reasons that Trump prevailed in 2016. For starters, the Democrats for years have abandoned working class Americans for the wealthy. People simply are not going to support a party which does not advance their interests. If the Democratic Party were obtaining material benefits for people, they would dominate the US government. But that would mean taking things away from the donor class, so it’s been a no-go. Instead, They court wealthy donors who in exchange demand policies which hurt ordinary Americans. There’s also been the Democrat’s decades long embrace of neoliberal economics with its outsourcing of manufacturing jobs combined with encouragement of immigration to replace well paying service work that has devastated working-class Americans.

While the Barr investigation into the history and particulars of Russia-gate is being slow-walked, the central claim–that the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton’s e-mails–is now being exposed as the fraud it always was. It turns out that the FBI has documents that prove that the e-mails were leaked to Wikileaks by DNC staffer, Seth Rich, just like Julian Assange, always maintained.

Of course, if Biden wins everyone will move on and no one will be held responsible.

Bygones.

The problem however is that when you suppress what is really going on and the reasons for it, you are left with increasingly unconvincing narratives—as happened in the late USSR. My takeaway from all this is that the US is becoming like the former Soviet Union where everyone knew that the official media could not be trusted, but underground Samizdat documents were treasured.

If anything, the overt reliance by Democratic partisans and “Resisters” on officials associated with the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other intelligence agencies and operatives has taken us in the direction of the USSR, where the KGB had such power to make people disappear into the gulag.

Indeed, at the end of all this it will be impossible to deny that these agencies intruded to an extraordinary degree in US domestic political affairs over the course of the past several years. But because it was largely done to hurt Trump, by creating the impression that he’s an agent of Russia, the long-term consequences of this development were not really thought out.

Let’s just say it doesn’t bode well for the future of political freedom when intelligence agencies can stage a coup against a sitting president.

Update: Once again, I hearken back to the pivotal scene in A Man For All Seasons.

“ROPER: So! Now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER: Yes! I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”