This isn't funny anymore. In fact, it never was.

I just came across a post on Facebook by a prominent Missouri Synod clergyman giving credence to the "stolen election" narrative and egging right-wing media personalities on to keep spreading it. As I've always understood it, pastors are tasked with advising against the bearing of false witness, not encouraging them to engage in it!

It would be different if there were some reason to even think that it might be true. But there simply isn't. Nor is it even remotely plausible. Joe Biden won the election by five million votes. Even if there were evidence of systemic fraud- and there simply is none- the size of the victory alone would make the task of manufacturing it by artificial means impossible. And the size of the conspiracy necessary to bring it about would be so large that keeping it secret even in the short term would be hopeless.

I'm not even going to get into the question of why, if the Democrats stole the presidential election, they were unable to steal a majority in the Senate when the Senate races were on the same ballot!

The rabid partisanship that can result in this sort of nonsense is bad enough. But the ideological extremism necessary for anybody to take this stuff seriously is even more frightening. The accusations are not even vaguely rational.  Can anybody even imagine any previous president, Republican or Democrat,  throwing this sort of tantrum or the rank-and-file of either party going along with it?

Can anybody even imagine any previous president of either party refusing to commit in advance to a peaceful transition if he lost? How on earth can anybody see this as normal?

And yet Republican politicians are so afraid of the rank-and-file that they go along even though they themselves know better. It turns out that the hearts of the rank-and-file still belong to Donald Trump. Even in clear and unambiguous (if fraudulently disputed) defeat, the Republican Party remains Donald Trump's party. Any hallucinations anyone may have had about it reverting to healthy normality ought to be gone at this point.

Narcissists, of course, finally care about nothing but themselves. Just as Donald Trump has been willing all along to sacrifice the nation's interests and even the nation's security to push the necessary buttons to maintain his coalition, keep the right groups of us fearful of the proper other groups, and keep the right amount of hate flowing in the right directions no matter what it does to us as a society or as a nation, he's proving himself willing to undermine our confidence in our most basic democratic institutions in an insanely hopeless attempt to somehow retain power, or at least save himself the humiliation of admitting to being that class of human beings he most despises: a loser.

The threat this sick and finally pathetic and tragically insecure man poses to our nation and its institutions has been patently obvious all along. And now, at the end of a bizarre four years in which a president who has literally never commanded the support of a majority of us has visited such havoc upon us as a nation and upon our institutions,  he has even defied the tradition of a civil and orderly transfer of power once the people have spoken that has been the envy of the world and a point of pride for Americans ever since the nation's founding. The only thing that is more inexcusable than the childish, petulant exercise in sore losership the man is engaging in is that so many of us should fail to clearly see just what he is, what he's doing. The damage he's already done to the nation and continues to do even in defeat.

Or- worse, and far more likely- willfully and dishonestly refuse to see it.

The most disgraceful think of all is that there will still be people who take Mr. Trump seriously as anything but an object of pity and contempt after January 20, when inevitably- because there is literally no rational argument to be made against it- the man the American people preferred to him by a margin of at least five million votes- 74 votes in the Electoral College- takes the oath of office.

But even as the false narrative is being spread that it's Joe Biden and the Democrats seeking to steal the presidency, President Trump supporters are actually trying to do it. There is talk- again, despite the absolute and total absence of any evidence whatsoever of systemic fraud in any state, and only the normal, isolated anecdotes here and there that pop up in every election of anything at all being fishy, anywhere- of the popular vote being set aside, and Republican governors and legislatures sending sets of electors pledged to President Trump to Washington in place of those picked by the voters.

There is, again, literally no evidence of Democratic hanky-panky here. None at all. But where that sort of talk is concerned, as the lawyers say, res ipsa loquitur-  "the thing speaks for itself."

To contemplate setting aside the voters' verdict and sending an alternate set of electors to Washington is to conspire against democracy and the rule of law. I do not believe Donald Trump to be above that, and even though I don't think they would get away with it, I can only hope and pray that there are not enough partisan fanatics in any state who are in a position to pull it off that they try.