Please Think It Over and Stop

 It is not really surprising that Trumpist lawyer Lin Wood is reported as calling for martial law to keep Trump in office,  accusing the chief justice of being a murderer and child molester,  and demanding  the arrest and execution of the vice president.  One can find a lawyer somewhere who will say just about anything one might imagine no matter how nasty or absurd. The surprising and unpleasant thing is that, based on a few searches on DuckDuckGo, there are people out there taking Wood seriously and liking what he is doing.The man may be nuts, using the Nazi and communist technique of the big lie, or both, but he has a following.  So does  Sidney Powell. So do General Flynn and a bunch of other so-called conservatives who are advocating or coming close to advocating the overthrow of the republic -  to save Donald Trump for gosh sake. 

The madness needs to stop.  The election is over. Biden won.  A belief in a conspiracy having stolen  the election from Trump would need an assumption that  the conspirators were slick enough to bring the thing off without leaving  evidence anyone can find of what they had done.  It now probably also would need  to include the entire Supreme Court, dozens of other judges, Bill Barr, Republican secretaries of state and other election officials in several states, the FBI and homeland security, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, several voting software and hardware companies, people  who did hand recounts in  various states, the Republican governor of Georgia, and the Republican controlled legislatures in several states among the conspirators or their fellow travelers and cowardly enablers.  That’s a hard sell.

Of course many people  still  think the election was won by Trump and stolen by Biden, millions of people according to polls. So given that a person believes that, what should he do?  By now he has only two main choices - realize that his side failed to prove its case and accept the (to him) bogus results or join those who seek to save Trump by at least partially overthrowing the republic.  The answer should be easy for any patriotic conservative.  He should accept the results irrespective of whether he likes or trusts them.  Preserving the republic and the constitution is more important than whether Trump or Biden will be in the White House.

Trump’s attempts to get people to believe the election was stolen and to fight  the results in court were foolish, wrongheaded, and disgraceful, but they were not an attack on the republic. What has happened since  December 14^th is.  Any politician or person in the media who has participated in that stuff has behaved as an enemy of the republic.  That will go double for participants in or supporters of the clownish and doomed attempted coup planned for Wednesday in the congress.  It will be very difficult to take those who are  part of that seriously as a patriots, believers in the rule of law, or supporters of the constitution for a long while. It will be easy to laugh them off as silly scoundrels. They will have deserved it. For their own good as well as the country’s, they should think about that and change their plans. Trump will be gone soon and with  him the short term political benefits of playing along with him. The disgrace from going through with this thing would stay with them much longer.