Schiff, Sounding the Alarm We Can All Hear Anyway

CONGRESSPERSON Adam Schiff suddenly became nationally famous for a time when he served as lead prosecutor in Donald Trump impeachment trial number one, as opposed to impeachment trial number two. (After a point, it becomes confusing trying to identify them individually. With Trump, one must distinguish between impeachment trials.) The first, you may recall, concerned the president's attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian govenment into providing damaging information, real or fabricated, against Joe Biden, by withholding essential military assistance to the Ukraine to use in their war against Russia, until such time as said information was provided. The second impeachment trial involved Trump attempting to overthrow the American government as a means of overturning the election after losing his reelection bid. Both, serious stuff. Schiff's prosecution presentation was so effective that when he concluded it, every Republican member of the Senate agreed that Trump had indeed tried to blackmail the Ukrainian president, but they still voted not guilty, for the incredible but fact based reason that he didn't get away with it, that his attempted blackmail failed. Attempted murderers, extortionists, bank robbers, and drug dealers should be so fortuate in being well understood.... Schiff, after what he went through, simply had to write a book. It simply had to be titled: "Midnight In Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy, and Still Could". Schiff does not reveal anything strikingly or shockingly new in his book, because all the striking, shocking material is already out there, available for the average American to either know, or ignore. That most Americans seem to be ignoring it Schiff uses as strong evidence for the "still could lose our democracy" part. Not only have we the people, most of us, not learned from the mistakes of our past, most of us are utterly unaware of their having happened, or do not care whether they happened, and, even if they are aware of them, have chosen to live in denial of them, or to downplay their importance. Trump's blackmail scheme, recorded on telephone, thus becomes a minor matter, as Trump said: "a perfect conversation" or a liberal hoax intended to hurt his reputation, and his attempt to overthrow the government by use of a violent insurrectionist mob after denying his election loss by lying about its true winner, over and over again, thus becomes simply a normal demonstration, or a tour of the Capitol, based on his election lie, which becomes a mere matter of opinion to which he and anyone else is entitled as part of their freedom and rights in the land of liberty. All this is alarming. All this is more than alarming. Trump's behavior, the behavior of his supporters, and the current state of American "democracy", such as it is, are all shockingly alarming. All Schiff does is recount the actual events, beginning with Trump's landslide election loss, to the present day. The big lie, the big insurrection, and the conservative Republican community's positive, supportive attitude towards it, constitute the entirety of the book. The old adage that reality is stranger than fiction has never been more true. Considering that Trump and most of his supporters are still alive and active, still in election loss denial, and still fully supportive of the big lie and the big insurrection, and that the rest of us still tolerate their (Trump's and his follower's) existence, forms the basis of how we almost lost American democracy, and how we still could, for real.