We’ve been watching the final season of Peaky Blinders. Left-wing gangster Tommy Shelby is pretending to cozy up to Oswald Moseley and other fascists while spying on them. He stayed up all night typing up his notes of the meeting so he wouldn’t forget anything important. That’s how I feel after today’s hearing. It ended, then I sat down at the computer and let it rip for an hour.

It was Adam Schiff day. The post title comes from his description of the destructive impact of the BIg Lie on the body politic It has a giant tumor with bad hair and a fake tan. It needs to be excised but it can only be done by people who voted for him but feel hoodwinked. The question is: how many of them are there?

This was the best hearing thus far. I wish it had run in prime time because there was so much great testimony. It featured two star witnesses: the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, Rusty Bowers and former Fulton County, Georgia election worker, Shaye Moss.

I don’t mean to minimize B Raffi and his trusty Georgia sidekick Gabriel Sterling, but we’ve seen a lot of them since the election. They were good witnesses, but the day belonged to Bowers and Moss.

I feel comfortable calling Rusty Bowers a genuine conservative. He was fooled by Trump’s fool’s gold until he was asked to help the Impeached Insult Comedian steal the election. He refused to do so without the evidence that Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis claimed they had and would provide. They never did.

Trump attacked Bowers right before the hearing, which led to the Arizonan calling him a liar. That wasn’t easy for the genial Mormon lawmaker. There’s such a thing as Mormon nice but we saw steel and determination in the face of corrosive calumnies.

I googled Bowers during his testimony. He turns out to be a trained sculptor and painter in the Remington vein. Here’s an example of his work:

Bowers essentially took a chisel to Trump during his hour in the spotlight. He came off as an earnest and honest man. His blinders came off when Trump insisted he help him steal the election in Arizona. “I do not want to be a winner by cheating,” he told Trump who has cheated every day of his life.

The final witness of the day was Shaye Moss. She’s no longer an election worker because of the smears against her by Team Trump. She and her mother Lady Ruby Freeman were the ones who supposedly stole the election for Joe Biden with their magical suitcase and flash drives. These were some of the wackier lies told by Rudy Giuliani and his minions.

All the Georgia witnesses refuted the magical suitcase nonsense so well that it gave me an earworm:

The smears and slurs against Shaye and Ruby would have destroyed the lives of lesser people but Black women are tough. tough. tough. They’ve been subjected to a torrent of racist abuse from the fine people who support Trump. A Trump mob even rushed Shaye’s grandma’s house hoping to find Shaye and Ruby there. What kind of people do shit like that? It makes me want to toast marshmallows as one of the Trumper diners so beloved by the MSM burns to the ground.  Fuck those people.

The fundamental decency of Shaye Moss, Ruby Freeman, Rusty Bowers, Brad Raffenspenger, and Gabriel Sterling stands in stark contrast to the Kaiser of Chaos and his minions. In her taped testimony, Lady Ruby Freeman nailed her situation:

Ruby Freeman: "The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small-business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton Co. run an election in the middle of the pandemic."

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 21, 2022

The plight of Moss and Freeman infuriated me. They’re just ordinary people whose good names and reputations were trashed by a power drunk former president* and his literally drunk shyster.

The cause of all this Trumpy evil is the electoral college. If we were a normal country, we would directly elect our president. The electoral college is the source of our current misery and deserves to be set ablaze like that mythical Trumper diner I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, the electoral college is real and is a clear and present danger to our democracy.

Finally, today’s hearing evoked memories of the Army-McCarthy hearings in which lawyer Joseph Welch verbally slit Joe McCarthy’s throat and left him bleeding on the floor. Like Mayor 9/11, Tailgunner Joe was a drunk and a liar. Like Trump, McCarthy had no decency whatsoever.

The last word goes to REM with a song I’ve used before, but it fits the mess we’re in: