Please devote ten seconds to watching this clip. Do you remember Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, with whom we all grew up in the days before cable television when an entire nation gathered around black-and-white television sets one Sunday night each year, tuned to CBS, parents and children watching “The Wizard of Oz” together? There were no four-letter words. No sex acts. No sexual entendres. No whining about racial, religious, ethnic, gender injustice. Just a simple story about a farm girl, a mean local lady who wanted to take away her dog, a twister, an emerald city with dwarfs, a happy ending where the evil witch all-dressed-in-black gets exactly what she had coming to her, and where our heroine learns that there is no place like home. That her parents and neighbors are more precious than any university professor or whatever.

Look, society never is perfect. There was plenty of corruption back then, too. The media had an agenda back then, too. But there was gentility, a recognition so soon after World War II that this is one heck of an amazing country, built on one heck of an amazing foundation of core principles. That we Americans are good people. So we listened to each other even when we disagreed. We kind-of respected each other even when we voted differently. We all voted on the same Election Day, not weeks before the main campaign spending educated us, and there was no ballot harvesting or felons voting or sixteen-year-olds voting. And we could go to movies with people who voted differently and play cards with them (if card-playing was your thing) or watch ball games with them.

It was a time when television’s weekly show about cops was not about their racism, their hatred of children, their gun-giddy readiness to shoot innocent boys like poor Michael Brown of Ferguson who pleaded “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” (as if…). Rather, it was Car 54, Where Are You? where Officer Muldoon, the only cop who could carry a melody in the 53rd Precinct, got forgotten in the butcher’s freezer the day before the “barbershop quartet” competition, even as guest judge Jan Murray had  a nervous breakdown after hearing two hundred consecutive performances of “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.”

So, back to the Cowardly Lion. There he is, clutching at his tail, and desperately fearfully proclaiming:

“I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do. I do.”

And that image is all I could think of, now that the Mueller Report finally has been submitted to the Attorney General of the United States. There are the Cowardly Lyin’ — Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters and all those others who are doomed to melt one of these days with or without a bucket of water generating the chemical reaction — and they all are clutching desperately at their tails all weekend pleading in so many words:

“I do believe in collusion. I do believe in collusion. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do believe in collusion. I do believe in collusion. I do. I do. I do. I do.”

Clearly, those of us on the conservative side of the Witch Hunt/Collusion Hoax aisle have known for two years that Donald Trump did not collude with Putin to beat Hillary Clinton. She lost for many reasons, including but not limited to:

1. She is easy to despise. She just is. Her fake laugh. The way she falsely would open her eyes wider, broadly smile, and point to someone in the audience. (The “audience,” not the “crowd.”) So utterly phony. She just is easy not to like. Maybe it’s not even her fault. Other liars still have popularity. Obama was likable to half the country. But with Hillary,even her backers never liked her. The moment she lost power after her electoral defeat, they all jumped in, and the knives came out. Donna Brazile attacked her. Kirsten Gillibrand, who rode her pantsuits-belts to the Senate, attacked. It is just one of those things. Hillary had power and control for a brief period, but she was not liked.
2. She failed to campaign where she needed to campaign. She blew off the Midwest and rural white ethnic Catholic workers. She made clear that her targets were African Americans, Latinos and other Hispanic Americans, Gays and Lesbians and Thespians and Transgendered. That is, she filled her Basketful of Intersectional Adorables — and she forgot that the rest of us were out there. And when she called us “Deplorables,” them wuz fighting words.
3. She is corrupt, and she has been known for public corruption for at least three decades. A TV network could run six seasons of crime episodes just based on her public career. The Rose Law Firm billing records. Whitewater. Travelgate. Getting rapists off and laughing about it. Cattle Futures. Landing in Bosnia amid heavy gunfire — when in fact the TV on-site reportage showed it calmer than a Christmas Eve around the yule log, with a bunch of sweet little girls giving her flowers. Lying that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary when she in fact was born before the guy gained mountain-climbing fame. (Really, who lies about how they got their name?) Let’s leave Vince Foster out of this, and return to what we do know with certainty: Her roles in threatening some of #MeToo Bill’s victims among Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, and Monica Lewinsky, while publicly mocking them. Her trip to the Middle East and warmly hugging Suha Arafat (Yasser’s “beard” spouse) after Mrs. Arafat made a speech accusing Jews of poisoning the water supply.
4. And then the corruption reappeared for a New Generation Who Knew Not Hillary. The 33,000 missing emails — all about wedding dresses and yoga. (Like she knows from yoga? She never made it to the POTUS position, and it is doubtful she ever made it to the Lotus position.) Benghazi. And sending Susan Rice all over the Sunday talk shows blaming it on a YouTube clip seen by six people. The Clinton Foundation. The secret $150,000 speeches to Wall Street insiders behind closed doors. The hand-over of our plutonium. Her people working in cahoots with the media, handing her questions that would be asked later at debates, coordinating news reports. Loretta Lynch with Bill at the tarmac discussing golf and grandchildren. Comey and the whitewash.
5. Jill Stein and the Green Party slashed into her votes, as Ralph Nader had done to Al Gore in 2000.

None of this had anything to do with Putin or Russia. She simply blew it. She lost it just as she lost previously to Obama. Republicans of course cannot stand her, but Democrats loathe her, too. That’s just the way life worked out for her.

For two years, she and the Democrats have blamed Hillary’s loss on anything they could point to: the Electoral College. Jim Comey briefly reopening the email investigation when the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal revealed Huma Abedin emails in his laptop. She blamed the media. She launched a vitriolic attack, blasting the stupidity of White women who voted for Trump because they supposedly were coerced by their husbands, sons, fathers, uncles, nephews, the UPS man in the brown shorts, the male postal carrier, the male teenager at the supermarket check-out counter, and Thor, Spider Man, Batman, Superman, and the Green Hulk. White women were just too stupid not to realize that their Identity Politics interests as women aligned them with the likes of Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, Ilhan Omar, and the ever-loaaaaathsome Joy Behar.

But it always came back to “Trump must have colluded with Putin. That’s the only he could have won. He colluded with Russia.” This — from the Secretary of State who gave the Russians a big red “reset” button and whose President whispered: “Tell Vladimir.… After my election, I’ll have more flexibility.”

The allegation that Trump had colluded with Putin, never made any sense to fair-minded observers. The man has been a public American patriot for decades. Just google old Trump appearances on Oprah, Letterman, Leno. All his years in public life he had been complaining about how America gets the short end of the stick on trade deals and how we have been led mostly by amateurs. Those of us who figured Trump out years ago knew he was just kidding when he said publicly at one of his news conferences, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’ll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” He was just kidding! That is Trump’s snarky sense of unscripted humor. If he were serious, for goodness sakes, he would not have said it in public. He would have done like Podesta and met secretly with Russians. And yet all the Left Mediacracy went into a frenzy! Collusion!

The only collusion that was robust in the past decade, in which a country secretly colluded with political partisans of another country to try swinging a national election, was when Obama and John Kerry plotted and secretly colluded with Leftists in Israel to swing the 2015 Israeli national election from Prime Minister Netanyahu over to a tripartite coalition of Israeli leftist parties, outright socialist parties, and Arab parties that were running on platforms to terminate Israel. Obama and Kerry secretly sent our tax dollars — State Department funds — to bolster the anti-Netanyahu forces in the weeks leading up to the vote. So they knew what collusion is, and they projected their own wrongful and probably illegal behavior onto Trump.

I do feel bad for Trump. He has great mettle, is rich as can be, has had an apparently happy and meaningful life, is loved deeply by as many people as hate him deeply — a phenomenon that I can say, with first-hand knowledge, is even better than “just fine” — and continues to be the leader of the free world. So it may sound strange to “feel bad” for Trump. But the guy never got a day’s break in office. No honeymoon. From Day One they have hounded him and lied about him, dating back to that despicableTime Magazine Day One lie about the Martin Luther King bust in the Oval Office. He made the terrible mistake of starting his Presidency by appointing and trusting all the “recommended” Republican aides and the “safe picks.” So he had good people like Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer respectively as his Chief of Staff and Press Spokesman, but neither was cut out for the onslaught that ensued. He relied more than he should have on Paul Ryan, who many Republicans thought was going to be a dramatic improvement over John Boehner, and that reliance failed the President. He picked respected people like James Mattis, more a Democrat in ideology, as his Defense Secretary and Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State, both good men but the wrong people to serve in a Trump Administration. And of course his most cataclysmic mistake: naming a wonderful world-class conservative United States Senator from Alabama to be his Attorney General, a pick that might have been perfect in a different era, but that could not have been more disastrous for the here and now, opening the door to the Great Collusion Hoax of 2016-2019, disrupting two years of the Trump presidency, and costing the GOP a precious Senate seat in the balance.

Now this phase of the Witch Hunt ends. Mueller has submitted his report. We soon will know more. And in the meantime we are treated to watching Pelosi, Schiff, Maxine Waters, Nadler, and the rest of them each rubbing their tails, pleading, begging:

“I do believe in collusion. I do believe in collusion. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do believe in collusion. I do believe in collusion. I do. I do. I do. I do.”