BY THE LIGHT OF BURNING MARTYRS.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass suggests that the senescent political class would like to make examples of all seventy million Trump voters as terrorists and insurrectionists.

Trump is gone. Many Americans want to move on. The people are worried about their jobs, whether they can get the vaccine, whether their children's schools will open.

The Democrats don't have the votes to convict him. Chief Justice John Roberts is not even presiding, as required by the Constitution for impeachments of sitting presidents. The job should fall to Vice President Kamala Harris as president of the Senate. But the Biden White House doesn't want her fingerprints on this, lest it backfire, so she steps back to allow Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont to preside.

Democrats want to keep Trump politically alive for their political reasons. But what are they?

We'll see. As of now it's on members of the opposition, whether as Republicans, Libertarians, or any other alignment to be calling for the reopening of the schools, the lifting of the quarantines on ordinary business, the restoration of live sports with live audiences, and the recall or impeachment of the dictatorial governors.  It might be easier to keep up the Trump-tinfoil-hat skeer.

Implicit in all of this are the threats and shaming of 74 million Trump voters if they dare question the legitimacy of mail-in voting, which helped Biden win the election and which the Democrats now seem bent on federalizing to their advantage, or any aspect of election security measures.

I'm on record here and now that absentee voting is not bad per se. Neither is mail-in voting. But requiring voters to produce identification is not voter suppression, verifying signatures on absentee and mail-in ballots is following the law, and legislatures establish election law.  I'm going to have more to say of that, but it's Sunday, and there's a sermon to preach.

If that makes me deplorable, make the most of it!

What is frightening is that Democrats and some of their corporate media allies have been busy conflating all Trump voters with "domestic terrorists." In a recent essay, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, by no means a conservative, asked: "What acts should be criminalized by new ‘domestic terrorism' laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because — just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws — their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition."

That brings me to the rather strange looking title of this post.  The chaplain of the Senate offered a false dilemma to the impeachment jury duly empaneled.

As he opened Tuesday's Senate trial with prayer, Senate Chaplain Barry C. Black said: "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

"Mighty God," Black continued. "Could it really be that simple?"

No, it was never simple. But this is more than simple power politics now.

And it should frighten us all.

That's the opening stanza of a James R. Lowell poem, "Once to Every Man and Nation."

It's also the opening stanza of a hymn of the same title, based on Lowell' but with different continuing stanzas in the traditional A-A-B-A' song form, and set to a draggy tune called "Ebenezer."  Perhaps that it's from a Baptist hymnal is fitting.  Those opening words might well be Aquarian, but it gets gloomy right quick.  The third stanza is a real morale-builder.

By the light of burning martyrs,
Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calv'ries ever
With the cross that turns not back;

New occasions teach new duties,
Ancient values test our youth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.

Every so often it's the youth testing the ancient values, and that generally does not turn out well.