It was a friend who pointed out that we are living in a transition period like that in the Wizard of Oz movie, when what was once black and white becomes technicolor. Even this soon after the inauguration of a new U.S. president, it is seeming like what we came through was so foreign and bizarre. Could it really be that we lived for four full years with Trump actually running our country?

Now comes the extraordinary report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence this week, a new resource mandated by law as a consequence of earlier probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The declassified document shows us that everything the Mueller investigation attempted to reveal and report was, indeed, true in spades, and that Putin did not back away after 2016, but tried just as hard in 2020 to influence the U.S. election in Trump’s favor over Biden.

The current GOP thinks that’s OK. The moral decay of that once proud political party, including many of its fellow travellers like the self-serving fakers calling themselves leaders of the evangelical movement and the fake Fox News and related operations passing themselves off as credible media, is a sad thing to see, indeed. They appear to have every intention of continuing their dissembling of the U.S. population even as hard core evidence like this week’s report show the extent to which they’ve been compromised by a hostile foreign power that seeks the devolution and destruction of the world’s most important democracy. Indeed, they’ve joined that cause.

Most of what is in this week’s DNI report was known and shared in classified briefings that were available to many high level officials of both parties in the last year or more. Yet while top Democrats were compelled to operate within the strict confines of confidentiality, the GOP leaders were happy to know it was all being kept secret so they could proceed with impunity to be treasonous collaborators with the Russians and their dissembling operations, most of which remain intact to this day.

There was a time when anything approaching the revelations in this week’s report would cause an enormous uproar in our land, notably including from political conservatives. But the bar of morality has sunk lower among Republican leaders today than at perhaps at any time in American history. They simply don’t care that they are in an active alliance with those who have been working their entire political lives for the destruction of the very foundational principles of democracy in the U.S.

These Republicans are now engaged in one of the most active and comprehensive efforts to restrict access to the polls to Americans in history, pressing 243 obstructionist laws in 43 U.S. states right now. It can be assured that they are getting the total support of existing covert Russian networks in doing this, as well.