We beat the Christmas rush by labeling candidate Donald Trump a pathological liar last September, though neither we nor the many others who made similar observations before the presidential election could prevent his election as our 45th president.

To what extent, if at all, Russian interference in that election may have influenced the outcome remains a mystery, which hasn’t stopped partisans on either end of America’s political spectrum from jumping to conclusions consistent with their ideological biases.

For those who remember the statesmanship some key politicians showed the last time a president did battle with our democratic institutions, the naked partisanship of the early response to Trump’s dishonesty was profoundly disheartening. If the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee could pretend to lead a congressional investigation while surreptitiously serving as a Trump stooge, as California’s Devin Nunes did, the most dire predictions of Trump’s disruptive effect on the American democratic experiment began to sound plausible.

Read more at The Boulder Daily Camera.