"A little somethin' you can't take off."

    "But I do have one question," Aldo the Apache asks the Jew Hunter at the end of "Inglourious Basterds. "When you get to your little place on Nantucket Island, I 'magine you're gonna take off that handsome-lookin' S.S. uniform of yours, ain'tcha?... That's what I thought. Now that I can't abide... I mean, if I had my way... you'd wear that goddamn uniform for the rest of your pecker-suckin' life."

    Quentin Tarantino's violent revenge fantasy about World War II ends up with the Nazi villain having a swastika carved on his forehead, or as Lt. Raine puts it: "a little somethin' you can't take off."

    I thought of that moment when Ronna McDaniel was trounced out of NBC News after four days trying to pass as a journalist. The former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee thought she could shed her Trump-coddling, election-denying, democracy-shredding raiment and simply rejoin polite society. And, sadly, the out-of-touch NBC brass hoped she could too, briefly. Imagined McDaniel might provide some of that good old fashioned Red State perspective, make the case for lies and delusion, maybe snag a few viewers drifting away from Fox News.

     But legitimate NBC journalists rebelled, on air. Thank God. That's how it should be. Some things cannot be forgiven. Maybe casting a ballot for Trump two or three times, in the privacy of the voting booth, can be reframed as a secret shame. But at some point, as you rise up the ladder in the pyramid of cowards, quisling and craven opportunists, you lose the chance to walk away from your treachery. At some point you end up in the dock in a plexiglas booth.

     And if you're hung up on my comparing Nazis to MAGAzis, well, tough. Get over it. Or don't. The common element is clear — an identical ability to suspend decent moral values. To be blind to ethical duty. To confuse right and wrong. To hurt innocents and call it purity.

      Those who love America should, at some point, state the obvious: that denying the rule of law is unforgivable. That being a dupe in service of a fraud, year in and year out, in spite of clear, enormous evidence, is unforgivable. That rebelling against our country is unforgivable. Betraying our nation to despotic foreign enemies is unforgivable. 

     I'm sick of the media pretending otherwise. Pretending there is a balance. There is no balance. Joe Biden isn't perfect: he's old. He's a political hack. But he also could live to be 105 and he would still never become a seditionist. Never become a liar, bully, fraud and traitor. There is no comparison. The Trump enormity is clear, or should be clear, and those who don't get it, who willfully refuse to understand, should know they are following him down. 

     They should know that when he loses — as he will — they lose too. They have already lost. Now and forever. They can't just shower off their infamy and try to reclaim a spot at the table of the decent. Not at my table anyway. They can take their red baseball cap and stow it, lovingly, in a closet. And while it's a shame Aldo Raine can't take his gleaming bowie knife and carve, "MAGA" on their foreheads, it will still be there, nevertheless, for those of us who can't help but see it. Some stains never wash off. If you don't like it, well, you should have thought of that when you began betraying your country. Too late now.