A few short years ago, Sally Yates would have been burned at the stake for her crimes against humanity as a prosecutor.  But one cool trick changed everything. Betray your duty as acting Attorney General, play to the institutionally ignorant resistance, and be recreated overnight as a hero of the miserable, who know nothing about anything you’ve ever done before. It’s like one-hour Martinizing, except it didn’t take that long.

All anyone needed to know was that Yates used her moment in the sun of being fired by Darth Cheeto for using her interim post to embarrass him under the guise of being all justice-y, and every bad thing she ever did magically disappeared. Now, Yates gets to pretend she’s a warrior.

Over the course of our nation’s history, we have faced inflection points — times when we had to decide who we are as a country and what we stand for. Now is such a time. Beyond policy disagreements and partisan gamesmanship, there is something much more fundamental hanging in the balance. Will we remain faithful to our country’s core values?

Our founding documents set forth the values that make us who we are, or at least who we aspire to be. I say aspire to be because we haven’t always lived up to our founding ideals — even at the time of our founding. When the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were being enslaved by their fellow Americans.

Not to be too technical, Sally, but what about those hundreds of thousand of African Americans being enslaved by the Bureau of Prisons while you were signing off on the conspiracy indictments?

What are the values that unite us? You don’t have to look much further than the Preamble to our Constitution, just 52 words, to find them.

Sovereign citizens totally agree with you, Sally. For the rest of us, including people with a modicum of legal knowledge, we not only have to look a bit further, but think a bit harder. But then, you’re not playing to us, are you? We already know your game.

Our forefathers packed a lot into that single sentence. Our Bill of Rights is similarly succinct in guaranteeing individual liberties — rights that we have come to take for granted but without vigilance can erode and slip away, such as freedom of speech (our right to protest and be heard); freedom of religion (the essential separation between how one worships and the power of the state); and freedom of the press (a democratic institution essential to informing the public and holding our leaders accountable).

Nice of you to feel so strongly about the Bill of Rights. Shame you violated them at every possible opportunity while at the Department of Justice. Were you unaware of their existence until after you bought “How To Pander for Dummies”?

The rule of law depends not only on things that are written down, but also on important traditions and norms, such as apolitical law enforcement. That’s why Democratic and Republican administrations alike, at least since Watergate, have honored that the rule of law requires a strict separation between the Justice Department and the White House on criminal cases and investigations.

Actually, the rule of law is precisely what’s written down, rather than whatever shit rattles around in people’s heads. It’s almost as if you’re about to claim ownership of some ridiculous nonsense and pass it off as truth. Oh crap.

And there is something else that separates us from an autocracy, and that’s truth. There is such a thing as objective truth. We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications.

So Darth Cheeto is a moronic lying sack of shit destroying America. And Sally Yates says, “if he can pull this off, why can’t I?”