Instead of commenting on today's anniversary of the worst attack on the United States Capitol since 1814 (and the only one ever launched by American citizens) or how Congress is marking the occasion or President Joe Biden's rather forceful speech this morning, instead I am going to run the two columns from last year that expressed my own reactions to the outrage.

And I have only two words to add to all of it:

Never forget.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland gave a speech today to his fellow employees at the Department of Justice. The occasion was to mark tomorrow's anniversary of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and on American democracy. In essence, it was a progress report from the attorney general, and a defense of his own department's actions since. The speech broke no real news, but then it wasn't really designed to. Whether it will change any minds is doubtful, although it might at least give Garland the benefit of the doubt for another few months.

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Hopefully, as we approach the one-year anniversary of both the most serious attack on our democracy since the Civil War and the most serious attack on the U.S. Capitol since 1814, we may be about to enter a new phase of uncovering exactly what went wrong and holding those responsible to account. I say "may," because at this point nothing is guaranteed.

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Welcome back to the second part of our year-end awards column! If you missed it, please feel free to check out [Part 1], too.

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Welcome to the first installment of our year-end awards!

We do have to warn readers, right up front, that this is an insanely long article. If you're one of those "tl;dr" types of people, we would strongly advise you to go find a short listicle somewhere else, to read instead. Because this will be a marathon, not a sprint (as always).

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The Republican Party's descent into madness now appears to be complete. At this point their moral compass hasn't just broken down, they've thrown it overboard. The Republican Party is now completely morally bankrupt. The only thing that is even left to debate about this sad state of affairs is whether they had reached the bottom of the barrel months (or even years) ago, or whether they have only more recently arrived there.

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Republicans have never been particularly scrupulous about the fantastical political narratives they adapt in order to bamboozle the voters -- and that was even before the champion and master of lies came along and hijacked their party. Donald Trump may have driven the GOP to Crazytown, but it wasn't that far of a journey for them to take (to put this another way). Now conservatives in the media are attempting to do this again, and it really deserves some pushback.

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Today, the United States Senate staged a Kabuki vote for the benefit of one senator. It will probably come as no surprise to hear that Senator Joe Manchin was the reason for this doomed attempt to pass new voting rights legislation. This is, in fact, the second such Kabuki vote this year on the subject, the only difference being this time around the Senate voted on the compromise plan Manchin himself had drafted. And, just like before, it failed along strict party lines. The entire exercise was designed to prove to Manchin that this was exactly what was going to happen.

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Donald Trump made two types of legal news today. He filed suit against the House January 6th Select Committee in an attempt to block disclosure of White House records surrounding the attack on the U.S. Capitol, which will hinge on a very dubious "executive privilege" claim. But Trump is also sat down today for a video deposition in a case over Trump Tower guards' behavior towards a protest which happened when Trump first declared his bid for the presidency, back in 2015. These two separate cases bookend a real problem in America -- justice being delayed for so long it effectively becomes justice denied, just by running out the clock.

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The past two weeks were a prime example of why so many Americans are so disgusted and disillusioned with Washington politics. There were scary deadlines, meaningless drama, pointless partisanship, obstructionism, and ego-boosting all around. And at the end of the day, nothing really happened except we are all right back where we started from. What appeared to be a drama-filled few weeks of politics produced precisely zero result. Which is why so many citizens have just tuned out of the process entirely -- because it is usually frustratingly idiotic and nothing short of a massive waste of time.

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