Neither Congress (Democrats in this case) nor Big Journalism has done its job during the past 4 years in one key way:

Neither has assembled all of the corruption and crimes of this presidency and president -- which go wide and deep -- and shown it, in context, to the public.

The impeachment of Trump, while justified, was based on just one of the countless examples of his corruption and crimes. The House Democrats chose -- deliberately chose -- not to collect everything and show it to the American people. Keep it simple, the leaders said.

There should have been a House special committee whose job was to do nothing but collect the evidence, aggregate everything publicly, and drive home -- again and again -- the reality of this overwhelmingly corrupt and criminal administration.

No appetite for doing it right.

Big Journalism, meanwhile, is convinced it reached spectacular success. A few individuals and their organizations did do great work -- but it was sporadic and uncoordinated.

It lacked context. It didn't begin to show the breadth and depth of the corruption and criminality.

Journalism reached new heights in a few cases, but it was in a business-as-usual mode for far, far too long -- normalizing a rogue president (and family and allies) until after the election.

The way to cover Trump was not to chase tweets. It was to show what he DID, not said.

Yes, the worst villains in our unfolding American story are Trump, his apparatchiks, and his cult -- which includes the great majority of the Republican Party. They have already come close to bringing down our republic. They may still succeed, because they won't quit trying.

And it's vital to call out for special attention the rancid contribution of the Murdoch family's Fox "News" and its ilk: propaganda outlets for the right-wing extremism that has become so grotesquely mainstream. For decades, Murdoch has flooded our civic ecosystem with poison.

The heroes of this story are people like Stacey Abrams, whose work in Georgia has given more of its citizens the voting rights that the Republican Party has fought so hard to suppress for so long.

The heroes are the voters themselves, who turned out i great numbers.

The fight to save our republic isn't remotely over. In many respects it's just beginning.

The forces waging war on our liberty are already planning new outrages. We have to work hard -- all of us -- and realize that this fight never ends.

We, the people, have to force our leaders -- the ones we needed so much in the past 4 years and longer -- to have the courage to exceed their own limited expectations.

We need them. And they need us.