I’ll raise a quiet glass to Robert Mueller here. In the public mind, he was first the messianic savior of democracy and then an emblem of inadequacy and institutional failure — and both those visions did him a disservice.

He tried to do the right thing in a principled way. His effort failed, and we’ve paid dearly for that failure. The failure was his, but also all of ours to share: for every one of his choices that I can second-guess, I can name half a dozen places where others failed to hold up their/our end of the bargain, took the work he handed off and dropped it flat.

He failed, but he tried his damndest — and that’s more than I can say for a lot of folks in the USA over the last 10 years.