Over the weekend, I was at the Tucson Book Festival, where I was on panels with both Adam Schiff and Alexander Vindman. It was great to be able to say to their faces what I’ve been saying online for a long time: thanks. I was able to commend Schiff for his work, preparation, and determination in the first impeachment trial, and I was able to tell Vindman how grateful I am that my dad—a holocaust survivor and partisan fighter who had grown increasingly despondent over America’s inability to see the growing threats against our democracy—lived long enough to hear the words, “Here, right matters.” (I also complained to Vindman that I’ve tried the line here, right matters on my 13 year-old daughter at least a hundred times and it hasn’t worked once.)

It’s rare that taking a side at a historical point of inflection is proven to be the definitively correct move in such short order, but Schiff’s warnings about an un-throttled Trump played out on January 6, and the seriousness of the infamous “perfect phone call” between Trump and Ukraine’s Zelensky, sadly, couldn’t be more obvious. On Wednesday, we’ll see some hypocrisy bordering on farce as the very politicians who stood by Trump during the first impeachment will give a standing ovation to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he delivers a virtual address to Congress. But these days, we’ll take any defense of liberal democracy over party that we can get. Among the other unintended outcomes of his horrific war of choice, Putin actually managed to unify Congress.

+ Here’s a memo to remind you that not everyone got the memo. Leaked Kremlin Memo to Russian Media: It Is ‘Essential’ to Feature Tucker Carlson. (Carlson is now being rebroadcast on Russian and Chinese television. We finally came up with an effective way to punish our enemies.)