In the Monty Python comedy movie The Holy Grail, the legendary King Arthur encounters a fierce opponent, the Black Knight, guarding a bridge and forbidding Arthur to pass over it.  Swords are drawn, and a duel ensues.  Soon, Arthur has cut off the knight's left arm and declares victory – but the knight refuses to concede, dismissing his severed arm as a mere flesh wound.  The battle then continues, during which the knight loses his right arm, then a leg, and finally his sole remaining limb.  Even at this stage, the Black Knight, now armless and legless, refuses to concede and threatens to bite Arthur.

One may laugh, but for my part, I admit to a grudging admiration – not for the Black Knight, but for the modern-day black knights of the Democratic Party.  They never give up; they never quit.  They (1) lost the election, (2) lost the recount, and (3) failed to dissuade the electors from violating their duty, and now they are on their last leg, resolutely determined to thwart the Republican majority from keeping their campaign promises.

It is imperative for the Republicans to break with their past tradition of weakness.  They must resist the temptation to reach across the aisle, lest their own arm be cut off.  They must, as did the fictional King Arthur, swing that sword one final time, and mercilessly cut off the sole remaining leg of their adversary, an implacable enemy who will have not the slightest hesitation to decapitate them given the remotest opportunity.

This is easier done than said – yes, that's right, easily done.  The Democrats are full of fury and bluster.  Their panic is palpable, and their rage is fanatical – but theirs is, to quote another famous Englishman, "sound and fury, signifying nothing."  They have no real power remaining – none except the power of falsehood, by which they intend to strike fear into the lion's heart of their victorious enemy.

Well might we have feared them, had the president-elect been a timid Jeb Bush or a John Kasich.  He is not.  And while Donald Trump is no king, he does have the insurmountable advantage of being real.  Not even the most taunting of Democrat jesters can any longer regard him as the joke they tried to make him out to be for the eighteen months or so of his candidacy.  Trump has proved them all the fools they are.

Trump's most sinister threats come not from Obama's lame duck treacheries, but from the weak-kneed doubters in the Senate, including McCain and Graham, without whose votes Trump will require Mike Pence to be the tie-breaker.

I have little doubt that Trump will be as merciless to the Democrats as they were to the Republicans in the passage of a massive health care law they did not bother even to read before passing.  Trump has already shown that he will not back down.

Neither, for their part, will the Democrats – ever.  They well recognize that they have everything to lose, and that they are about to lose it.

In that sense, I yield grudging admiration to the enemy – and yes, the Democrats are no longer merely opponents, but genuine enemies of the Constitution and of the ages-old culture that underlies it.  I am forced to admire their tenacity, their relentless insistence of fighting on, every inch of the way, even long after all their arms and legs have been cut off.

We must learn from them.