Stealing Trump’s victory would be terrible thing

not give us license to casually undermine the integrity of the election.

Besides, Trump is doing a fine job of that without Stein’s help.

You’d think, what with recruiting the political equivalents of Darth Vader and Victor Von Doom for his Cabinet and presumably ordering a new Oval Office rug with a giant golden “T” in the center, he’d be too busy for such things, but you’d be wrong. On Monday, Trump tweeted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

It was hardly the first time he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Not only is there zero evidence this massive fraud happened, but simple logic says that it could not. To be here illegally is to live off the grid, to be paid in cash, avoid interactions with police, steer clear of City Hall. Why would one such person — let alone millions — jeopardize the security of anonymity to cast a fraudulent vote?

It’s an idiotic idea. News organizations dutifully dubbed it “baseless,” too polite to say that his claim contained enough steer manure to fertilize Central Park.

And at this point, anyone who ever believed in an ideal called America should be unnerved.

A democracy is, in many ways, a fragile thing. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, it depends upon the “consent of the governed” — meaning not our support of every action a government takes, but rather, our willingness to believe in its integrity. It is from this that democratic government derives its power.

In a nation of 320 million people who share no one ancestry, culture or faith, it is also connective tissue. The idea that my vote matters no more — or less — than yours is the tie that binds an Inuit in Bethel, Alaska, to a Haitian refugee in Miami to an Irish Catholic in Boston to a Mexican-American in San Diego to a Muslim in Kansas City. It is the thing that makes us Americans.

And it’s the thing Trump burned down in his scorched-earth appeal to bigotry and resentment. Now, here comes Stein in a desperate bid to deny the electorate its appalling choice. Avatars of a demoralized left and a hateful right, they are alike in at least one respect: their apparent willingness to damage what they purport to love.

So we find ourselves at a no-win crossroads. Trump’s victory is a terrible thing.

Stealing it would be even worse.

The word “inappropriate” is increasingly used inappropriately. It is useful to describe departures from good manners or other social norms, such as wearing white after Labor Day or using the salad fork with the entree. But the adjective has become a splatter of verbal fudge, a weasel word falsely suggesting measured seriousness.

A French court has demonstrated how “inappropriate” can be an all-purpose device of intellectual evasion and moral cowardice. The court said it is inappropriate to do something that might disturb people who killed their unborn babies for reasons that were, shall we say, inappropriate.