In Kenneth Grahame's classic The Wind in the Willows the manorial home of Toad, a flawed but endearing aristocrat, is invaded and occupied by a mob of weasels, ferrets and stoats. These unattractive species of an animal underclass are from the despised and feared Wild Wood, a dark, lawless place where civilised and cultured creatures like Toad and his noble friends Mole, the Rat and the Badger never go.

With a surprise attack (eerily suggestive of the unexpected attack on the Capitol), the weasels, ferrets and stoats (eerily suggestive of the MAGA ruffian-insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol) storm into Toad Hall. Toad's mansion is eerily reminiscent, in its dignified magnificence, of the Capitol.

Then, the behaviour of the wild-eyed scum-rodents once they are inside palatial Toad Hall is so very like the behaviour of the invaders inside the Capitol. There is much vulgar wallowing in the luxury of the surroundings.

The Capitol's romping invaders, narcissistically pleased with themselves and their visigothery, engaged in an orgy of selfie-taking. You can tell in The Wind in the Willows (it is here at my elbow and I have been re-reading it, with joy, for the umpteenth time) the verminous, romping Wild Wooders (Grahame's label for them) are engaging in the behavioural equivalents of boastful selfie-taking. But of course selfies were not dreamed of the in the imagination of Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) when he wrote his masterpiece, first published in 1908.

Of course it is the essence of The Wind in the Willows that as well as telling a beloved-by-children-of-all-ages tale of the adventures of engaging characters it is simultaneously a book of eternal truths about humans, our foibles and flaws. Grahame's depiction of the Wild Wooders' invasion was based on his own alarm at the threats he felt sure barbarians posed for civilisation as he knew it.

And the book's hero, the Badger, (shy, modest and egoless, but decent, fearless and wise) is surely Grahame's idealisation of the kind of political leader he, Grahame, yearned for.

Me too. All of my life I have waited, wistfully, for a true Badger to emerge among my country's leaders. Alas, though, Australian public-political life remains the domain of weasels, ferrets and stoats.

It is a small consolation (not a consolation at all, really) that those of us who could always see and feel Donald Trump was an awful human being, have been vindicated by last week's icing on the cake of his vile presidency.

Let us spare a charitable thought, then, for those now horrified, thinking Americans for whom a Trump presidency seemed a good idea at the time (at the election of 2016). How their remorse gnaws at them now! The testimonies of the remorse-gnawed are all over the online places where I do my everyday reading about politics and life. It is a phenomenon of these heady days and is, somehow, a kind of columnist/commentator's contemporary art form. We may not see its like again and so should study and celebrate it while we can.

Here is a little of a fine example of it just written by Rod Dreher an ultra-conservative, throbbingly-Christian columnist with The American Conservative.

It is one of the proofs of the uncanny openness of my ever-inquiring mind (an important quality in a columnist) that my voracious everyday online reading includes reading The American Conservative.

Personally left-leaning and liberal myself I seldom agree with anything very much any of its contributors contributes. And yet, my mind insists, it is masturbatory to only ever read what one knows one will agree with. Then, too, some of the conservatives of American Conservative do think and write entertainingly and with their hearts sincerely on their sleeves. Here is a little of dismayed Dreher's heartfelt apology.

"What happened last week at the Capitol, and the president's role in it, must be firmly repudiated by Congress ... And Congress should make it impossible for him ever again to run for president," he wrote

"Along those lines I owe the Never Trumpers an apology. They were right all along. I did not vote for Trump, but I was pleased to see conservative populism rising within the Republican Party ... The president was frequently embarrassing and foolish, but I figured that if the only choices were Trump, the old-line GOP, or the increasingly extreme Democratic Party, then we could tolerate his boobery. The system was strong enough to contain him, I figured.

"I was right about a lot of that ... But what I did not recognise until last Wednesday was how crazy Trump and Trumpism had made a lot of people in this country. What I did not foresee is that Trump would normalise cult thinking on the Right. I regret not taking the Never Trump folks more seriously back in the day ... I am saying that the things that the Never Trumpers said about not making a deal with this devil were true, or at the very least more truthful than I gave them credit for at the time. And for that, I am sorry."

Surely all of us who have ever been hopelessly wrong in our judgements of an important anyone or anything in public and private life will understand and share Rod Dreher's pain.