Some plain speaking about the Squirrel-Hair phenomenon

Here are a couple of examples of razor-sharp incisiveness regarding S-H's impact.

From Leon Wolf at Red State:

Trump’s candidacy, and the existential threat it poses to the conservative movement and the Republican party as a whole, has irretrievably poisoned the race – not just because Trump has lowered both the intellectual and rhetorical bar below where it has ever been before – but because the justified panic his rise has induced has caused a series of ugly, unforced errors by the other candidates, who have found themselves facing the pressure of jockeying aggressively against each other while constantly looking over their shoulders at the Trump menace.

Peter Heck at The American Thinker:

If conservative pundits like Ann Coulter and Breitbart's John Nolte want to make fools of themselves, so be it.  But as a Christian and by consequence a political conservative, I want no part of the Donald Trump campaign.

I admit to being initially amused by The Donald's antics, and delighted by the fits he was giving the mainstream press and Republican establishment so desperate to eliminate him.  But the longer this reality TV show has dragged on, the more frustrated I have become with this mindless game far too many Christians and conservatives seem to be playing.

Because they rightly despise the Republican establishment,whose repeated capitulations to the godless left allow our country to be sucked helplessly into economic and moral oblivion, these conservatives pretend that simply attacking that Republican establishment makes Donald Trump something other than a liberal charlatan. 

But he isn't.  Trump copied the immigration position that had been espoused for four years by Senator Ted Cruz, spoke it in racially inflammatory terms during his presidential campaign announcement, and the media's subsequent inability to browbeat Trump into an apology inspired and enthused a Republican electorate beyond exhausted with wimp candidates like Mitt Romney and John McCain. 

They gravitated toward Trump's politically incorrect manner.  So be it.  But as refreshing as Trump's boorishness towards these irritating engines of media manipulation and political sophistication may be, it doesn't erase this one critical morsel of truth: Trump is not a conservative.

I fully understand that it gains the conservative movement precisely nothing in our effort to reverse the damage being inflicted upon our civilization by the left to either nominate someone who will lose to a liberal in the general election or compromise with a leftist agenda once in office.  That's why I'm not campaigning for John Kasich or Jeb Bush.  It's why I wasn't a supporter of Chris Christie or Lindsey Graham. 

But I remain shocked that so many supposed conservatives think it would be somehow preferable to nominate a liberal like Trump.  If Kasich or Bush is unacceptable because both would compromise with liberals, wouldn't it stand to reason that Trump is more unacceptable since he is one?

I actually take a bit of issue with Heck's last assertion. S-H isn't a liberal, either.  He doesn't approach life ideologically. He lacks the intellectual depth for it.

But his larger point is spot on. There's a certain breed of right-of-center figure who used to be worthy of respect but who has recklessly conflated rage at the ossified power structure of the Republican party and the way that plays out in, for instance, Congress with some kind of positive meaning to be gleaned from Squirrel-Hair's rise. There is no positive meaning.

Heck names some names, and he nails culprits who deserve a calling-out, but for my money the worst is Laura Ingraham. I honestly do not know what has happened to her. In the past year-plus, she has quite pointedly put "populism" and "nationalism" front and center among the values she strives to extoll on her show. She's become a two-note johnny, obsessing over trade and immigration, even going so far as to characterize foreign policy as a back-burner area of concern. She says the American people are tired of US involvement in middle-east conflicts, as if ISIS, tensions between Russia and Turkey in Syria, and Iran's seizing of every opportunity to humiliate the US can be ignored.

Yesterday, her guest was Newt Gingrich, and they were having quite a cackle over how supposedly out of touch National Review is.

This is the poison of which Wolf speaks. These people have turned their back on the principles that once drove them, and they are doing grave harm to the prospects for those principles being able to be applied to American life.

It's hard to work up any forgiveness for that.