To excerpt at length or just provide you the links?

That is the question concerning two important, cogent and exquisitely crafted anti-Squirrel-Hair pieces I've run across today: one by John Hawkins at Townhall and one by Jonah Goldberg at NRO.

The problem is that I'm not sure I could muster the discipline to say "that's enough" after giving you a taste of each.

The common theme of both is the authors' dismay at how people they had always admired and respected have swallowed - indeed, guzzled - the S-H Kool-Aid.

There's much of supreme importance in each essay beyond that, but that's the essence. It's something at the fore of my thoughts these days as well.

So, as they say in the blogosphere, read the whole thing. What I will provide is the section of each in which they get to the core of their respective arguments.

Hawkins:

I don’t understand how so many good Christians can support an adulterer who claims to also be a Christian, but also says he’s never had a reason to ask God for forgiveness.

I don’t understand how so many rock-ribbed conservatives can support an obvious flimflam man whose positions seem to change almost day-by-day and will undeniably change even more if he’s nominated.

I don’t understand how so many parents can support a man who’s a horrible example for their children. Yes, Trump’s had a great business career, but his character is at the bottom of the barrel. He’s crude and arrogant and he treats other people like garbage. 

I don’t understand how so many people who say they only care about illegal immigration can support a guy who was pushing amnesty three years ago and is in favor of citizenship for illegal aliens now when a stronger candidate on illegal immigration, Ted Cruz, is in the race. 

I don’t understand how so many people who care about the Constitution can support a man who’s probably never even read it and wouldn’t care about anything in it if he did. 

I don’t understand how so many fundamentally decent people who were furious at Bill Clinton for degrading the presidency can back a man who mocks the disabled, lies as often as both of the Clintons put together, brags about sleeping with married women and who said, “it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”

I don’t understand how so many smart people can back a guy who’s too lazy to study anything beyond the basics of any policy issue. Donald Trump doesn’t seem to know any more about the policies of the country he’d be running today than he did the day he got into the race. Trump knows the results of every poll in America that are favorable to him; so why can’t he take the time to learn something about the government policies of the nation he wants to lead?

Most of all, I don’t understand how so many good people can support a hateful, fundamentally dishonest, divisive man who’s turned friends and allies in the conservative movement against each other and who has shown over and over that he doesn’t care about anything but himself. 

If all these people were phony, insincere, dumb or corrupt, that would be an easy explanation, but I know that doesn’t describe the vast majority of people who back Trump. Most of them are intelligent, well-meaning people. If the only choice were between Trump and some horrible establishment candidate no one wanted, I might understand at least a little bit, but it’s not.

Goldberg:

Driving home from the airport on Wednesday, I happened to hear part of Sean Hannity’s interview of Newt Gingrich on the radio. Gingrich, whom I like and respect, said something along the lines of “Trump’s waging a campaign of high policy” or “He’s winning voters over with policy at the highest level.” I can’t give you the exact quote because when I heard it, I almost crashed into a mailbox. Gingrich added, more plausibly, that Trump is running perhaps the most nationalist campaign since Andrew Jackson.

This prompted a good question from Hannity: “What’s the difference between a nationalist and a conservative?”

Newt answered that a nationalist wakes up every morning asking, “What can I do to further America’s interests?” (or something along those lines). He then added that a conservative is more likely to have bought into the “post–World War II international order.” The implication being that conservatives are kind of like cookie-pushing internationalists who care more about going to Davos than fighting for America. This is largely the kind of argument you hear from Laura Ingraham, who at least seems to believe it. Then Gingrich went on and on about how terrible the U.N. is.

Now, again, I like Gingrich. But this is flim-flammery. It would’ve been nice if Sean had asked Newt to explain how that answer reflects on Gingrich, given that the former speaker almost single-handedly got NAFTA passed. Moreover, the idea that, say, National Review’s opposition to Trump is grounded in — or even related to — our desire to protect the United Nations is insane.

What dismays me is I have to believe Gingrich knows this. He’s smarter than I am and better read. It’s stuff like this that makes me feel like checking under Newt’s bed for the remnants of the giant space pod that took over his body.

It was either Aristotle or Larry Storch who said, “You can’t be disappointed in your enemies, only your friends.” And that brings me to my friend Bill Bennett. I’ve known, admired, and defended Bill for years. He’s a mensch and a fighter of noble causes.

I am a frequent listener to Bill’s radio show, mostly when perambulating my canines. Bill is not entirely pro-Trump, but he’s certainly anti-anti-Trump. Bill says concerns about Trump amount to “Trumpophobia.” Last week, he asked rhetorically, “Is it because he’s crude?” And then Bill Bennett rhapsodized about how he’s so worldly that a little profanity doesn’t bother him. Again, we’re talking about Bill-fudging-Bennett (that was a fantastic example of tmesis by the way). That’s not the Bill Bennett I know.

Then there’s this from last week’s Washington Post: “I’m used to being the moral scold, but Trump is winning fair and square, so why should the nomination be grabbed from him?” asked Bennett, now a conservative radio host. “We’ve been trying to get white working-class people into the party for a long time. Now they’re here in huge numbers because of Trump and we’re going to alienate them? I don’t get it. Too many people are on their high horse.”

Again: I love Bill. But I don’t know anyone who knows the view from the saddle more than Bill. Here’s an abbreviated list of his books:

The Book of Virtues The Devaluing of America: Fight for Our Culture and Our Faith

The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals

The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Collapse of the American Family

Index of Cultural Indicators: Facts and Figures on the State of American Society

The Children’s Book of Heroes; The Children’s Book of Faith

The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood

Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism

And here’s just a few things that I would have thought the author of these books would find disqualifying for a president of the United States and de facto standard-bearer of conservatism.

• Trump said it doesn’t matter what the media writes about you “as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”

• Trump boasted that his ordeal of avoiding the clap while sleeping around so much amounted to his own “personal Vietnam.”

• He said that John McCain’s ordeal avoiding dying at the hands of his torturers wasn’t heroic.

• As for everyone else’s Vietnam, Trump got out of that by claiming to have a medical condition that instantly healed when hostilities ended.

• He bragged — in print! — about bedding married women and has admitted to cheating on at least two of his wives.

• He boasted that he “whines until I win.”

• He’s condemned Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and many other friends of Bill’s (including yours truly) with far, far more vitriol than he condemns Vladimir Putin, the butchers of Tiananmen, and David Duke.

• The man is so lacking in moral clarity that he dismissed Vladimir Putin’s murdering of journalists by saying, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” This is a man who expresses a passionate desire to change the First Amendment so he can punish journalists who don’t kowtow to him.

• This is a man who praised the mass murder at Tiananmen and criticized Gorbachev for not being as tough-minded. This is a man who says he “reads the Bible more than anybody” but can’t — after months of opportunities — speak intelligently about it for 30 seconds.

• This is a man who, by any objective measure, lies nearly as much as Bill Clinton but with a tenth of the skill.

• He lacks the patriotic seriousness to do minimal homework, even when his ignorance has been pointed out time and again. (Bill’s colleague Hugh Hewitt asked Trump about the nuclear triad in August. Several months later, when the question came up again Trump was, if anything, more ignorant.)

• This is a man whose business dealings have been shot through with shady practices, mob ties, and fraudulent claims (also known as “lies”).

• This is a man with a totally thumbless grasp of what the Constitution is about or what conservatism is (“Conservatism means,” according to Trump, “to conserve our money”).

• This is a man who boasted for months that he will torture our enemies and indiscriminately murder their children as a matter of policy. This is a man who says that the last Republican president deliberately lied us into war and plays coy about whether 9/11 was an inside job 

 Now, Bill has criticized some of these things, he just doesn’t think they add up to anything that justifies trying to keep this guy from taking over the GOP or the country. And, bear in mind, I haven’t even talked about Trump’s “policies.”

To Bill’s credit, he had me on the show on Monday to argue with him about it all. We did. My heart wasn’t entirely in it because I hate being at odds with Bill. I think that’s one reason why I didn’t do as well as I could have. Another reason: I couldn’t believe what Bennett was saying. (Here’s the full audio.) Remember the aforementioned Reagan fallacy?

This is a partial and rough transcript:

Jonah: Conservatism has more to do with gratitude, as our friend Yuval Levin puts it. Conservatism, as Lincoln put it, was the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried. And to those things that we love, that have made this country great. That we should be grateful for. And my problem with Donald Trump is he says he wants to make America great again and yet he reveals not an iota of understanding about what made America great.

Bennett: Well, neither did Reagan.

Jonah: Seriously?

Bennett: I was just reading Bill Leuchtenberg . . . Just bear with me for a minute and I’ll come back to your argument.

Jonah: Okay.

Bennett: This is Bill Leuchtenberg, great Democrat, liberal, friend of mine. Wrote [The American President:] From Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. “No one ever entered the White House so grossly ill-informed as RR. In all fields of public affairs, from diplomacy to the economy, the president stunned Washington by how little he knew.” “His mind,” said Peggy Noonan, who was well-disposed toward him, “was barren terrain.” I wonder if Peggy would like to be reminded of that. Columnist David Broder wrote “the task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears was a challenging one for his aides.” And on and on it goes. Now this was said, that he was dumb and stupid and had no grasp of policy. Now his grasp of policy in some areas was very thin. I know. I was there. I was one of the areas. He was interested in what I was doing but he had very little grasp of the right policy there. So these things were said about him. He also said that the main job he had was to win. Remember: we win, they lose. Trump is saying similar things . . .

Jonah: There are two things going on there. First of all, I think Leuchtenberg is a great historian, but that assessment of Reagan is sort of ludicrous, at least in terms of what I’m talking about.

Bennett: No, but it was what a lot of people thought for a very long time. It’s certainly what the Left thought, almost forever.

Jonah: That’s fine. But I think a non-biased, objective observer would know that Ronald Reagan had thought deeply and seriously about his philosophical biases, about his core principles. The guy read Hayek. You read his diary, this is a guy who had thought deeply about what he believed about the world and how the world works. Now yes, he may not have known about the fineries of tax policy or education policy. That’s fine. But the idea that he didn’t have core convictions about liberty, the Constitution, the role of government, and that was obvious even at the time. And if liberals want to dismiss it, that’s fine, but that’s their bag, that is not the truth.

Bennett: But is it, can I just ask this? Isn’t it fair to say, in the broadest outlines, we can see, yes, there’s been some nibbling at it and some backing away from it, some core convictions on the part of Trump?

 

Jonah: I don’t see it. I honestly don’t see it. 

 One final quote from Goldberg, because it sums up where I am attitudinally about this:

I hate it. I hate attacking people I respect. I hate hearing from former fans who say they’re ashamed to have ever admired me or my writing. I hate being unable to meet fellow conservatives half-way. One of the things I love about conservatism is that we argue about our principles; as I’ve written 8 billion times — more or less — we debate our dogma. I love our principled disagreements. But I honestly and sincerely don’t see this as a mere principled disagreement. I see this as an argument about whether or not we should set fire to some principles in a foolish desire to get on the right side of some “movement.” I have never been more depressed about the state of American politics or the health of the conservative movement. I hate the idea that political disagreements will poison friendships — in no small part because as a conservative I think friendship should be immune to politics. I certainly hate having to tell my wife that my political views may negatively affect our income. But I truly fear that this is an existential crisis for the conservative movement I’ve known my whole life. 

May almighty God find it possible to look mercifully on the thoughts that run through my head about Donald trump and anyone and everyone who is enthusiastic about his candidacy.