Ate-up Bots and latecomers to Squirrel-Hair alike, I implore you to consider what you're jettisoning

This morning - it was in the course of station-hopping, I swear - I came across a little of Laura Ingraham's radio show, and she was still at it, still being a firebrand Squirrel-Hair-bot. She was taking the tack one has seen since the video came out Friday evening, and certainly since last night's debate - namely, that in a country with a $19 trillion debt, a collapsing "A"CA, a foreign policy that is putting the nation in peril, in which the rule of law is a mockery, not to mention with a Democratic candidate as incompetent, corrupt and hard-left as the public has ever been offered, the proper perspective on S-H's glaring shortcomings is that they matter little. Time to "rebuild this country," as Ingraham put it.

Here's my problem with that position: Not only does it signal desperation, but it is an indication of cynicism.

Ingraham spoke of the GOP defections over the weekend, and then went on about how "Democrats never break ranks."

No doubt about it. They gave those Kennedy brothers passes on some pretty awful behavior. Robert Byrd. Billy Jeff the Zipper.

Let's stop and ask, though, whether that is intrinsically a good thing.

Pubs aren't like that. Howard Baker went after Richard Nixon like a hunting hound. Outside of his Congressional district, Mark Sanford is generally considered a world-class jerk. The Republican Study Committee, a conservative group in Congress, was formed in response to W's squishiness on a number of key issues.

What that "guy-talk-can-get-pretty-raunchy-get-over-it" line of argument amounts to is a concession that our culture is now so rotten that it's time to "move on" from any discussion of standards. That it's so damn late in the game that it's time to forget concepts such as a gentlemanly approach to life.

There goes the baby with the bath water.

That's raw nihilism. It is completely counter to the kind of world envisioned by conservatism.

Rebuilding this country is going to be a Sisyphean undertaking if we don't start with the root reason it's in shambles. If at this grave moment we do not insist on standards, it's pointless to talk about tax rates and economic growth.

No, sorry. It's time to shut this thing down. Let's pray that Mike Pence looks deeply at the role history has handed him and does what is right.

It's time to walk away from Squirrel-Hair before the spiritual damage is any greater.