Where is real integrity to be found in late October 2016?

The main point of Caleb Howe's latest piece at RedState is to pose the question, why did we give up on replacing Donald Trump? Along the way, however, he puts in stark relief just how raw the discourse on the "right" has become at this late date:

When someone writes something critical about Trump, people don't say "oh that's not true, he's not like that, he never said that." What they say is "why are you talking about this instead of attacking Hillary, you traitor?" It has been a non-stop, relentless onslaught of people who accuse those who won't support Trump of everything from "moral preening" to wagging our tails for pats on the head from the left. 

Nobody says "oh Trump's ideas about women are awesome" or "I'm a big believer in p*ssy grabbing," it's always "you're just like the MSM, leave Trump alone" and above all, without fail, without surcease, "BUT HILLARY!" To call it tiresome would be a colossal understatement. 

And even if you're likewise writing about Hillary's deceit, malfeasance, bribery, corruption, and how she is not fit for office, and you are not voting for her, it does not matter, because you don't write "enough," or have a good "ratio," or your heart isn't it. Or, and this is my favorite, you're really just helping her get elected but also don't matter because you've thrown your relevance in the trash and aren't credible anymore and ha ha you're done as a conservative.

Yeah, I never said their arguments were logical.

I could name names, but you know who these petty, bitter clingers are, so I don't have to.

Laura Ingraham. Fine. I said one.

On the question of who should lose, let's be perfectly clear. I want Hillary Clinton to lose the election. I don't want her to be the President. I also want Trump to lose the election. I don't want him to be the President. On the scale of losing, I want her loss even more than I want his. Frankly, in light of the recent email releases, and especially the Project Veritas videos, the "burn the system down" impulse to vote for Trump is sorely tempting. I want Hillary to lose.

It doesn't matter, though. The two of them are running, only one will lose, and that one will almost certainly be Trump. Since advocating for Trump is a betrayal of the conservative movement, and defending him requires debasing oneself, it is absurd to expect us to do that. Claiming Trump is fit for office requires resorting to flat-out lies. We don't do that here at RedState. We criticize politicians when they are wrong. Or evil. And both of them are both.

That's not to say that there aren't those who are planning to vote for him, and say so, that haven't maintained their integrity. There are. We have some on the front page at RedState who have said publicly stated their intent to vote for Trump. There are radio hosts and writers at other websites, there are people who are making the decision that this is what they can do to stop Hillary. They aren't, you see, saying "locker room talk."

I'm not going to bother to disprove the whole "not supporting Trump is a vote for Hillary" crap, since we have destroyed that many times here at RedState. And I'm not going to bother explaining that we at RedState, like the fine folks at Conservative Review and National Review, have held Hillary to account, as we do all politicians, not just this year but every year this site has been online. If you don't know that then you're have selective attention and aren't honest anyway so there's no point. 

And I'm certainly not going to bother explaining to you the 200 thousand ways that your defense of Donald Trump is illogical, undermines your entire worldview, will ruin your credibility in the next election cycle on all the issues where you defended his anti-conservative points of view, or how you can never again honestly call yourself a "values voter" if you have spent this cycle apologizing for and promoting him.

Jerry Fallwell, Jr. Fine. I said two.

As I have pointed out before, there are two main categories of people on the "right" who publicly say they are going to vote for Squirrel-Hair. And, as you know, the first type, exemplified by the two people Howe mentions above, has been giddy about his candidacy from the get-go, viewing it as a breath of fresh air, a needed shakeup for the Republican party.

I have nothing but contempt and disgust for those in that category.

The second category, those who stress that they opposed S-H's candidacy as long as others were still in the race (Dennis Prager, Bookworm) still get a shred of my respect, but I'll forever view them a little differently than I used to.

Just before writing this post, I saw a really stupid essay over at The American Thinker that I won't even honor with a link that took this neverTrumpers-are-traitors position, saying it's we who will have much to answer for after his defeat the election. Are you ready for this? He even characterized S-H as a "common-sense conservative." You don't see a depiction that ate up much anymore.

If there is one aspect of this whole debacle that can be, with some tortured reasoning, construed as a positive, it is that the S-H phenomenon has shown us the price of certain souls.