The sad descent of Gateway Pundit into madness

Back in the day,  Gateway Pundit was a stimulating and insightful conservative blog. I well remember the 2004 campaign- perhaps the most blog-intensive in history- in which we both were members of Blogs for Bush and fought the good fight side by side.

But how the mighty have fallen! Sadly, Gateway pundit has come to this.

Ok. Try to stop laughing. Yes, the blog seriously proposes that Hillary Clinton was sending hand signals to Lester Holt telling him what to do and say on Monday night. The startling, stark tinfoil hat lunacy of this suggestion, the sheer, utter, outrageous, raving paranoia.... well, suffice it to say that there are some things so transparently ridiculous that they serve as their own refutation.

The damage Donald Trump has done to the conservative movement is enormous. It goes beyond handing Hillary Clinton the presidency on a silver platter, with the Senate as garnish. It goes beyond making certain the fate for the Supreme Court they now advance as an argument for voting for a manifestly unfit and emotionally immature ignoramus and sociopath. Trump has taken valiant fighters for the conservative cause like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram and amusingly outrageous lampooners of liberalism like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and turned them into jokes like those they themselves once exposed and mocked. They can never be relevant or taken seriously again.

I mourn for the fallen. One does not come back to credibility from this kind of paranoid raving. When the dust has settled and Donald Trump has been defeated, they will find themselves relegated to irrelevancy, just like Trump himself.

I don't know what the future will look like for the new, post-Trump conservative movement. But I do know that there will be no place in it for racists, Nazis, anti-Semites, or tinfoil hatters. These people have contaminated the movement for far too long. Now they are vindicating every slander the Democrats have ever bleated about Republicans and conservatives. I am saddened beyond measure to see Gateway Pundit, Hannity and others making themselves useless for the movement by embracing the stark, raving, extremist paranoid insanity  that lies at the heart and core of the Trump movement, and thus destroying themselves.