Why I just can't support Joe Walsh

It is said that someone once offered Babe Ruth asparagus at a fancy dinner party. He declined it but did so politely.

"No, thank you," he is reported to have said. "I never eat asparagus. It makes my urine smell funny."

Well, he meant well. And Joe Walsh means well, too. Walsh built his political personna out of pretty much the same cloth Donald Trump cut his from. Now, he's apologizing for his past bad manners, and racism, and slander, and conspiracy-mongering, and irresponsible rhetoric. He is opposing Mr. Trump for next year's Republican nomination as a more honest and less erratic version of Mr. Trump himself.

Honesty and good manners and some measure of stability are certainly good things and an improvement on what we are currently getting from the man in the White House.  But they just aren't enough.

I just can't support Joe Walsh. A more civilized and honest and stable version of Donald Trump just isn't good enough.

I've read the arguments. Isn't Trumpism without the crazy better than Trumpism with it? Well, yes. Isn't it better to have a guy who takes inherently divisive and unreasonable positions, but admits and apologizes for his mistakes and misdeeds, better than someone who takes the same inherently divisive and unreasonable positions, but doesn't? Of course. And wouldn't forcing the nation's Republican primary voters to choose between a childish, mean-spirited, erratic narcissist and someone who comes from pretty much the same place policy-wise but isn't childish, mean-spirited, or a narcissist, and who isn't quite as erratic the perfect way to prove that in choosing the former it's the childishness and the bullying and the crudity and the cruelty that they actually like about Donald Trump? Well, it's not that simple. He's also an incumbent Republican president, there are perceived issues of party discipline and loyalty involved, and besides, anybody who at this stage is willing to support Donald Trump has long since come to terms with the childishness and the bullying and the crudity and the cruelty. Having made that choice won't faze them, and the rest of us are already scandalized that they're willing to put up with all of that.

No, in the last analysis, Trumpism without Trump is still Trumpism. It's still the politics of division and conspiracy-mongering and fear and paranoia and irrationality. And it can't be beaten by endorsing a slightly less aromatic version of those very things.

No, I give Joe Walsh full props for his willingness to own and apologize for and publicly renounce his past forays into the realms of racism and slander and scapegoating and general irresponsibility. But he's still Joe Walsh. He's still Trump Lite. He's still a manifestation of the same dysfunction in America's communal and civic life which gave rise to Trump and neither better manners nor his admittedly useful critique of all the ways in which Donald Trump differs from the new, reformed version of Joe Walsh will change that.

His candidacy may well serve a useful purpose, but the more I think about it the more skeptical I am about its clarifying just who and what Donald Trump is to the Republican rank-and-file. I'm tempted to say that they already know that, but of course, many of them don't. Some do know and don't care- or at least don't care enough not to support him. But most choose not to know.

Yeah, it's a choice. Trump's corruption and irresponsibility and erratic personality and narcissism and the rest have been on public display all along, and anyone for whom those things matter knows all about them. In fact, anybody who simply has paid attention has known about them for decades. A lot of ignorance lies behind the willingness of roughly a third of the nation to support the least-fit man ever to occupy the highest office in the land, but for the most part, it's willing ignorance.

What has to be fought is what lies behind the phenomenon of Donald Trump, and it can't be fought by choosing Trump Lite instead.  There is no real chance that a better man or woman could defeat Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination next year, and yes, that's a damning indictment of the Republican rank-and-file and the conservative movement, or what's left of it. I hold out no hope that the Democrats will nominate anyone much wiser than Mr. Trump; I only hope that they nominate a better person, a better example, and a figure with higher priorities than his or her own self-glorification.

Even that would be an improvement. But even the politest and most mannerly of cancers can still be lethal. Better to chose health or something that approximates it, however less than ideal, than to call the particular intellectual and moral cancer that has spawned the political careers of both Donald Trump and Joe Walsh anything but what it is.

Graphic by DonkeyHotey. Licence Creative Commons Attribution 2.0