Michael Walsh yesterday published an outrageously intellectually fraudulent essay that claims that I’m supposed to vote for Donald Trump and am guilty of moral cowardice, forsooth! if I decline to support him.

Walsh starts off, with jaw-dropping insolence:

For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that Donald Trump is what the small but obsessive, increasingly deracinated, band of “never Trumpers” says he is. He’s not a “movement conservative” – true. He’s often crass and vulgar – true. His quasi-grammatical flights of oratorical fancy often get him into trouble –also true. “Words matter” they remind him, while calling him a “witless ape,” a “white nationalist,” and — most childishly — a “turd-tornado,” who’s “dark,” “condescending,” and a “lunatic,” to list some of the more printable epithets in the conservative press. …

Okay. Therefore… what?

“For the sake of argument”!? We have to “stipulate”!? You are “deracinated” if you recognize that Donald Trump is not conservative, unprincipled, unethical, badly educated, a bully, a pathological unhinged narcissist, and a habitual liar? And “therefore… what?”

Therefore, we do not support someone who really does not believe in any principles, let alone the basic, fundamental ideas that the Conservative Movement came together to defend. Therefore, we do not support someone unqualified for the presidency additionally on the basis of a flawed character and inadequate education and intelligence.

Like President Adams, we should desire that only honest and wise men ever rule the United States.

Mr. Walsh then tries to prove that I have to support Trump because Hillary is leftist, corrupt, and also unacceptable. Unfortunately, this argument does not work for a variety of reasons.

It happens to be the case this year that not one, but two non-conservative, unprincipled, corrupt candidates have the nominations of both parties. If you are facing the prospect of Bubonic Plague, that actually does not make Ebola suddenly acceptable.

Donald Trump might make some policy concessions to conservative Republicans, but… the unlikely event of Trump winning the election would fatally confirm the separation of today’s Republican Party from the party we are familiar with and would mark the starting point of a new kind of populist, nativist, protectionist, and isolationist Republican Party, a party resembling much more the Know Nothing Party of the early 1850s than the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan.

Hillary’s election would condemn the country to another four years of corrupt democrat misrule, but Hillary is a known commodity. She is a conventional democrat politician. She will be progressive in her policies, but her policies will fall within recognizable limits. Hillary Clinton may campaign as a populist, but she will never repudiate international trade agreements, destroy NATO, or cancel the US alliance with Israel. On the other hand, nobody knows what Trump might do. In campaigning, Trump has spouted all sorts of radical Buchananite BS. You never know: Donald Trump might decide to endear himself to the yobbos by shredding all our trade agreements and re-instituting the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Donald Trump might possibly out-do Barack Obama in deepening the recession by provoking the first grand international “beggar-your-neighbor” trade war in many decades.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka vacations with, and was fixed up with her husband, by Vladimir Putin’s mistress. Putin has been leaking material damaging to Hillary. How can anyone be sure that Donald Trump won’t trade Ukraine for a casino monopoly in the Russian Federation?

What Trump might or might not do is, of course, imponderable. We have no way of predicting his policy decisions accurately. But we have had plenty of evidence of his character, his behavior, and his knowledge and intelligence. Donald Trump is totally unqualified for the presidency and even the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s election does not make him qualified.

Faced with two unacceptable candidates, I’d say the responsible thing to do is to vote for neither. Hillary’s flaws do not make Trump desirable or qualified and vice versa.

Michael Walsh is obviously living in Trumpkin-kuckkucksheim. He thinks that because Trump got a plurality of low information, commonly cross-over-democrat, votes, leading to capturing delegates in badly-arranged winner-take-all primaries, conservatives like myself are somehow obligated to support him. If I don’t vote for Trump, he says, I will have “stabbed him in the back.” Baloney! I’ve been attacking Trump quite consistently directly from the front. I do not owe Walsh, the Alt-Right, or all the Trumpkins in the trailer park a damned thing. When I was first of age to vote in a presidential election, the Republican Party was running Richard Nixon. I would not vote for Richard Nixon, and I’m certainly not going to vote for Donald Trump.