In the tech industry, many of us refer to a lot of the new technologies that come down the line as “bright, shiny objects” – things that tech people look at that are new and potentially interesting but rarely turn out to be anything other than an attention-grabber and a distraction from more important things.  Applied to the election season, this should sound familiar.  But if you’re missing the analogy..here’s a reality-check, people: Donald Trump is this week’s bright, shiny object, and he is not going to amount to anything but a couple of magazine covers and some (once again) very disappointed, misguided individuals who thought he was The Great Conservative Hope.

I don’t like “National Review” much, given the social liberal bent they often display. Right now, though, they seem to be on a tear.  And I do like two of the NR writers quite a lot: Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson. They’re great writers, solid conservatives, and are virtually always spot on target. Williamson is more of a libertarian than most, but he doesn’t let it get in the way of his intellect…. 😉 This past weekend, both Goldberg and Williamson addressed the blonde-haired (toupee’d) gnat that is Donald Trump. Let’s take a look at how they characterize Trump and the Trump-pets (Jonah’s term for the fans of this election season’s allegedly conservative, GOP-wannabe bright, shiny object). Goldberg starts off:

There have been times in the past when I’ve gotten crosswise with certain segments of the conservative base and/or with the readership of National Review. And, because, like the Elephant Man, I am a not an animal but a human being, I have always had at least some self-doubt. That’s as it should be. People who share principles should not only hear each other out when they disagree; they should be able to see each other’s points and hold open the possibility that one’s opponents have the better argument.

This is not one of those times, at least not for me.

I truly, honestly, and with all my heart and mind think Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are making a yuuuuuuge mistake. I think they are being conned and played. I feel like a guy whose brother is being taken advantage of by a grifter. I’m watching helplessly as the con artist congratulates him for taking out a third mortgage.

“Grifter” is the perfect word.

grift•er

n. Slang.

Trump is a grifter.  He’s a sideshow act – an attraction. But that’s what Trump does. I don’t begrudge him being a business man. I begrudge him doing it as a fake conservative who is trying to promote his own interests. He’s a fraud. Goldberg proceeds to promote what I believe is a good course of action: an intervention for the Trump-pets.

I’ve written many times about how I hate the term RINO because conservatives should consider themselves Republicans in Name Only. The Republican Party is a vessel, a tool for achieving conservative ends. It’s nothing more than a team. Conservatism is different. It’s a body of ideas, beliefs, and temperaments. The amazing thing is that Trump is both a RINO and a CINO. I’m sure he has some authentic and sincere conservative views down in there somewhere. But the idea that he’s more plausibly conservative — or more loyally Republican — than [mc_name name=’Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’C001098′ ], [mc_name name=’Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’P000603′ ], Scott Walker, or any of the others is just flatly absurd. It is vastly more plausible that he is a stalking horse for his dear friend Hillary Clinton than he is a sincere conservative.

Trump supporters need an intervention. I want to sit them down at the kitchen table, reach into a manila envelope, and pull out the proof that he’s a fraud. The conversation would go something like this…

And then Goldberg proceeds to lay out the reality of Trump’s alleged “conservatism” and the reality of where he has stood for years. Could Trump have had an epiphany and changed course? Perhaps. But on ALL of these: Immigration, Abortion, Obamacare, Hillary, Economics? Bloody unlikely. (I’m not going to quote Jonah’s documentation of all of Trump’s left-wing beliefs on these topics. You can read his article or look at Isaac Cohen’s breakdown).

Oh, but you say – Trump is accomplishing things by “telling it like it is”. Really? To many, Trump comes across as a blowhard. Anger isn’t an effective argumentation or debate technique. It just makes the angry person look like a fool. For those who think that Trump would “clean up” in debates, you’re smoking something. Cruz, et. al. will shred Trump in a debate. These past stances of Trump’s are not exactly state secrets. Heck, even Jeb Bush will make “The Donald” look like God’s gift to hypocrites. Remember when everyone thought Chris Christie was the Next Big Thing – last year’s bright, shiny (and big) object? Huh. Turns out he wasn’t really the real deal, eh? But boy howdy, he could “tell it like it is”.

ANGER IS NOT AN ARGUMENT

Now, before I go on, let me clarify a few things. I get it. The base of the party is angry. They’re angry about Obama’s lawless chicanery on immigration. They’re angry about the GOP’s patented inability to cross the street without stepping on its own d*ck and then having to apologize for it. They’re angry that the Left’s culture warriors are behaving like an invading army that shoots the survivors even after they’ve surrendered. They’re angry that Republicans have to bend over backward so as not to offend anyone, while Democrats have free rein (and at times free reign) to do and to say as they please.

Enter Trump, stage left. He makes no apologies. He’s brash. I can understand why some see him as a breath of fresh air. If you want to give him credit for starting a worthwhile debate about sanctuary cities and illegal immigration, fine. I think that argument is way overdone, but certainly reasonable enough.

Maybe you just like him. On that, we can respectfully disagree, as there is no accounting for taste. Perhaps you just like his musk and the way it assaults your nostrils, which is fitting, given his line of cologne. Fine.

I, on the other hand, find him tedious, tacky, and trite. He’s a bore who overcompensates for his insecurities by talking about how awesome he is, often in the third person. Jonah can’t stand that.

You see the next Teddy Roosevelt and all I see is someone who talks big and carries a small schtick.

The folks around here like to toss around the acronym “RINO” a lot. Trump folks, you are supporting a RINO. And a CINO. Again, from Goldberg:

I’ve written many times about how I hate the term RINO because conservatives should consider themselves Republicans in Name Only. The Republican Party is a vessel, a tool for achieving conservative ends. It’s nothing more than a team. Conservatism is different. It’s a body of ideas, beliefs, and temperaments. The amazing thing is that Trump is both a RINO and a CINO. I’m sure he has some authentic and sincere conservative views down in there somewhere. But the idea that he’s more plausibly conservative — or more loyally Republican — than [mc_name name=’Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’C001098′ ], [mc_name name=’Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’P000603′ ], Scott Walker, or any of the others is just flatly absurd. It is vastly more plausible that he is a stalking horse for his dear friend Hillary Clinton than he is a sincere conservative.

Now Kevin Williamson goes a bit farther. He’s now coined the term “WHINO”

You know the RINO — Republican In Name Only — but you may be less familiar with the WHINO. The WHINO is a captive of the populist Right’s master narrative, which is the tragic tale of the holy, holy base, the victory of which would be entirely assured if not for the machinations of the perfidious Establishment. Never mind the Democrats, economic realities, Putin, ISIS, the geographical facts of the U.S.-Mexico border — all would be well and all manner of things would be well if not for the behind-the-scenes plotting of [mc_name name=’Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’M000355′ ], [mc_name name=’Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’B000589′ ], and their enablers, who apparently can be bribed with small numbers of cocktail weenies. The WHINO is a Republican conspiracy theorist, in whose fervid imaginings all the players — victims, villains — are Republicans.

Barack Obama? Pshaw. The real enemy is Jeb Bush.

That this is a deeply stupid view of the world should go without saying, but if you need evidence, consider that the WHINO vote has settled for the moment upon Donald Trump, a Hillary Rodham Clinton donor who supports Canadian-style single-payer health care and amnesty for as many illegal immigrants as he imagines to exist, who has 0.00 percent chance of winning a general election and who is, as if more were needed, a ridiculous buffoon.

Ask the WHINO to explain that and you will get the characteristic WHINO whine: “But what about the baaaaaaaaase!?!”

Which is to say, the WHINO loves Trump not because Trump confounds the Democrats or because he constitutes a serious threat to a Democratic victory in 2016, but because he confounds the Republicans and constitutes a serious threat to a Republican victory in 2016.

Remember, we ARE trying to defeat the bad guys. And those bad guys are badder than our guys, no matter how much you don’t like Jeb Bush.

It takes a certain quality of mind to embrace Rubio over Crist only to look over the new senator’s shoulder longingly at . . . Donald Trump.

Rhetorically, this has reached the point of silliness. When [mc_name name=’Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’C001098′ ] was shaking the rafters, I had dinner with a state party chairman who assured me that he was a thorn in the side of the Establishment. If a party chairman isn’t the Establishment, who is?

We must give some consideration to Trump, Breitbart’s Boyle informed me, because he is a vessel for the expression of the base’s frustration.

The base should get a hobby.

Yeah. And that hobby needs to be using their heads instead of their emotions. That’s what Democrats do. THINK about what it takes to win and beat the Democrats. Act to make it happen. Stop being distracted by bright, shiny objects and pay attention to substance instead of style.

Oh, and about that “style” – it doesn’t work. From Mona Charen:

While the Obama administration is paving the way for a possible mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv or New York in the near term, we’re all tying ourselves in knots about what Donald Trump said about Mexicans. The Democrats seem to have a Trump card.

Immigration arouses tremendous rage among both Left and Right. The Left, always panting to push grievance buttons, transforms illegal immigrants into yet another clientele — as if those who enter the country illegally are entitled to legal status, benefits, and even citizenship. They establish “sanctuary cities” as if enforcing immigration laws amounts to persecution.

This drives the Right crazy. You don’t break into my house and then demand the keys, they fume. While I like a good brawl as much as the next person, it seems that Trump is the answer only if the question is: Why can’t we get more oafish egomaniacs into politics? Just when the Republican party needs finesse and sensitivity when discussing immigration; just when it needs to focus on issues that unite all sectors of the electorate, including Hispanic and Asian voters; it gets a blowhard with all the nuance of a grenade.

Trump’s smear about Mexican immigrants was about as far away as you can get from Ronald Reagan’s “Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it.” He tarred most Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists, allowing only as an afterthought that some may be good people. He claimed to have discussed the matter with border guards. (Would those officers please step forward?) In any case, crude and vulgar people always preen that they are brave truth tellers.

Trump has achieved his objective — making himself the center of attention — but he has subtracted from our sum total of knowledge about the immigration issue. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Immigration Policy Center, only 1.6 percent of immigrant males between the ages of 18 and 39 are incarcerated, compared with 3.3 percent of the native-born. There are terrible stories of immigrants committing crimes, and it’s certainly fair to demand that criminal aliens be deported with dispatch. Sanctuary cities are a disgrace. But just as Dylann Roof doesn’t represent white people, Mexican rapists don’t represent anyone other than themselves either.

Will Trump make Republicans talk about immigration? Maybe. But it’s likely to be more about what an ass Trump is rather than addressing it an issue.

He’s not a conservative. He’s not a Republican. He’s closer to Hillary than her Bill is. And here are a lot of you, trump-pet-ing about how great he is as a candidate. Seriously?

So, here’s your intervention, WHINOs – stop the whining. Get the bright, shiny object out of your eyes and pay attention to a candidate that’s not just a Barnum & Bailey sideshow bearded lady (or toupee’d man…whatever). There are some serious conservatives out there that won’t do more harm than good and who actually can win an election without antagonizing a large swath of the electorate who might actually vote for a better candidate than Hillary or BERN! Here’s Goldberg’s suggestion:

Look, these are rough times for conservatives, for reasons too lengthy, and all too familiar, to go into here. But none of our problems — demographic, political, cultural — can be solved unless conservatives take the cause of persuasion to heart. All of our problems can be fixed by convincing people to join our cause. That is what politics is about — persuading people that their interests and concerns are better addressed by coming to our side. And, given the degraded nature of our culture, I won’t deny that having a celebrity on our side has its utility. But it’s only helpful if that celebrity convinces people to switch sides. As a purely mathematical proposition, it is insane to believe that Donald Trump will convert more voters than he will repel.

Trump is a voter repellent. We’ve had enough of those. Let’s try a candidate that actually makes normal people want to vote for them.  In case you hadn’t noticed, there are a few of them, and then’re not named Bush, either.