Dying is really hard.

The psychological strain upon approaching the end of one’s existence drives some people mad. Patients diagnosed with terminal cancer sometimes lash out, or join a fringe religion, or buy an expensive RV they know they will never live to use.

Never-Ever-Trump-Under-Any-Circumstances columnist Kevin Williamson (D–National Review) seems to be foundering in just such a death spiral.

As National Review struggles through its last throes, Williamson is lashing out at the cascade of Trump victories unfolding–and at anyone connected with the president, like Roger Stone.

If you don’t know the backstory with Roger Stone, please consult my RedState colleague Nick Arama to catch up:

• READ: Troubling Revelations About Roger Stone Jury Foreperson – And She Wasn’t the Only One with Issues

Williamson just published a brief article-ette at National Review entitled Roger Stone Deserves a Severe Punishment. The uncharitable contents of this article-ette are easily deduced from the title. Williamson writes:

Roger Stone belongs in prison for a very long time. The seven felonies of which he stands convicted are at heart crimes of political corruption — lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses in order to impede a federal investigation into official wrongdoing. The charges together could have brought him 50 years in prison — and that would not have been unjust.

The purpose of my article is not to re-litigate the minutiae of the Stone Affair. That’s been done everywhere. But just to be clear: the “federal investigation into official wrongdoing” to which Williamson vaguely alludes was the Mueller Witch Hunt, one of the most politically corrupt abuses of prosecutorial power in U.S. history–for which Uberprozecutor Mueller and his Gestapo should probably be in prison, not Stone.

Also, “felonies” is rather grandiloquent. Everyone and his brother knows that these “felonies” would not have been bothered with, except that Herr Mueller and his Democrat Thumbscrew Gang wanted to intimidate Stone into proffering incrimination against the president in exchange for leniency:

“How did zee collusion vith Russia take place, Herr Stone? You vill tell us, or vee vill drag ziss out for evah und make you spend effry dime you heff on das legal fees!”

If you want to know more about Stone’s “felonies”–and some of the Democrats who got away with the same felonies free of consequences–I highly recommend John Nolte’s thunderbolt-wielding excoriation of Williamson on Breitbart, entitled National Review’s Top Troll Demands Roger Stone Die in Prison.

Yeah … Nolte was none too impressed with Williamson’s petite opus. We may see a pistol duel at ten paces, if these guys ever meet face-to-face.

Williamson knows the Mueller “investigation” was a groundless farce to fabricate impeachment against President Trump, and that Stone was collateral damage to said farce. Yet Williamson writes that it “would not have been unjust” to send Stone–a 67-year-old man convicted of at best petty annoyance of rabid prosecutors–to prison for the rest of his LIFE.

WOW. What the fork is going on here?

I have no idea whether Kevin Williamson is a hateful prick. I have never met him, so I couldn’t possibly say. What I CAN say is that I have lost all desire to meet Williamson and find out. The reader should form his own opinion. Just never let it be said that I called Kevin Williamson a hateful prick. Because I didn’t.

You’d think Williamson would evince more charity, having fallen victim to a witch hunt himself.

Williamson procured a plum job writing at The Atlantic, but then was witch-hunted out the door forthwith, after some ill-phrased tweets of his were dredged back up by the Twitt-mob. Williamson was so traumatized, he wrote an indignant book and shaved his head–a traditional Jewish sign of extreme grief.

But Williamson gives no quarter to Roger Stone. Roger Stone must be PUNISHED–SEVERELY. To hell with forgiveness, perspective, or extenuating circumstances. Bung that Stone guy in the pokey and throw away the key. And no toilet paper for him, either!

Roger Stone is a kayfabe performer and a deliberate “heel,” much like the president. Stone has enthusiastically practiced political legerdemain for decades, taking a Luciferian delight in confusing others about what’s real and what’s true (Stone likes to call himself “a dirty trickster”).

If you want to see him in action, watch Get Me Roger Stone–in which Stone takes two wanna-be Michael Moore documentarians and wraps them around their own axles until they don’t know which way is up:

But playing the heel is risky, even if it’s performative. Heels invite the crowd’s hatred for strategic reasons, and they can’t be surprised when the hatred comes rolling in. Stone didn’t watch his back, and crazed anti-fans jumped into the wrestling ring and hit him from behind with a folding chair.

Kayfabe heels enrage those who believe the world should be simple, black and white, good and evil. Heels blur the lines, making bad-guy behavior look appealing and good-guy behavior look square and foolish. A percentage of the crowd find the ensuing confusion of values intolerable. They want to see the confuser smashed.

Judging by Williamson’s other writings, he falls into this group of brittle, punitive folks. Williamson seems to believe the United States should be governed by two-dimensional philosopher-kings a la Mitt Romney, straightforward sorts who would never stoop to politics, populism, trickery, or strategic name calling. Anyone who stoops should fall beneath contempt and receive obliteration.

No, for the Romney Fan Club, losing nobly is the way to go. It doesn’t matter if we wind up in a socialist dystopia, as long as we’ve got that public front of buttery integrity to keep us warm when the natural gas gets shut off by Bernie and Secretary of Greenness Ocasio-Cortez.

I can’t predict the future (I’m not a progressive); but I suspect National Review, Williamson, and the Never Trumpers–for all their smug confidence in their own righteousness–will not age well. I suspect they will be remembered as Chamberlains, not Churchills, as they fancy.

Given the sordid nature of the entire Mueller Witch Hunt, coupled with Stone’s staggeringly unjust persecution, President Trump may finally pardon Stone after the election–if the case isn’t thrown out first, the outcome toward which Michael Flynn’s analogous persecution appears to be headed.

Then Williamson will be left to pound sand into his keyboard and watch the USS National Review sink slowly beneath the waves–that, or get boarded by liberals in bankruptcy and turned into a false-flag vessel to fool low-information conservatives. (Or has that happened already? Hmmm ….)

I’m not a lawyer (thank heaven), so I won’t pretend to know every detail of Stone’s charges and whether they are, in the end, technically valid.

But I know about the Mueller debacle, and that someone convicted in the midst of such a lynch-fest at least deserves the benefit of the doubt. Stone’s life has been turned upside down and inside out investigating a crime of Russian “collusion” that never occurred.

Roger Stone is a clown. A brilliant (like, 160-IQ brilliant) clown, who most assuredly stepped over the line at points. But saying that “his ass belongs in the federal penitentiary for a good long while,” as Williamson does? Whoa there, Nelly.

If Stone had really done something terrible, he would have been charged with such, not with process crimes and “lying to Congress”–which these days happens more frequently in D.C. than jaywalking, and is virtually always ignored.

What qualifies Williamson–legally, spiritually, or otherwise–to pronounce such a blunt verdict? What did Roger Stone ever do to him? “Deserves a severe punishment”? As Shakespeare so aptly said:

Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. (‘Hamlet’)

Williamson should scream out his Never-Trump frustrations into a pillow; or come out and announce to the world his self-discovered Democrat political orientation:

“Later, b*tches! You DISGUST me, and I’m SO out of here! Mitt and I are going to the left, where people understand us!”

That would at least make sense. Moreover, The Atlantic might reconsider employing him.

But lusting after the suffering of an old man? That smacks of impotent, misdirected rage.