There is an admirable nihilistic evacuation to @JayCaruso's argument that - ok. Let's work back and through. Caruso is making the point that @RadioFreeTom doth protest too much in the Tea Party dept. That is, there wasn't exactly a 'good' Tea Party that then went nihilist. 1/

The hard core of the Tea Party was, always already, a proto-Trumpism waiting to metastasize. Nichols does not utterly deny this but it's slightly uncomfortable. He would prefer a clearer image of some moderate, center-right beforetimes. So: quarter-point to Caruso. 2/

Oh, but at what cost? Caruso is basically arguing that opposing Trump, on behalf of some notional center right, is fatuous twaddle because, as the Tea Party shows, the US center right has always been just as nuts and crazy as Trump is now. The crazy right used to attack Mitch. 3/

Now Mitch has gone crazier, the non-crazy right is attacking Mitch the way the crazy right once did. So they're crazy, too. So there's nowhere non-crazy to stand on the right, and that's why we might as well ... stick with Trump, because it's hypocrisy to say he's crazier? 4/

Given that there can't be a non-crazy US right - this Tom Nichols pipe-dream of a party of grown-ups is not, and has never been, any part of US conservatism - conservatives have no choice but dance with the madness what brung them, by nature? 5/

Otherwise, liberals will get in power, and that would be crazy, right? (Or have I missed a step? If Trump is admittedly nuts, and Tea Party conservatism was, and NeverTrump is same-same as Tea Party stuff ...) 6/

Caruso is not pro-Trump but his argument for not being anti-Trump is that conservatives are all crazy, so it's best for the good of conservatives if conservatives don't do what they would do if they weren't crazy - namely, be anti-Trump. Because that would be self-destructive. 7/

So it's like the frog and the scorpion, only the frog is also a scorpion. So there's only an issue of whether the venom or drowning will do it first. 8/

I guess somehow it’s supposed to turn out, for Caruso, that McConnell is the good guy here. True conservatives should be against Trump and against anti-Trump, threading the needle to keep the likes of Mitch afloat. But Mitch is, at best, a Machiavellian means to an end. 9/

So I guess Caruso thinks conservatism is a righteous willingness to say the ends justifies the means, no matter what. AND that IS the end. The medium is the message and the medium is Mitch so the message is: there’s no message, dude. It’s turtles all the way down? 10/

I’m sure that Caruso would say this is the opposite of what he means. But I am honestly amusing myself, trying to imagine what opposites remain that it could be. 11/

Ok one last. I’m honestly trying to figure out where Caruso is coming from and I think I comes to this. He thinks Nichols is advocating de-Baathification, in effect. De-Trumpification. And that’s impractical in US as in Iraq because it leaves no one who was in power with any. 12/

Any moderate conservative US party would have to be peopled by seasoned pols who were also ‘collaborators’ with Trump, who was bad. But politics is dirty like that. That’s not nuts, I guess. Just very cynical, and a recipe for another Trump. 13/