It can lead to self-destruction.  It produces the mental carnival of mirrors, a skewed view of reality – first you're three feet tall and fat; then you're eight feet and thin.  This emotional vice explains why a certain brand of conservatives have a knack for misreading their own country.

Bret Stephens has penned an op-ed at WSJ, telling us we should just get it over with and elect Hillary in November.  Why?  We prefer a seething, long-burning anger against a Democrat president over a modicum of compromise with so-called RINOs like Paul D. Ryan, whose omnibus bill can yield great benefits for our country, during the Obama administration (he has veto power, remember?).  Plus Ryan inherited some things.

Stephens writes:

Let’s move straight to that first Tuesday in November, when we grimly pull the lever for the candidate who has passed all the Conservative Purity Tests (CPTs), meaning we’ve upheld the honor of our politically hopeless cause. Let’s stop pretending we want to be governed by someone we agree with much of the time, when we can have the easy and total satisfaction of a president we can loathe and revile all the time.

What we need are those candidates who will lose against Hillary because they are so ideologically pure or wacky that the wavering centrist voters wouldn't go near their preferred candidates:

As for what the soul of that movement is supposed to be, we can figure that out later. Donald Trump is a candidate of impulses, not ideas. (If you can hire people to write your books you can also hire them to do your thinking.) This doesn’t seem to have perturbed his supporters in the slightest. Mr. Cruz is happy to be on any side of an issue so long as he can paint himself as a “real Republican”—the implicit goal here being the automatic excommunication of anyone who disagrees with him. Naturally, he’s rising.

Dear WHINOs (White House in Name Only), it's better not to shut down the government, as the two ideologically pure candidates Cruz and Paul have done, to no lasting effect but to further their career among the anger addicts.  And why is Trump ahead in the polls?  The American media, who are giddy about his outlandish statements, have forced-fed the public Trump jawbreakers and have given it a sugar high.  He gets all the attention.  Why are they giddy? Because they know the public, when it's voting time, won't cast their ballot for a jerk – an insult machine.  People will come down off of their sugar high just in time to think and vote sensibly.  His devoted followers can't see this because they're angry.

But as Stephens points out, Rubio fares better in a head-to-head match-up against Hillary in the generals. Yet he's too soft on your one issue – immigration.

So let's get it over with and elect Hillary, so we can talk angrily among ourselves in our pure, conservative, anti-RINO gated community.

James Arlandson’s website is Live as Free People, which is updated almost daily and where he has posted What New Conservatives Believe.