The relevant test is one that partisan politicians and their partisan supporters usually fail.
It is not whether they disagree from time to time with a badly flawed standard-bearer of their party. It's whether they altogether disapprove of that standard-bearer, and thus reject him.
It's whether their consciences or their partisan preferences prevail.
We can choose to be guided by right and wrong, or by left and right.
Take, for example, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton. He almost certainly finds the megalomaniac Donald Trump to be a deplorably unworthy candidate for president--if, that is, I am to believe the zealously principled reputation Cotton's admirers apply to him, and which I admit to thinking I glimpse amid a cloud of disagreement from time to time.
The ambitious and arch-conservative junior senator told the Political Animals Club in Little Rock last week that he disagreed with Trump on occasion--on such little things as abandoning our NATO allies and insulting parents of a slain war hero--but that a Republican president would be better than a Democratic president.
He was saying that his partisan and philosophical association was a higher priority than the risk of putting in the White House a man-child whose consistent behavior reveals him as devoid of character, integrity, restraint, discipline, responsibility, principle, discretion, taste and decency.
All right then: Let's go ahead at this point and engage in the conversation that partisan Republicans and uncompromising conservatives are no doubt having with themselves as they read.
You see, partisan and uncompromising people on both sides can seldom consider anything anymore on its stand-alone merits. Instead they clutch the handy playground-worthy retort that the other guys do the same and are as bad or worse.
The right-wingers and hardened partisans are surely grumbling that Democrats also sell out their greater principles for party, most obviously when they fail to disavow the lying likes of Hillary Clinton or the philandering and lying likes of Bill Clinton.
To that I say:
1.) So your argument is that you are no better than those you disdain.
2.) Yours is a false equivalency, all too common amid the superficial emotion of contemporary polarized politics. Trump's failure is thorough, full and reflective of his essence, covering temperament and behavior. It is not a matter of personal compartment, like Hillary's. She is flawed as a candidate because of her distrustful secrecy and the dishonesty in which she engages to serve that distrustful secrecy. But that's not the full extent of what she is. She, unlike Trump, has certain Methodist principles that guide her. She has certain qualifications, experience and skills, unlike Trump, that suggest she could function ably as president. She is disciplined, perhaps to a fault, and thus less likely than Trump to say needlessly incendiary things that create heightened instability in the world. The people get it: The new Fox poll shows that 61 percent of respondents don't consider Hillary honest. But 62 percent of them don't see Trump as honest. Meantime, they deem her more qualified to be president, by 65-43, and more suited by temperament, by 64-37. They see the very difference I've explained.
3.) I fully agree, though, in regard to Bill Clinton. Check back on what I wrote in columns for this newspaper in the late 1990s. It was that Bill was fatally flawed by essence--that engaging in Oval Office sexual misbehavior with an intern and then lying to the country warranted his resignation. Try being a chief executive in the private sector, having sex in your office with an intern and lying to your board about it.
So, yes, Democrats who defended Bill in his essential unworthiness share their party-over-right priorities with Cotton--as well as with Gov. Asa Hutchinson, uttering the comical line that Trump is the right leader for our time, and Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, running out to say any laughable blamed thing her party asks, such as that Melania did not copy Michelle when she said all those identical sentences.
It's true that conservative Republicans would be acceding to a vitally different U.S. Supreme Court than they want, and to vitally different budget policies than they want, and to a vitally different health-care system than they want, if they behaved with as much principle as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who simply can't bring themselves to back the absurdity that is Trump.
The New Testament contains some soaring passages, such as this one: "For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
Republicans like Tom Cotton have an answer. It shall profit a fifth vote on the U.S. Supreme Court to save Citizens United and all that Koch money, a bigger defense budget and the stripping of health insurance from millions of poor people.
It's a devil of a deal.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/07/2016