Alaska's D.C. delegation owes us a straight explanation for backing Trump

OK, the amusement value has long passed its "sell by" date. It's time for our congressional delegation to come clean about their support of Donald Trump. I don't want to hear how they "support" the candidate but don't "endorse" him. What a bunch of hooey. The second definition of endorse in the dictionary reads, "support somebody or something." So you can see where I'm a bit confused by their play with words.

According to our delegation, they support the party's nominee without endorsing him, which is an intellectual impossibility. It stopped being funny about the time their candidate took on a Gold Star family and a baby in the same week.

Our delegation owes us an explanation of exactly what they do support about Trump. Unlike their nominee, I will assume they support babies and Gold Star families. I will also hopefully assume that they would never support the idea of banning all Muslims or calling Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers. I can guess so many of the things on which they probably disagree with the nominee. So the real question is, what do they agree with him on?

[DIFFERENT VIEW: 5 reasons decent people may want to back Trump.]

This is a tricky question when you consider that the Republican presidential nominee has not really taken any clear, concise or even foggy stands on the most difficult problems facing our country. Where are his position papers that would tell both our congressional delegation and the American voter how he plans to carry out the yet undefined goals of his presidency … undefined, that is, if you eliminate his hate speech and unhinged mental ramblings. As for that wall, if Mexico pays to build it, it will be to keep all the crazies on our side of it.

The common wisdom has it that Republicans are holding back their gut reaction to their nominee, a reaction that includes the intense urge to vomit, because they want him in the White House in order to move their agenda forward in Congress. I read this and wonder if they have collectively lost their minds. Have you seen their nominee recently? What in heaven's name makes them think they will control him any better in the White House than they are controlling him on the campaign trail? And how can anyone who claims to love this country support a candidate whose impulses need to be "controlled"? Will they have a senior Republican adviser sleeping in bed with him so that when he wakes up in the middle of the night annoyed by a tweet and calls for the nuclear codes he can be stopped?

[DERMOT COLE: Murkowski and Sullivan hide behind the 'non-endorsement endorsement' of Trump]

Since we will be voting this fall for two out of three members of our congressional delegation, I think Alaskans have a right to know exactly what it is they support about the Republican nominee and what they don't. Before I vote for Don Young (OK, that's clearly never going to happen) or Lisa Murkowski, I want to know how they keep a straight face while supporting but not endorsing a candidate whose views of America resemble nothing more than the rantings of Mussolini in the first half of the last century. And while my Italian immigrant family was always the first to point out that Mussolini made the trains run on time, they also made those statements from the safety of their homes in America where they'd fled looking for a better life that didn't include him.

The argument that they are supporting the Republican nominee because they don't want Hillary Clinton in the White House holds no water for so long as that nominee is a man who would destroy America, use the Constitution for toilet paper and start a nuclear war over a perceived slight. (And yes, I said nuclear war. This is a man who wondered during a television interview why we don't use nuclear weapons since we have them.)

So you're up, Lisa and Don. Give us a clear and concise description of what you stand for that he also stands for. Tell us how you can parse the words support and endorse to the point where you can claim they are different things. Tell us why you think your nominee belongs in the Oval Office. Alaskans deserve to know if they are voting for someone who puts their party above their country. And we deserve to know before we vote.

Elise Patkotak's book "Coming Into the City" is available at AlaskaBooksandCalendars.com and at local bookstores.

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