The list of things this election has exposed as over-played and played out is both long and undistinguished. Making the selection of the worst of our worst no easy task. Which criteria to use?

How about the things most in the way of having a real conservative movement, a real conservative political party, and real opposition to the Left’s agenda? So with that criteria in mind, here’s a list of the top 10 things we should forcibly strap to the next rocket headed straight for the sun.

10. Being so defensive about being a conservative that we elevate literally any celebrity/minority, who claims to like us, to instant hero status

I’ve got nothing against trying to make conservativism’s packaging more contemporary, but can we please stop with the pathetic desperation? Such as taking immature kids like C.J. Pearson — who in the span of one election cycle schizophrenically goes from supporting Ted Cruz, R-Texas (A, 97%) to Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. (F, 17%) to Donald Trump — and elevating them because they’re young and non-white. We look like the jock-sniffing water boy, who tries too hard to get the cool kids to notice him.

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9. Pepe the Frog and David Duke

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8. Ann Coulter

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7. Roger Ailes

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Who can forget Fox’s week-long fawning over Marco Rubio’s, C, Fla. (C, 74%) greatest third-place finish ever in Iowa? Or carrying Trump across the finish line to the nomination by spreading the lie Ted Cruz was stealing elections? And there’s a lot more where that came from — years’ worth, in fact. All orchestrated by Ailes, the Palpatine-esque Svengali. When your movement allows such immoral men to call its shots, your movement is broken.

6. ‘Christian leaders’ who are really just political party shills

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5. Allowing the media to pick your nominee

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4. Selective moral outrage that can be easily exposed as hypocrisy like never before thanks to the Internet

To paraphrase the great prophet Bob Seger, “The Internet never forgets.” It’s been astounding to see some otherwise smart, political hacks just say things that contradict what they said in the past, thus creating their own mockery memes. Just look at the recent controversy over Trump’s X-rated comments about grabbing women by the genitals. So many people on the Right used all the same language to defend Trump they were mocking from the Left during the Lewinsky matter. Meanwhile, suddenly many moral relativists and post-modernists on the Left rediscovered their inner puritan. Feckless hypocrisy is no way to go through life, son.

3. Cults of personality

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2. The lesser of two evils

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1. Both major political parties

Any regard for the Constitution and the founding vision of the country was jettisoned from the Democratic Party long ago, and now it’s on the endangered species list at the Republican Party as well. As the political paradigm currently stands, conservativism stands no chance regardless of who wins, which means we must change the paradigm. Either conservatives deploy a go-for-broke, hostile takeover of the GOP similar to what the progressives did to the Democrats, thus making it unthinkable to defy the party platform. Or we must start a third party. Seat at the table, coalition-building within the GOP has been a colossal failure, unless you count all the bank accounts for faux leaders it’s fattened. Meanwhile, what’s left of our constitutional republic is about to be tossed unto the ash heap of history.