Probably the single best column of the week comes from Dan McLaughlin in the Los Angeles Times:

Kristol

Why don’t normal people run for president? How did we get these candidates? We face, in 2016, the possibility that one of just two American families — the Clintons and the Bushes — will produce the occupant of the White House for the sixth time in the past eight elections. The alternative is a boorish carnival barker who probably has never read the Constitution. Can’t we have some better choices?

Tuesday showed why we can’t. Bill Kristol, the ever-optimistic editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, has been trying to recruit a sane alternative to Donald Trump. And Bloomberg Politics reported Tuesday that Kristol was looking at David French, a National Review writer and Harvard-educated constitutional lawyer who served in Iraq and earned a Bronze Star. French is almost completely unknown to the general public, but at first glance, anyone would regard him as the sort of accomplished, upstanding, idealistic citizen who ought to try his hand at electoral politics.

So what happened? Without anyone waiting for confirmation from French — without even waiting for Kristol to confirm that he was trying to persuade French to run — the Washington political establishment started digging for dirt. ….

Again, the whole thing is here.

I’ll have more to say on David French later. Let’s give the man a chance to make his case. I am told, definitively, that he has a very strong team and excellent resources behind him — and that he is a wonderful man of principle and accomplishment. Stay tuned. — Quin