These past two weeks a most disingenuous campaign was waged by Donald Trump.
Unable to master the mystery of the Iowa Caucus voter, he and his surrogates engaged in flat out dishonesty. (Not a trait becoming for a person applying for the job as public servant one.)
Mr. Trump began raising the question of Senator Ted Cruz’s legitimacy for office based on the same lame conspiratorial garbage that he attempted to press against Obama. And while Obama produced what no one has been able to verify as an actual birth certificate—arguing he was in fact born in America—Mr. Cruz has taken a different path.
Mr. Trump was joined by the always-ready-to-rumble Ann Coulter who went even further in attempting to discredit the legitimacy of Senator Cruz as an American citizen, eligible to run for and serve as President of the United States.
Later in the week even talk radio icons—some of whom are colleagues of mine at Salem Media Group—decided they would also echo the libelous and false claim that Ted Cruz is in some way less qualified to run for President than others.
This all came to the fore of course as the Republican debate in South Carolina ran its course and the moderators decided to take a whack at Mr. Cruz personally. All of them, should’ve steered far clear of the issue, but logic and rational thought aren’t strengths for the supporters of Donald Trump, nor the supporters of the GOP establishment.
Given that Dr. Alan Dershowitz—the law professor that instructed both President’s Barack Obama and Senator Ted Cruz—has stated on multiple occasions that Ted Cruz is in the top ranks of any law school students he ever instructed (and that President Barack Obama was middle of the pack—at best), you would think that Constitutional hacks like talk show hosts, businessmen, and a woman that reads about the constitution on her lexis-nexus searches would no better.
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But no… They’d rather foolishly wade into the water against a man who has won five cases in the United States Supreme Court.
Given that ninety percent of lawyers will never even grace the premises of the Supreme Court much less even argue a case before it, much less win one, Senator Cruz’s track record at the highest level of legal argument is unassailable.
There’s also one other thing these “Trumpsters” do not seem to grasp: Ted Cruz is really smart.
His statement about Trump’s values stemming from the social and moral cess-pool that is Manhattan was not only not misplaced, but effectively strategic in solidifying the fact that Ted Cruz has a moral center, and one that to this date in his public life has not been able to be corrupted. This bothers op-ed writers who get outed for shacking up with over-the-hill Fox News reporters, and internet news aggregators. And it irritates men who consistently leave the wife they are married to, to be with a younger woman they’ve begun sleeping with.
As a lover of the greatest city on earth, and as someone who would not wish to live anywhere else, I—like Ted Cruz—can see the beauty of this city and be repulsed by the moral temperature of the electorate that puts a socialist to the left of Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama into the office of Mayor.
Governor Cuomo also lost all his moral high ground on the matter when he outright said in 2013 that pro-life, pro-family, conservatives are not welcomed in his state.
Senator Cruz sees it for what it is, and calls it like it is.
Trump is an immoral pragmatist that only considers what could be. He seldom asks the question, what “should” be.
Therein lies the problem. If the GOP base believes that character counts for something, then Donald Trump may have assisted all of us in this election, but he can not be the nominee.
And when (not if but when) he loses Iowa—and loses it BIG—as he will--then his air of invincibility will be gone.
Donald Trump by all accounts, loves his country, and truly does want to make America great again. But part of her greatness eludes him, and that is due to the fact that in order to understand why America has been great is to admit that she has also been good. And to understand that is to make a moral judgment.
Ted Cruz is a man of good morals. Donald Trump is a man who makes good deals (at least for himself.)
So when Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, and some of my colleagues behind the microphone are willing to look the other way on a host of issues just so they get their guy elected, they are acting no different than the idealogical left.
I have not and refuse to endorse a GOP candidate in the primary, the man I hope would do the best, appears to be heading for an earlier exit than I had hoped for.
But my conscience drives me to put all pretense aside to say the treatment of Ted Cruz by Donald Trump and his minions in recent weeks (all based on the growing realization that they will lose Iowa in big fashion) is unbecoming, it is beneath them, and for the good of our nation and her future it is something they should set aside.
Because while dishonesty is a common value in New York elected officials, it has no place in the grassroots fight for the soul of our nation in the most important election of my lifetime.
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