Congratulations to Ted Cruz for winning his fourth primary! Usually Donald Trump wins the primaries -- where you go and vote, like in a real election. Cruz wins the caucuses -- run by the state parties, favored by political operators and cheaters.
Until now, the only primaries Cruz has won are in Texas (his home state), Oklahoma (basically the same state) and Idaho (where Trump never campaigned).
So now, Cruz has finally won an honest-to-goodness primary. This is great news for him, provided: (1) the general election is a caucus, and (2) the national media universally denounce Cruz's Democratic opponent the same way the Wisconsin media denounced Trump.
In that case, Cruz should do fine.
The Cruz-bots don't care. They don't care that they're being used as a cat's-paw by the Never Trump crowd, and that a brokered Republican convention is more likely to end with Bernie as the nominee than Cruz.
The Cruz cultists don't even care about plain honesty, which I always thought was a conservative value. Republicans used to be appalled by guttersnipe, lying political operators like the Clintons. Now they are guttersnipe, lying political operators like the Clintons.
It's all hands on deck to stop the only presidential candidate who wants to save America from the cheap labor plutocrats.
Cruz has flipped to Trump's side on every important political issue of this campaign -- which only ARE issues because of Trump. These are:
-- Quadrupling the number of foreign guest workers to help ranchers and farmers get cheap labor: Cruz was for it, and now is against it.
-- Legalizing illegal aliens: Cruz was for it, and now is against it.
-- The Trans-Pacific Partnership deal: Cruz was for it, and now is against it.
-- Building a wall: Cruz was against it, and now is for it.
These are all positions Cruz has changed since being a senator -- most of them he's flipped on only in the last year. I'm supposed to believe that U.S. senators can sincerely change their minds about policies it was their job to know about, but a New York developer can never change his mind about pop-offs he made more than a decade ago.
Back in 1999 -- 17 years ago -- when Donald Trump was considering a presidential run on the Reform Party ticket, he said this when asked about abortion by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press": "Well, look, I'm very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject. But you still -- I just believe in choice."
Russert then asked him specifically if he'd ban partial-birth abortion. Trump said, "No. I am pro-choice in every respect and as far as it goes, but I just hate it."
A year later, Trump wrote in his book "The America We Deserve": "When Tim Russert asked me on 'Meet the Press' if I would ban partial-birth abortion, my pro-choice instincts led me to say no. After the show, I consulted two doctors I respect and, upon learning more about this procedure, I have concluded that I would indeed support a ban."
Sometime in the intervening 16 years, Trump became fully pro-life.
You can say you don't believe him -- just as you might say you don't believe Cruz has truly changed his mind on amnesty, the wall, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, etc. But to claim Trump is pro-choice today -- present tense -- is what's known as a "lie."
But that's what Cruz says over and over again, including in a campaign ad -- and not one of those "super PAC" ads that count even less than a retweet. A Cruz ad plays the clip from that 1999 interview where Trump says, "I am pro-choice in every respect," repeats it three times, and then cuts to a narrator proclaiming: "For partial-birth abortion, not a conservative."
These are the kinds of lies that used to drive conservatives crazy when the Clintons did it. Not anymore. All's fair in smearing Trump.
Trump has said a million times that he'd scrap Obamacare and replace it with a free market system (which, by the way, he explains a lot more clearly than Washington policy wonks with their think-tank lingo). Merely for Trump saying that we're "not going to let people die, sitting in the middle of a street in any city in this country," Cruz accuses him of supporting "Bernie Sanders-style medicine."
Yes, because Trump is against people dying in the streets, Cruz says that Trump thinks "Obamacare didn't go far enough and we need to expand it to put the government in charge of our health care, in charge of our relationship with our doctors." Over and over again, Cruz has repeated this insane lie, telling Fox's Megyn Kelly: "If you want to see Bernie Sanders-style socialized medicine, Donald Trump is your guy."
Trump's alleged support for the kind of national health care they have in Scotland and Canada is another big fat lie. Trump was issuing his usual effusive praise before he drops the hammer -- "It actually works incredibly well in Scotland. Some people think it really works in Canada." Then he continued, in the very same sentence: "I don't think it would work as well here. What has to happen -- I like the concept of private enterprise coming in. ... You have to create competition."
Cruz and his cult-like followers lie about Trump wanting a health care system akin to Canada's and Scotland's. They lie about his supporting Obamacare. They lie about his supporting partial-birth abortion. They lie about his ever having been a Democrat. They lie about his campaign manager assaulting a female reporter.
I tried being nice after Florida, when it became clear that Trump was the choice of a majority of Republican voters, nearly choking on a column praising Cruz for his admirable flip-flops to Trump's positions on immigration and trade. I censored loads of anti-Cruz retweets. But -- as with the Clintons -- you offer these Cruz-bots an olive branch and they bite off your hand.
The next thing I knew, the Cruz cult was accusing Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski of criminal battery for brushing past a female reporter. Anyone who claims this video shows a "battery" is as big a liar as the liberals who lined up to say Clinton did not commit perjury when he denied having "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky.
If James Carville and Paul Begala had a baby, it would be a Cruz supporter.
They lie about my own tweaking of Trump -- I didn't like the Heidi retweet! -- amid a tidal wave of support. Trump is the only presidential candidate in my lifetime who will build a wall, deport illegals and pause the importation of Muslims. He's the only one who cares more about ordinary Americans than he does about globalist plutocrats. Does anyone really think I'm "tiring" of him because of a retweet?
Apparently, for slavishly devoted Cruz-bots, a normal human making a small criticism of her preferred candidate is unfathomable! That fact alone proves how dishonest they are about their own candidate.
I was under the misimpression that I was dealing with adults and not swine like Carville and Begala, willing to twist someone's words to win a momentary political advantage. Mostly, I was under the misimpression that honesty was still a conservative value.
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