Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.
Ted Cruz endorsed Donald Trump for the presidency Friday afternoon, a stunning turn of events after a contentious primary filled with nasty personal attacks and a dramatic snub at the Republican National Convention.
“After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump,” Cruz wrote in a Facebook post.
“A year ago, I pledged to endorse the Republican nominee, and I am honoring that commitment. And if you don’t want to see a Hillary Clinton presidency, I encourage you to vote for him.”
Now that Cruz has finally gone along to get along with the GOP hierarchy the people who complain about him not being a team player are happy, right?
Not in the 2016 House of Mirrors election.
To be sure, the Republicans who have always hated Ted Cruz were never going to like him, so it is beyond disingenuous when they pretend that this offends/surprises/shocks/disappoints them more than if he hadn’t endorsed Trump. There are still legions of Rubio-supporting Republicans railing daily against Cruz even when he isn’t in the news, contorting facts to blame him for the the Rubio campaign’s complete lack of a coherent strategy during the primaries. They all tend to be in the #NeverTrump camp, but Ted Cruz is really their Devil.
All today’s endorsement did was give them something topical to throw into their ongoing Cruz tantrum. The anger levels are unchanged.
To reinforce what they believe is their ultimate “Gotcha!” moment of this election cycle, the He-Man Cruz Haters club is resorting to a lazy, popular habit in the social media era: quickly digging up statements from the primaries.
Yes, boys and girls, politicians say bad things about each other during the primaries when they are trying to defeat one another. As American politics are presently constructed, only one of these contestants can emerge from the primaries and represent the party during the general election. More often than not, the primary combatants will unify for the sake of the party, which means that everyone makes up and stops saying mean things.
Of course, the moderate hacks know all of the above, but are pretending that the disparity between primary and general rhetoric invalidates an endorsement. They do this because, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times already, they’re hacks.
Oh, they also think everyone else is too stupid know the steps in this primary-to-general dance. One thing bonding Republican and Democrat elites (especially inside the Beltway) is condescension fueled by a presumption of intellectual superiority. A superiority which, in most cases, doesn’t exist. Unearned smugness abounds in political elite circles.
I have always liked Cruz and I will admit that I’m perplexed by this. Why not just do it at the convention? Why do it at all now? It’s not a smooth political play at all. That, however, goes against what the anti-Cruz crowd says about him being a slick, self-serving politician though. I really don’t see a clear upside to the timing, which doesn’t seem to please anyone, but I certainly don’t fault any congressional Republicans for supporting the Republican presidential nominee.
Let the hack consultant class in the GOP think that Trump and Cruz are the bogeymen. They’ve been destroying the party from within for decades and have institutionalized blame-assignment, just like their counterparts across the aisle. They are the reason the Republican Party is flailing. They’re drowning in their own filth and pretending that the stench is coming from elsewhere.
Don’t bother throwing them a lifeline, they’ll just tell you that you’re too dumb to use it properly.
