Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Here's hoping I don't have to play the blame game

I feel very bad for Ted Cruz. I honestly do, dear reader. Not only did he have an awful day in Indiana, not only is his campaign imploding, but the poor bugger doesn't seem aware of how futile his attempt to remain alive in this Republican contest is.
Cruz should never have allied himself with John Kasich, that pathetic, cop-bashing, greedy pig of a RINO—and it was an alliance that essentially broke up before it began. Cruz agreed to let Kasich have Oregon and New Mexico if Kasich stood down in Indiana to cede it to Cruz. But Cruz, contemptuous chess-player that he is, immediately told the voters of Oregon and New Mexico not to vote for Kasich. It's pretty clear that I have no love or respect for the Ohio governor, but really, Teddy Boy? You seal an agreement with someone and that is what you do to him? Talk about a backfire. Kasich easily came in second place in four out of the five Acela primaries.
Cruz's betrayal of Kasich does, cependent, seem in line with the comfortability factor he has with regard to letting delegates—not voters—decide the contest, as with Colorado and Wyoming. Some liberty-embracing, Reaganite conservative purist.
Teddy Boy then trots out failed businesswoman and war hawk Carly Fiorina as his partner. Fiorina was picked to appeal to the female electorate and she is solid in her attacks on Madame Hillary. It makes some sense, but there are many other questions to be answered. Chief among them is her own grudge against Donald Trump. Does Cruz really believe in Fiorina to deliver for him or is it just a way to bolster the "Anyone But Trump" agenda?
Teddy and Carly see eye-to-eye with the neo-con agenda which wants to keep arming the "rebels" in Syria against Bashar al-Assad—a man who wants ISIS destroyed, a man who years ago directed his forces to kill the radicals involved in a plot to bomb the American embassy in Damascus before it was carried through—while portraying Russia, which wiped ISIS out in Palmyra, as the enemy.
I have had it with the neoconservatives and their rancorous, Trotskyist platform and the cynical embrace of the money, through contracts, that it provides them with. William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, John McCain, et al.: Put these people on Mars and let them start a war there. That's it, boys and girls, bring "freedom and democracy" to burgeoning hydrocarbons on Mars and maybe then we can get stuff accomplished here on Earth without your poisonous interventionism.
As a little aside here, dear reader ... I can't wait for the knife that will slash through the Clinton, Bush and Obama doctrines, with all the military conflicts they entailed, if Trump gets the job. I know I was a staunch defender of Dubya, his administration and his policies a decade ago. That was because, when it came to Iraq, I did believe in the destabilizing threat inherent if not in Saddam Hussein or his Ba'athist party, then his more psychotic sons Qusay and Uday. Furthermore, if the Left hadn't been so childish and unpatriotic in their opposition to the War in Iraq, calling it the "War on Iraq," sending out stupid memes like the one that used all the oil/gas company logos and calling members of the administration "Wolfie" and "Rummy" and the president himself "the Shrub," and perhaps if Stop the War had not been the poster child of the anti-war perspective, I would have seen the sense in opposing the whole agenda.
Just maybe if most liberals had calmly and clearly argued that the President had no plan for how to replace what he wanted to topple in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we could have been spared the ra-ra patriotism that served as the natural, automatic and understandable response to the progressives' puerile protests and which defended the war hawks. Yes, Lefties, it is all your fault.
Back to Cruz: If he had just stepped down after the New Hampshire or South Carolina primary, had a talk with the Donald and dropped out, Trump very likely would have reserved the late Antonin Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court for him. Now, he can forget it. Trump is likely to keep humiliating Cruz after he's won the nomination and the Presidency, and Cruz will have no-one to blame but himself. Like Marco Rubio, this dude is finished. How either of those men can revive their fortunes, never mind their good standing among the public, is beyond my ability to comprehend.
Actually, Rubio has a small chance at being considered as Trump's VP. Not likely, but he has been mentioned. Cruz? No chance. Teddy Boy would rather keep deluding himself that Trump can be stopped from getting the necessary 1,237 delegates, thinking he'll take Indiana and California, and stand a chance with a second ... a third ... a fourth ballot at the convention in July.
Ted Cruz is an ill man, in addition to a charlatan, because as I've already written in past entries, I'm hardly convinced that he has not worked with Senator Leader Mitch McConnell to portray himself as his adversary and, therefore, an "outsider". I know former House Speaker John "Bonehead" Boehner, as useless a degenerate drunk as you will ever come across, recently referred to Cruz as "Lucifer in the flesh," right up there among the best of ironic political machinations.
I can just hear it now, in some darkly lit Washington backroom: "C'mon, John, your turn. Step up to the plate, John. It can't be on Mitch all the time, and you know that. Come on, your margarita will still be waiting for you, just put it down for one moment and make an announcement bashing Ted Cruz. We need to make Ted appear as anti-Establishment as possible."
See where I'm going with this? Cruz is one of them, but he's been careless. He's been revealing just a little too much of that lately, with his embrace of voter-free delegate counts and proudly citing the endorsements of Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham as if they were actually worth a damn. So, time to drag the Orange Man from his barstool and prop him up in front of the podium and the lights for him to announce, "Goddamnit—hic!—but I sure hate Ted Cruz!"
Yep, that's believable. Golly, the GOP is so clever!
"But hey," I hear you Cruz-bots telling me, "We know Cruz is the real deal because Glenn Beck is fasting and praying on his behalf."
Ah yes, Glenn Beck, the phony evangelical, with his mansion and his private jet, who douses his face in crushed-up Cheetos in a bizarre protest against Trump, radio's most prolific weeper, who fired a load of people who've been loyal to him because his media empire is sinking fast. That Glenn Beck? Oh, you purists are a scream, I'll tell you what.
What's infuriating about the whole thing is that the Cruz people and Trump people are supposed to be allies in the fight against the socialist takeover of America. We could both make this country truly great again, together. But the Cruz crowd won't vote for Trump because they listen to schmendricks like Mark Levin who makes every excuse, no matter how feeble, for Cruz and his tactics. If the pardon just can't be delivered in a modern sense, Levin will start discussing some esoteric anecdote from the 19th century to justify it. Right, Mark, Lincoln got elected through a contested convention. I get that. That was a different era. There were no such thing as voter primaries in 1860.
Trump, for all his faults, has told us what he will do and he's been very clear about it. Sure, he's unrefined, he's made errors in judgment and he's taken some head-scratching positions on some subjects like the North Carolina bathroom law. Yet he also recently delivered a foreign policy speech that true patriots have been waiting forty years to hear. Nevertheless, I'm expected by all "real" conservatives to embrace a man who handed soccer balls out to border-jumpers alongside the snack product-bathing headcase I mentioned earlier.
If this country goes to hell in a handbasket for good because Mrs. "Hot Sauce in my Handbag" Pantsuit gets elected, because of the deleterious trade deals that'll be signed, illegal wars fought, businesses killed through the continuance of Obama-nomics*, and Stalinists put on SCOTUS as a result of her presidency, I already know who I'll be blaming.

* I credit my wife Squirrel for coming up with that phrase.

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