Pat Buchanan: Ted Cruz and the Trump Takeover

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The self-righteousness and smugness of Ted Cruz in refusing to endorse Donald Trump, then walking off stage in Cleveland, smirking amidst the boos, takes the mind back in time.

At the Cow Palace in San Francisco in July of 1964, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, having been defeated by Barry Goldwater, took the podium to introduce a platform plank denouncing “extremism.”

Implication: Goldwater’s campaign is saturated with extremists.

Purpose: Advertise Rocky’s superior morality.

Smug and self-righteous, Rocky brayed at the curses and insults, “It’s a free country, ladies and gentlemen.”

Rocky was finished. He would never win the nomination.

The Hollow Man

From HotGas.Net

For 26 years, Rush Lim­baugh has insisted that con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues, clearly and pas­sion­ately artic­u­lated, will win every time.  By con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues Rush meant:  God, coun­try, fam­ily, com­mu­nity, lib­erty, indi­vid­u­al­ism, per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity, lim­ited gov­ern­ment, and free mar­kets.  Rea­gan was the model, and the promise:  it had hap­pened once, and could hap­pen again.

Eas­ier said than done.

Year after year, can­di­date after can­di­date mouthed the plat­i­tudes, and botched the exe­cu­tion.  They could over­come nei­ther the oppo­si­tion, their own estab­lish­ment, or per­sonal foibles.  Yet year after year, fail­ure after fail­ure, Rush kept the faith, exhort­ing, cajol­ing, com­fort­ing, and dream­ing of the per­fect can­di­date.

In 2012, that can­di­date arrived on the national scene; and in 2016 he ran for Pres­i­dent.  Bril­liant, artic­u­late, prin­ci­pled, and tough, Ted Cruz couldn’t have been more per­fect had Lim­baugh molded him out of clay.  Unlike the breath­less ingénue Marco Rubio, who is so scripted you can see the hand in his back, Cruz was the real deal.  Seem­ingly impreg­nable, Cruz over­came tremen­dous oppo­si­tion, and sev­eral of his own mis­steps, to become a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge to the cur­rent front-runner, Don­ald Trump.

Boyd D. Cathey: Why I Support Donald Trump and Not Ted Cruz

Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

From The Unz Review

By Boyd D. Cathey

Recently, I was asked by a friend who likes Ted Cruz, why I support Donald Trump and not the Texas senator among the Republican candidates running for president. In partial response to that question, let me set down briefly my thoughts.

I think it is important to begin with a review of some essential history, a brief exploration of the evolution of what is now called “Movement Conservatism” and its symbiotic relationship to the modern Republican Party. Understanding this background is critical to comprehending what has happened and is happening, politically and culturally, to what remains of the American republic in 2016. The transformation of the intellectual brain trust for the Republican Party has fundamentally affected and influenced the successive evolution of the positions the Republican Party has taken over the past fifty years.

Before discussing this history, I think it is necessary that we recall that the GOP Establishment, in fact, never gave up its virtual control of the party structure, despite Ronald Reagan. And since Reagan’s departure it has controlled the party apparatus completely and uninterruptedly. Even under President Reagan, as a dear friend who worked in the White House in 1981 once remarked to me: “Reagan let the Bush establishment people control appointments, and their strategy was ‘Let Reagan speak like Reagan, but we will control appointments and policy’. And basically that is what happened.”

It was my mentor and friend, the late Dr. Russell Kirk, whose volume The Conservative Mind actually initiated what became the older, scholarly “conservatism” in the 1950s. “Conservatism,” as Kirk explained it, encompassed an inherent distrust of liberal democracy, staunch opposition to egalitarianism, and an extreme reluctance to commit the United States to global “crusades” to impose American “values” on “unenlightened” countries around the world. Conservatives should celebrate local traditions, customs, and the inherited legacies of other peoples, and not attempt to destroy them. America, Kirk insisted, was not founded on a democratic, hegemonic ideology, but as an expression and continuation of European traditions and strong localist, familial and religious belief. Indeed, Kirk authored a profound biography of Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Conservative,” who embodied those principles.

Donald Trump Releases New Ad on Ted Cruz - Clear Difference TV Spot

Donald Trump's Masterful Retort to Ted Cruz's Hypocritical 'New York Values' Smear

This video confirms our opinion that Canadian born Rafael Edward Cruz is an opportunistic, hypocritical charlatan who is flailing and fading in his desperate attempt to defeat a man of great heart, conviction, sincerity and accomplishment.  The great silent majority is making clear through massive rallies and lopsided polls that they won't be swindled and lied to by the slippery political class any longer.  Donald Trump is coming to make America great again -- and America is behind him.