* I’ve heard from three people (an anti-globalization democrat & two mainstream republicans) who have been glued to the TV this week that are now voting for Trump. Seeing his family has humanized him to those who previously viewed him as a one-dimensional villain. The consensus across party lines is that Ted Cruz is a weasel.
* Ivanka’s obviously a super-impressive lady, but I don’t think that she–or her brothers–have their dad’s humor or moxie. Trump makes me LOL pretty regularly, but I’ve never laughed at anything his kids have said.
* Reporters have never been able to find a single person who has spent time with Cruz who can stand him.
* I agree that his future prospects are exceedingly dim, but I thought that before last night’s speech, which really hurt him. The more you saw of him on the campaign trail, the less you liked him. I have a theory that the reason he withdrew from the race immediately after the Indiana primary was not just because of Indiana but his fear that he was going to lose Nebraska the following week where he was ostensibly favored and that would hurt his future prospects. (Nebraska had an open primary, whereas next door Kansas had a caucus a few weeks earlier, which Cruz carried handily.) He certainly lacks the charm and likeability of Mike Huckabee, who also is very religious, so it is not religion which makes Cruz unlikeable. I think Huckabee may be the best natural politician in the traditional sense than anyone I have seen. If you recall, Cruz sidled up to Trump all last fall, even adopting the same positions, and then did an abrupt 180 degree turn at that Fox debate which Trump skipped. So he wound up burning all his bridges with Trump, and the prospects of being the VP or AG or Supreme Court nominee all went up in smoke.
* I ended up favoring Ted Cruz over Donald Trump, but I was glad that Trump raised the question about whether Cruz’s father Rafael was involved with Lee Harvey Oswald.
It’s plausible that Cruz’s father really is the man photographed handing out leaflets with Oswald.
I’d like to know whether Cruz’s father ever has responded to the question.
* Trump’s (feels like) 12 kids being everywhere at the Convention subliminally speaks to Affordable Family Formation and the Blue-Metro/Red-State divide.
That they are articulate, well-behaved, successful, and can be trusted to go out alone in public doubles-down on the message in ways that Palin never could. That Trump is not an overt or, apparently any kind of, religious nut and yet has 5 kids doubles-down on the double-down. Trump has 5 successful kids because he is a positive, successful guy. Wouldn’t we all if we could afford them? Isn’t that a sub-text of MAGA: hang-up the smart phone and live life well.
More generally, I see at the local level you can categorize people by the number of their off-spring:
* Less than 1.1 kids and that person is a Progressive that wants to invite the world to take care of them when they are old (ahem, for minimum wage) and buy their house for 5-10x what they paid for it.
* Greater than 2.9 kids and that person is a True-Con that wants to build a wall to stem the flood of immigration because they look around and are rightly worried what their children’s employment opportunities are going to be, and how or where their children are going to find decent, affordable housing.
* …the big difference between the rare right-wing terrorist (Breivik or Roof) and leftist or Islamic terrorists is how rare it is for right-wing terrorists to have accomplices. One sign that a particular ideology is especially violent is the ability of a would-be terrorist to find accomplices.
* Middle Easterners tend to be very clannish. So when you fight one of them, you fight the entire clan. That’s why it’s misleading to think that terrorists are just violent individuals. The reality is that these terrorists are members of much, much larger clans. If the terrorist hates you, his clan (whether it wants to or not) gets drawn into the conflict.
Euro whites are more individualistic and not much into the idea of clan loyalty. So they’re more likely to be lone wolves.
* Because Ted Cruz won the largest delegate haul in at least 8 states, he is granted an automatic speaking slot according to RNC rules. There was nothing Trump could do to prevent Cruz from speaking if he wanted to; and since Trump either knew or guessed that Cruz would never endorse him, he decided to let him make a douchebag out of himself on international TV. It was a masterstroke given the constraints of the situation.
What Ted Cruz did last night was literally psychopathic. With the whole world watching, with the fate the party and the country on the line, with the future of law and order up for grabs, Ted Cruz decided to nurse a personal grudge and throw a stink bomb at the man whom we were all there to honor and support, the man who is the reason for the whole occasion. No only was this atrociously bad form, it was also cowardly to a degree that makes me queasy.
There is something deeply, disturbingly wrong with Ted Cruz which makes normal people run in the other direction. This freak and anybody who supported him (including El Rushbo) will need to be dealt with after the election is secured.
* Supposedly Trump extended an invitation to Cruz a couple of weeks ago without any conditions after failing to get him to agree to live up to his commitment to endorse the RP’s nominee at one of the debates. Apparently, Trump got an advance copy of Cruz’s speech two hours before the scheduled appearance and, despite the fact that the draft contained no endorsement, he decided to let Cruz go ahead and speak. Had he cancelled Cruz’s appearance, the odium would have fallen on Trump. Maybe that was what Cruz was counting on. Since Trump didn’t blink, Cruz probably felt he had to go through with the speech, lest the odium fall on him. Being the vain and self-centered creature he is, Cruz may have convinced himself that his “brilliant” speech-making would sway the audience and carry the day. Trump, being the very savvy judge of men and a completely unscrupulous operator (think of Chris Christie’s withering cross-examination of Senator Rubio in the NH debate, which brought out Rubio’s best robotic qualities), probably arranged for his manager Paul Manafort to organize the chorus of boos and probably figured that, if Cruz delivered the draft speech without endorsing him, Cruz would be committing political suicide. It looks like Trump figured it out perfectly and Cruz not so much.
* Trump’s “attack” consisted of retweeting side-by-side pictures of the two wives– with his wife, Melania, by the way, actually being older than Cruz’ wife, Heidi! As far as I know, the picture of Heidi Cruz used was (a) taken in public; (b) taken by a professional photographer; and (c) not digitally retouched, in any way, to make her look any worse than she actually did, at that instant. Again, Trump’s retweeting, however dubious as a campaign tactic, was in direct response to that Cruz PAC’s sending a modeling photo of Melania in the buff, long before her marriage to Trump, to married women voters in Mormon precincts of Utah, telling those married female voters that they could have Melania Trump as their next First Lady– or else vote for Ted Cruz!
In addition to that Cruz PAC’s dubious tactic, a female Cruz surrogate had appeared previously on Fox News Channel, on Neil Cavuto’s 4 p.m. (E.S.T.) show, decrying the possibility of a Trump presidency by pointing out that Melania Trump was (a) an immigrant (!); (b) a third wife; and (c) a former professional model who had posed in the nude, and thus was, according to that female surrogate for Senator Cruz, unfit to serve as the First Lady of the United States!
Even more egregious, to my own mind, than the two above-noted instances of Cruz supporters’ maligning Melania Trump, earlier this year, was what Ted Cruz’ most famous and prominent surrogate, Glenn Beck, had to say about her, last year: Beck claimed that Melania Trump had appeared in “lesbian porno videos!” How often have the mainstream media mentioned this fact, while they were condemning Trump for “attacking” poor, innocent political wife, Heidi Cruz, the Goldman Sachs banking executive?!?
Finally, I read an ABC News story about Ted Cruz, this morning, which continued to push the myth that it was Trump’s campaign that had pushed the Cruz sex-scandal story, earlier this year. Everyone who followed Twitter knew that it was Rubio supporters who were pushing the story– not Trump supporters, let alone the Trump campaign itself. In fact, it was reported that the source of the eventual story in “The National Enquirer” was neither Trump nor Roger Stone, as falsely asserted by Senator Cruz himself; it was one (or more) of the private eyes hired by Rubio surrogates to trail Cruz and his supposed women friends! When Rubio withdrew, his surrogates immediately stopped pushing the sex-scandal story, and one (or more) of their private eyes decided to repurpose their handiwork by selling it to the aforementioned tabloid. Since the owner of that tabloid is a Trump friend, Trump was blamed for what was a Rubio dirty-tricks operation.
* I can recall the very first Republican debate (in Cleveland, of all places) last August, which was moderated by Fox. (That was the debate where Megyn Kelly famously asked Trump about all the bad things he had said about women over the years.) After the debate, where Fox did their best to torpedo Trump’s candidacy, Mr. Luntz held one of his focus groups, and they all agreed that Trump had lost the debate. Polls revealed the next day that Trump had won the debate. So much for the Luntz focus groups.
* This is one of those iSteve posts where the comment quality just craters for some reason. It’s like when you’re eating strawberries out of one of those big flats from Costco, and they’re all ripe and delicious but then you pick up that mushy one with the gray mold on it.
* The Don not only hit a grand slam home run tonight, he hit it out of the stadium, across the street, and into the parking lot, where it broke the window on Hillary’s limo.
* As far as what George Will will do should Trump win, I suggest he retire from the opining business. The man is 75, has had nothing of interest to say for the past 15 years, and ought to have put aside sufficient savings to live comfortably.
* Instead the DNC has Ivanka’s ugly step-sister, Chelsea Clinton. Can’t you picture her watching Ivanka on TV, then letting out a blood-curdling shriek, throwing herself on her bed, kicking her feet and crying into her pillow. “Mom! Don’t make me do this!!”
