Matt Walsh:
I’ve been re-reading the transcript of Ted Cruz’s convention speech on Wednesday night and I can’t quite find the controversial part of it.
He congratulates the nominee. He urges everyone to go to the polls and vote for the candidates who will defend the Constitution. He articulates, quite brilliantly, the principles of conservatism. He calls for conservatives to come together. He talks about freedom, liberty, and the preciousness of human life. And for that, he was booed off the stage.
Establishment Republicans have been competing over who can condemn the “disgraceful” Ted Cruz in the harshest terms.
Rep. Peter King, a gaseous belch cloud of a man, may have taken home the prize. Sarah Palin tried to outdo the Belch Cloud by blasting Cruz on Thursday morning, telling him to “delete [his] career.” One has to wonder what Palin knows about careers, considering she hasn’t had one since she packed her bags and fled the governor’s mansion in Alaska. Many of my own readers have been so infuriated by Cruz’s speech that they’ve sworn to stop reading me just because I liked it. But I look at the transcript again and I find not a single word, sentence, or phrase that any conservative could possibly protest.
No, he didn’t explicitly endorse Donald Trump, but, despite the frantic claims to the contrary, Cruz never “pledged” to stand on stage at the convention and endorse the nominee. He did pledge to support the nominee — a pledge that Trump himself renounced on more than one occasion — but nothing he did or said constituted breaking that pledge. And if he did break it, he only broke it because his pledge to support his wife and father — both of whom were viciously attacked and slandered by Donald Trump — supersedes a pledge to a political party. But this is all sort of irrelevant to the point. The real point is that the whole embarrassing charade last night was a production staged by the Reality TV Celebrity himself.
The Daily Wire has the full story on the events leading up to Cruz’s address, but suffice it to say that nothing that happened was a surprise to the Trump camp. The RNC and the Trump people saw the script ahead of time. Cruz was honest about his intentions. He told them he would not be offering a specific endorsement. They approved the speech anyway. They approved everything that happened on Wednesday night. It turns out the backstabbing weasel in this situation was, as usual, Donald Trump.
Trump invited Cruz to give his speech, knowing exactly what it would and would not contain, and then ordered his team to whip up the crowd into a frenzy of boos. Trump decided to use his convention to exact revenge against Ted Cruz. That was Trump’s doing, not Cruz’s. The Trump team could have simply applauded Cruz’s remarks and made it seem like an implicit endorsement of Trump, thanked Cruz for urging his followers to go to the polls and vote for the most conservative candidates, and been done with it. It would have been a win for everyone involved. Instead, Donald Trump sacrificed a chance at unity for another chance to exact petty retribution against his political opponents. We should not be surprised by that.
Nonetheless, critics of Cruz insist that his speech wasn’t unifying. Clearly they’re correct in that assessment, and that’s precisely the problem. Cruz spoke exclusively about the principles of conservatism. He offered the Republican Party a chance to unite again around those principles. But it was made clear, once and for all, that many Republicans are not interested in uniting around principle. They aren’t interested in the principles at all.
The only principle in the new party is Donald Trump. The only positions that should be taken are the ones Donald Trump takes. The only speeches that should be given are ones centered around Donald Trump. This was precisely the fear of the Never Trump camp; that Trump would devour conservatism and leave only himself standing in the gap; that the new conservatism would be Trumpism, and the old conservatism would be anathema. It seems those fears have been realized.
Trump became the nominee on Tuesday. On Wednesday, conservatism was finally kicked to the curb. It was made official when Ted Cruz and his wife had to be escorted out of the building by security simply because he gave speech that profoundly defended the principles of conservatism without kissing the ring of the Godking. A speech that featured lines like:
…America is more than just a land mass between two oceans, America is an ideal. A simple, yet powerful ideal. Freedom matters.
For much of human history government power has been the unavoidable constant in life. Government decrees and the people obey, but not here. We have no king or queen, we have no dictator, we the people constrain government.
Our nation is exceptional because it was built on the five most beautiful and powerful words in the English language, “I want to be free.”
…Freedom means the right to keep and bear arms, and to protect your family.
…Freedom means that every human life is precious and must be protected.
…We will unite the party; we will unite the country by standing together for shared values by standing for liberty.
…If you love our country, and love our children as much as you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom, and to be faithful to the constitution.
If we all hold the same values and principles, these lines should have been plenty unifying. If they aren’t, that says something about us and about the Republican Party, not about the speech itself.
Look, I have said since the end of the primaries that I understand why conservatives might vote for Trump. I understand why they might not. I can respect both choices at this point. I am not trying to guilt anyone into doing anything. Those who supported Trump in the primary, when there were a myriad of other options, are utter fools and certainly not conservatives. But now we are in a very different and difficult situation, and we must all follow our conscience. If your conscience leads you to Trump in order to stop Hillary, so be it. If your conscience leads you to a third party, so be it. If your conscience leads you to flee into a cave in the desert, so be it. Those are all defensible strategies, as far as I’m concerned. The only choices I don’t understand and can’t respect are, first, voting for Hillary, and second, voting for Trump and then acting like you can’t understand why some conservatives may choose not to.
The Blaze is Glenn Beck’s platform.
Of course they all LOVED Ted Cruz’s speech.
The only thing that was controversial about Ted’s speech was the JUXTAPOSITION of the fight over whether delegates could ”vote their consciences” on the 1st ballot (while they were bound) or not with the idea of all us voters voting our consciences in the polling place.
YES, WE are free to vote our consciences in the polling booth.
But NO, delegates were NOT free to vote their consciences on the 1st ballot.
Mia Love, my Congress woman and Utah delegate decided to stay home rather than vote for CRUZ at the convention!
As a result I have decided to vote for someone else not her.
I was for Trump but I strongly felt our delegates ought to do what they pledge they will do.
And she broke her pledge.
Conservatives need to stand up for what america is all about that means God the Constitution family and smaller goverment and getting america out of the United Nations let these war mongers fight their own wars
Maybe conservatives should make a list of all of their principles, and then ask themselves which of them Donald Trump has truly embraced in his personal life and in the conduct of his business activities. It could be instructive.
Maybe conservatives ought to consider what a hildebeast victory would do to the United States they supposedly love…
Getting america out of the wretched United Nations would go a long way to improve our lives
@Spurwing Plover:
My fondest dream is John Bolton as UN Ambassador…until we leave the organization and then as Secretary of State!