Super Tuesday: The Final Battle

The Orange Dragon is devouring the land. From Alaska, where a former governor has endorsed the beast, to Georgia, where despite a statewide Cruz Campaign that is, reportedly, stronger than anything any candidate had in Iowa, the Dragon’s flames are consuming all in its path.

The establishment has been routed, their favorite White Knight, Jeb Bush, having fallen on his own sword in defeat. The libertarians have fled, Rand Paul slinking back into the woods of Kentucky rather than continue to fight a losing battle. Now, a gaggle of half-baked alternatives, one of whom isn’t even awake, and none of whom like each other, has risen. But they too, will fall.

John Kasich cannot defeat Donald Trump, deep down, even he knows that. Ben Carson’s campaign ended even before Iowa happened, and soon the brain surgeon will also be forced to admit he is no match for the great lizard. As for the New White Knight, the last best hope of the establishment, Marco Rubio, even his home state doesn’t want him. He has not won a single state, and cannot predict any state that he will win. He may think he can fight all the way to the convention, but the odds of him surviving that long are so small as to be non-existent.

That leaves only one person between the nomination and the dragon...Ted Cruz. And today is his final stand.

The South was supposed to be Ted Cruz’ bonanza. It was supposed to be his firewall. Instead it is turning into his Alamo. Instead of campaigning in states that he might have a chance at across the South, Cruz is at home, in Texas, in the fight for his life.

If Cruz can’t win his home state, it’s over. The route of the Republican Party will be complete, the armies of the GOP will all have been beaten, and Donald Trump will runaway towards the convention. The good news for Cruz is that he will probably win his home state, but everywhere else the sky is dark, lit up only by occasional flashes of flame from the Orange Dragon.

Cruz recognizes that he needs today. In recent days, in Texas, he has spoken about how badly he needs this win. He has, in fact, actually called Super Tuesday his Alamo.

But while, if Cruz wins Texas he will still be alive, what if he only wins Texas? Trump will not be the nominee, he will still be a long way off from the numbers needed to stand on the stage at the convention basking in the applause of many thousands, but if Cruz cannot win in the South, the most conservative part of the nation, where can he win?

This is a desperate day for Ted Cruz and all of those that share his brand of ultra-conservatism. The polls don’t close for several hours, and there is still time. But the one thing I can’t quite get out of my mind is what actually happened to those who stood inside the Alamo.

They were massacred.

Andrew C. Abbott

I Support Ted Cruz for President

Atlanta, GA – Who am I supporting for president? Ted Cruz.

Senator Cruz is not a perfect man, indeed, some of his policy positions and strategy moves have, in the past, been much less than could have been hoped for. He’s human. He can be abrasive. But for all that, when it comes to choosing a Republican Nominee, we have, now, only three choices.

Donald Trump. A man who can’t control his mouth, and doesn’t know what, if anything, he believes. He has flipped-flopped so often he makes Mitt Romney look like a Lincoln Chafee-style block of granite. He has been pro-life, he has been anti-life, he has believed everything by turns, and none of them for very long. Remember when John Kerry said he was for before he was against it? Trump was against after he was for it but before he changed his mind and supported it, but after that he opposed it. His supporters are the type of people that just want something to change in Washington…they want the table kicked over, and they don’t give a red cent how it’s done.

The second choice is Marco Rubio, a man who has proven again and again that he cracks under pressure, and also that he can change his mind on major issues after already having made it to the top. If we were the only choice, we could certainly do worse, but, for now, we can most assuredly do a whole lot better.

Ted Cruz isn’t a “great man.” He’s a senator who believes a lot of good things and who has a record of putting those beliefs into action. He isn’t someone to be trusted, because he was born of a human mother and father. He isn’t the last best hope of mankind, because that is God’s position, and it isn’t up for grabs.

But Ted Cruz is the man of the hour. While it is narrowing and steepening, he does still have a shot at the GOP nomination; if he wins Nevada and has a hands down victory at the next debate, he will be sitting pretty for a chance at the nomination.

He has the requisites to be the nominee: Conservative, (actually conservative, not "talking point conservative"), and he is electable. He is pro-life, (actually pro-life), and he is pro-self defense, and also he is anti-violence, otherwise known as pro-gun.

This is going be a long, hard fight. The only ones who know who will win are the groundhogs. But this is a fight worth fighting, and I’m all in, with Camp Cruz.

Let’s do this.

Andrew C. Abbott

Please Don't Panic...but I'm Feeling the Bern

Atlanta, GA – The Junior Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders is running for president as a socialist who can’t comb his hair.

He wants to soak the billionaires and the “fat cats,” and doesn’t care that American greatness was built in large part on capitalism. He wants to tax the rich, despite studies showing that taxing the rich won’t actually help America. He wants to make college free for all, even though there is no way to pay for that.

This litany of reasons has been touted over and over again both by conservatives and liberals as reasons why Senator Sanders will never be president. They say he is too old, too out of touch, too nuts to ever be elected. And yet…and yet. Something is happening. Across the nation, a movement has risen from the college campuses of America, from young people who are sick and tired of the status quo, and are ready to try anything to make it better; even someone that, according to popular wisdom, can’t win.

Sanders came within one delegate of taking Iowa, and then took New Hampshire. He has narrowed Hillary Clinton’s lead nationally, and claims that he can take it all.

There are even a few things to like about him. He understands that we need to get rid of the “too big to fail banks,” he understands that college ought to be more affordable, (although he isn’t going about it the right way), and he understands that it isn’t the Federal Government’s job to tell states they can’t legalize marijuana.

But that isn’t Sander’s greatest strength. His greatest strength is that he really believes the stuff he “believes.” Hillary Clinton has gone farther and farther to the left in the last forty years; she once was against gay marriage, but ran after popular opinion to make herself “relevant; she once was against a higher minimum wage of twelve bucks and hour, but now is supporting it. But Senator Sanders is different, right, wrong, crazy, he believes the things that come out of his mouth, and probably would rather, in the old fashioned way, rather be "right" than be president.

For these reasons, I am announcing my support of him for the Democratic Nomination. He might not win it, but if he did, we would at last have a Democrat who represents the party’s base.

And, Republicans would once again take the White House, because the rest of Senator Sander’s platform is such a load of donkey manure that the GOP would carry forty-nine states against him.

Andrew C. Abbott

Should we TrusTed?

Atlanta, GA – The Junior Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. In case you haven’t heard by now, he’s running for president.

On his yard signs, on his t-shirts on the banners that hang behind him when he speaks, Senator Cruz asks us to trust him. “TrusTed,” we are told. Ted is a “Proven Conservative,” Ted is a “Courageous Conservative,” Ted is a “Constitutional Conservative.” In other words, if you like conservatives, you will like this guy, and you should trust him too.

Putting aside for a moment the fact that it doesn’t actually take an awful lot of courage to talk and vote like a conservative when you’re from Texas, a place where, last time I checked, Republicans hadn’t lost a statewide election since 1990, lets deal with the question “should we really trust this guy?”

Ted Cruz, at age 18, said he wanted to rule the world. Granted, most 18 year olds do, which may be why some of his long time acquaintances, (I hesitate to call them friends,) don’t like him-they feel he is competition. However, as one digs deeper in the personal life of this man, you find more and more stories about people not liking him. One of his former college roommates, speaking about Cruz, said that he was a horrible person, “We should be afraid that someone like that has power.” Adding “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone, I would rather pick somebody from the phone book."

This record of people seeming to have relational issues with the Senator has been played up in the media, and, if one is looking for anecdotes, they wouldn’t be hard to find. John Boehner, former speaker of the house, when asked about Cruz, raised the middle finger. Most of the other Senators seem not to like Cruz; they aren’t backing him in his run, and they don’t have much good to say about him. Senator Cruz would probably say that all of this is a god thing, indeed, in his stump speech he often says “if you see a candidate that is embraced by Washington, run away and hide.”

Oh, there is the catch. Cruz once tried to get himself embraced by Washington.

In the early two thousands, Ted Cruz was the one who argued at the Supreme Court level to ensure George Bush got the presidency, and then worked for a time in his administration. According to some reports, as late as 2012 he was still seeking Bush backing for a presidential run before they turned him down.

Ultimately Cruz’ attempt to join the machine was unsuccessful, and he fled to the wilderness, otherwise known as Texas, and started becoming a “courageous conservative.”

Politico and the New York Times both have tried to use these two factors: and lot of people don’t like Senator Cruz, and: he once tried to get himself embraced by the establishment, to say that Senator Cruz shouldn’t be trusted.

The first argument is malarkey. A lot of people don’t like him? A lot of people don’t like a lot of people. Tough. Get over it. Maybe Cruz was annoying when he was in college, (I’m told lots of people are), maybe those folks that don’t like him need to get a grip, and maybe the Washington Cartel doesn’t like him because they don’t like anyone who goes against the grain. Or maybe he is abrasive, (I’ve never met him), maybe he isn’t likable…so what?

As for the second argument, that he was once a member of the establishment, I’ll let my good friend Daniel Woodworth answer that one:

As a young man, he wanted a job. He didn't get the job, so he went on to do other things. That much is not particularly noteworthy. The author tries to equate wanting a job in the Bush White House to wanting to go along with all of Bush's agenda, but that doesn't follow at all with events.

It almost certainly is a good thing that Cruz didn't get the job, by the way. Who we associate with can play a big role in shaping what we believe. Had he not been forced out of the Washington mainstream as a young man, he might not have developed the same integrity and strength he shows today.

But, to answer the question “Should we TrusTed” I will have to give a resounding NO.

Not because he is a secret liberal or because he hates homeschoolers, (he doesn’t), or because John Boehner doesn’t like him. We shouldn’t trust him because he is a human.

In the years of the Bush Presidency, if you had listened to multitudes of conservative “talking heads,” you may have thought that George Bush could do no wrong. He was a saint. Every time the liberals attacked him, (sometimes with good reason), scores of conservatives would take to the airwaves like fighter pilots taking to the skies, to shoot out a stream of tracer bullets and memorized talking points.

Now that Barak Obama is in the White House, according to FOX and Conservative Talk Radio, he can’t even drink a cup of coffee right. Where was all that criticism when Bush was passing the PATRIOT Act? Could it be that some people just trusted him?

We should always hold our president accountable; we should always look over his shoulder and check on what he is doing. We should never trust him. You might choose to vote for Ted Cruz, you might choose to vote for Bernie Sanders, but whoever you pick, whoever becomes president, don’t ever trust them, because it is true that all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

Andrew C. Abbott