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Ted Cruz refuses to endorse Trump, tells voters to “vote your conscience”

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Lone man refuses to give Hitler salute
One single, solitary man refuses to salute Hitler at a Nazi party rally

I have to say something about Ted Cruz’s speech at the Republican national convention in Cleveland, OH.

This article from The Federalist was the best summary:

Ted Cruz knows exactly what he’s doing. On Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention, Cruz walked onto the stage in Cleveland to thunderous applause, smiled, waved, and then openly defied the Republican Party.

Not only did Cruz fail to endorse Donald Trump, in a master stroke of rhetorical understatement he also implored Republicans to “vote your conscience” in November. It was all he needed to say.

Cruz uttered the name of the GOP nominee only once, right at the beginning. “I congratulate Donald Trump on winning the nomination last night,” Cruz told the crowd.

That was it. The very next thing he said was a rhetorical shot across Trump’s bow: “I want to see the principles of our party prevail in November.”

For the rest of his remarks, Cruz’s theme was freedom—not Trump or party unity or even Hillary Clinton. He took up his theme by talking about something he’s been talking about for years: the frustrations of average Americans with what Cruz calls the “Washington cartel.” Recall that early in the primaries, Cruz made common cause with Trump as an outsider candidate, lambasting not just the Obama administration but also a Republican establishment he said was woefully out of step with ordinary Americans.

“Voters are overwhelmingly rejecting big government,” he said. “That’s a profound victory. People are fed up with politicians who don’t listen to them, fed up with a corrupt system that benefits the elites, instead of working men and women.”

He lambasted a “political establishment that cynically breaks its promises and ignores the will or the people,” a shot aimed not just at the Obama administration, but at his GOP establishment rivals in Congress.

But it was clear, to those who have ears to hear, that Cruz was not making a case for Trump. “We’re fighting not for a particular candidate or campaign,” he said. Americans deserves leaders who “stand for principles” and “shared values.”

The closest Cruz came to an endorsement of anyone was a plea for the beleaguered down-ballot Republicans who in many places across the country face tough odds in November with Trump at the top of the GOP ticket.

“To those listening, please, don’t stay home in November,” he said. “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.”

That’s what I’ve been telling people as well. Don’t vote for Trump, but do vote for solid conservatives at every level of government in your home state.

Here is the full speech: (Transcript at Caffeinated Thoughts)

 

Ted explained his actions like this:

Not everyone who runs for office is a "politician"
Not everyone who runs for office is a “politician”

Donald Trump repeatedly insulted the much better conservatives who were running against him in the primary. Most of those conservatives, like Rubio, have apologized, grovelled, and kissed his ring after they lost. Not Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is as far above Trump in intelligence and morality as Hyperion to a satyr, to quote Shakespeare. There is no way that Cruz could kowtow to an immoral imbecile like Trump.

Jonah Goldberg says this at National Review:

Well here comes Ted Cruz providing exactly the sort of drama they yearned for and many of these same voices are aghast at Ted Cruz’s effrontery. The word has gone out across the land: This is an outrage! Not since Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman senate has a political figure showed such contempt for decorum and the solemnity of politics!

[…]I understand that Chris Christie will spew whatever fake outrage his masters instruct, like a trained seal barking for another herring. But I don’t see why so many supposedly seasoned political observers are volunteering for service.

[…]This is part of the corruption of Trump. He called Ted Cruz a liar every day and in every way for months (it used to be considered a breach in decorum to straight up call an opponent a liar, never mind use it as a nickname). The insults against his wife, the cavalier birtherism, the disgusting JFK assassination theories about his Dad: These things are known. And yet the big conversation of the day is Ted Cruz’s un-sportsmanlike behavior? For real?

[…]Ted Cruz has never been my favorite politician. And I am not so naïve that I don’t recognize the gamble Cruz is making.

But if the choice is between forgiving Ted Cruz’s obvious political calculation to become the standard bearer of an authentic conservatism or Donald Trump’s lizard-brain narcissism where no principle or cause outranks his own glandular desire to be worshipped, like a conqueror atop the carcass of conservatism, I choose Ted.

If the choice is between, say, congratulating the Boy Scoutish obedience of Mike Pence as he sells off bits and pieces of his soul like jewels from a family heirloom just to survive another day, or Ted Cruz who took the tougher road and refused to join the mewling mobs of toadies, apologists, human weather vanes, difference-splitters and vacillators, I choose Ted.

If the choice is between suspending the rules of decorum, decency, and civility for Donald Trump as he casually bad mouths his own country to the New York Times just as he secures the presidential nomination of the Republican Party or accepting that we are in dark and uncharted waters and conscience must light the way, I choose Ted.

I wasn’t worried about what Cruz would say at the convention. More than anyone else speaking, I trusted him not to stain his honor by endorsing someone he didn’t support, for political gain. There was just no way that someone with the education, achievements, moral character and conservative principles of Ted Cruz would lower himself into the gutter to support a disgusting piece of godless left-wing filth like Donald Trump. Ted Cruz will be back in 2020. Maybe then American voters will care enough to actually look into the backgrounds and achievements of the candidates.

I can only hope that God will give this nation one more chance to turn off of the road to serfdom. But even if he does not, we can’t say that we were not warned.

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Ted Cruz suspends campaign: what next for conservatives? #NeverTrump

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Donald Trump with some of his supporters
Donald Trump with some of his supporters

I’ll comment after quoting some of this brief message from Ben Shapiro, posted at Daily Wire.

Excerpt:

So, Donald Trump is the nominee.

After all the fighting, after all the lies, after all the conspiracy theories and bloviating and position-shifting and progressivism, after all the insults and racist pandering and economic illiteracy, after all the cruelty and full-fledged stupidity, Donald Trump is the nominee.

What does this mean?

It means that standing against Trump means more than ever.

Early in this race, I stated repeatedly that the way to defeat Trump would be to point out to Republican primary voters that he wasn’t conservative. After all, I reasoned, conservative voters were outraged with the Republican establishment that had caved over and over to President Obama; they’d want to nominate someone who wouldn’t cut deals with the wild leftists of the Democratic Party.

I got it wrong.

It turns out that a huge bulk of Trump supporters don’t care that he’s a leftist. They think he’s a tough guy who will fight for them; they think he’ll fulfill the promise emblazoned on his ridiculous red “Make America Great Again” hats. They buy his two-bit promises, his stripper glitter showmanship, his foghorn bravado. And they do so because they don’t give two good damns about conservatism.

[…][T]he Trump movement rejects conservatism. They don’t care about the Constitution – it’s a passé document that must be discarded in favor of a Dear Leader who can lead America back to Greatness. They don’t care about the Declaration of Independence – they are an interest group, and they want their payoff. They don’t care about traditional concepts of negative rights, or economic freedom, or foreign policy strength.

They don’t care about conservatives.

So conservatives must stand against them.

[…]Trump’s “something new” is something quite old, and quite un-American. If conservatives want a future, they must stand against him and his corrupt, bankrupt philosophy.

2016 could have been a time to reap the harvest of conservatism. Instead, Trump burned down the field.

It’s time to plant anew. We should do so with alacrity rather than embracing the man holding the match.

Right. There is not a single authentic conservative that voted for Trump. Trump is not a conservative, in any way, shape or form – on any issue. We should stay home during the general election and let him lose rather than let the label “conservative” be connected to a clownish liberal sociopath.

UPDATE: Don’t stay home, go vote in the other races, and just write someone in or leave it blank for President. (I stand corrected on this)

The people who voted for Trump were basically idiots who had failed in their own lives, and wanted to blame someone other than themselves. That’s what Trump promises: he will help the losers who want to win vicariously through him. Most of his support came from white registered Democrats who never completed college, and probably had never held a decent job in their lives for any length of time. But there are enough self-made losers in America, apparently, that a clown can be selected as the nominee of a major party.

Consider this post by Kevin Williamson in National Review magazine:

The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

David French, who grew up in Kentucky, and then attended Harvard Law School, adds this in National Review:

These are strong words, but they are fundamentally true and important to say. My childhood was different from Kevin’s, but I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand.Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.

For generations, conservatives have rightly railed against deterministic progressive notions that put human choices at the mercy of race, class, history, or economics. Those factors can create additional challenges, but they do not relieve any human being of the moral obligation to do their best.

Yet millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. As I’ve related before, my church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement.

And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in. They were there, beckoning, giving men and women alternatives to gainful employment. You don’t have to do any work (your disability lawyer does all the heavy lifting), you make money, and you get drugs. At our local regional hospital, it’s become a bitter joke the extent to which the community is hooked on “Xanatab” — the Xanax and Lortab prescriptions that lead to drug dependence.

Of course we should have compassion even as we call on people to do better. I have compassion for kids who often see the worst behavior modeled at home. I have compassion for families facing economic uncertainty. But compassion can’t excuse or enable self-destructive moral failures.

We have Trump as the nominee because there are just too many of these low-information voters voting. Some of my friends are blaming the public school system, for destroying the quality of American education. Others are blaming the churches, for focusing on feelings rather than intellect. Those are both true, but I think we should blame the TV-watching Trump cultists themselves: first for failing at life, second for voting. If you’re an illiterate loser who cannot hold a job and you blow all your money on alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, then you should not be voting.

Sadly, there is no job interview for voting. Any imbecile who knows more about sports than policy can vote. The way forward is simple. We need to play defense more than ever before, because things are going to get worse. And we need to continue to argue and explain why conservative principles and policies work better than the policies of liberal Democrats like Trump and Clinton.

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Which candidate will defend religious liberty as President: Trump or Cruz?

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

First, let’s see a story is from the Business Insider, about the latest attack on religious liberty. Then we’ll compare the candidates on religious liberty.

Excerpt:

An Illinois inn that refused to allow a same-sex couple hold their civil union ceremony on the property was fined more than $80,000 by the Illinois Human Rights Commission on Tuesday.

An administrative law judge with the commission ordered TimberCreek Bed & Breakfast to pay $15,000 each to Todd and Mark Wathen for emotional distress.

[…]TimberCreek, located about 100 miles south of Chicago, must also pay $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and $1,218.35 in costs.

“We are very happy that no other couple will have to experience what we experienced by being turned away and belittled and criticized for who we are,” Todd Wathen said in a statement.

Ah, yes. The “Human Rights Commissions” that only ever go after Christians and conservatives, never secularists and liberals. It’s now more important that gays not feel “belittled and criticized” than that Christians have their religious liberty respected. Christians must be forced by the government to act like non-Christians – that’s apparently the law. A law that many Christians voted for when they voted for Democrats.

OK, now let’s see what the presidential candidates think about the issue of gay rights vs religious liberty. Let’s start with Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz

Pro-marriage activist Maggie Gallagher reports on what Ted Cruz said about the Georgia governor’s decision to side with gay rights over religious liberty:

Ted Cruz once again proved he has the courage to go up against the GOP establishment in the person of Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, who sided with leftists, big business and Hollywood by claiming conscience protections for gay marriage dissenters are “discrimination”:

“I thought that was very disappointing to see Gov. Deal of Georgia side with leftist activists and side against religious liberty,” Cruz said. “It used to be, political parties, we would argue about marginal tax rates and you could have disagreements about what the level of taxation should be. But on religious liberty, on protecting the rights of every American to practice, live according to our faith, live according to our conscience, we all came together. That ought to be a bipartisan commitment and I was disappointed not to see Gov. Deal not defend religious liberty.”

Now will any reporters ask John Kasich, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the same question?

No need to ask Hillary Clinton what she thinks, she been endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign – she’s a hardcore gay activist who opposes religious liberty 100%. Bernie Sanders is the same – 100% opposed to religious liberty.

But what about Donald Trump?

Donald Trump

This is from Bay Windows, which bills itself as “serving New England’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender communities”.

Here’s what they wrote:

The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination today promised “forward motion” on gay and lesbian equality if he is elected.

In an interview with NECN’s Sue O’Connell just days before the crucial New Hampshire primary, Trump cast himself as a uniter on LGBT issues.

O’Connell, who is also Bay Windows’ Publisher, identified herself as a lesbian in a question that noted the progress the LGBT community has made in the last two decades and asked Trump if voters can expect him to continue that momentum if elected

“When President Trump is in office can we look for more forward motion on equality for gays and lesbians?” O’Connell asked him.

“Well, you can,” Trump answered. ” And look, again, we’re going to bring people together, and that’s your thing and other people have their thing. We have to bring all people together and if we don’t we’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Recall that during the Iowa primary, Trump declared how much he loves evangelicals, and even held up a Bible he supposedly got from his mother as evidence of his genuine, authentic Christian faith. But the Iowa primary is over now, so no more Bible prop needed.

What about John Kasich?

John Kasich

Kasich considers same-sex marriage to be the law of the land, and he opposes legal protections for Christians who are sued by gay activists.

He gets an F on marriage from pro-marriage activist Maggie Gallagher for his stance on same-sex marriage:

The Supreme Court overturns the marriage laws of your state and many others by inventing a new right?  That gets a big yawn from John Kasich: “I do believe in the traditional sense of marriage—that marriage is between a man and a woman.  But I also respect the Supreme Court of the United States.  The Supreme Court of the United States made the decision, and as I have said repeatedly we’ll honor what the Supreme Court does—it’s the law of the land.”

And he opposes protections for Christians who are sued by gay activists:

What will you do, Gov. Kasich, to protect the rights of gay marriage dissenters?

[…]Gov. Kasich has refused to say whether he would support [the First Amendment Defense Act].

Ted Cruz has pledged to sign the First Amendment Defense Act, and quickly, too. No hesitation, because religious liberty is in the Constitution, and Ted Cruz is crazy about the Constitution!