Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:13 pm
If hearing Ted Cruz (R-TX) of all people, say that we should cast aside leaders who hate and endorse love, wasn’t surreal enough for you, I don’t know what is.
Unless it’s maybe Donald Trump blaming Melania’s plagiarism on somebody who doesn’t exist. After all, stabbing Trump in the back wasn’t all that big a surprise, was it?
As Elaine Kamarck writes over at Brookings, Cruz isn’t the only guy at the convention auditioning for Election Day 2020.
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There are all kinds of ways to describe what Cruz did, but most of them can be repeated here. Donald Trump played it cool, tweeting,
“Wow, Ted Cruz got booed off the stage, didn’t honor the pledge! I saw his speech two hours early but let him speak anyway. No big deal!”
Which is funny. Because Trump wasn’t going to honor the pledge either.
Some of the mainstream media responses are equally entertaining, as journalists try to figure out how to report something as bizarre as this year’s Republican convention. Bloomberg played the straight man, saying “Ted Cruz stole the show at the #GOPConvention last night.”
Heck, as their tweet shows, Ted even gave Trump’s signature Hitler salute:
Ted Cruz stole the show at the #GOPConvention last night https://t.co/ZDuUX5lBc2 #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/eKDYACw9nY
— Bloomberg (@business) July 21, 2016
ABC’s Tom Llamas told audiences that “Ted Cruz walked in here and he body slammed Donald Trump’s convention.†That’s a WWE reference, for those of you who don’t watch sports entertainment. Llamas had “The Texas Rattlesnake,” Stone Cold Steve Austin, in mind when he said that.
This is Cruz giving his Stone Cold impersonation last night:
Austin’s finisher was the Stone Cold Stunner, not exactly a body slam, to which he attached the catchphrase, “Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!” And you can be sure that’s how Cruz felt last night.
Yeah. That might be an apt comparison. But another way to say it is that Ted Cruz kicked the rotting corpse of the Republican Party. And I don’t mean Mitch McConnell.
Maybe just to see if it was still alive. He’s been one of those, after all, who has tried hard to kill it. He found out it was; at least enough to boo him offstage.
Chris Matthews probably had the best analysis of Cruz’s appearance: “This is going into someone’s party and dumping on it. This is very bad behavior.”
And it is. But this is Ted Cruz we’re talking about, the guy absolutely nobody likes – or a Matthews put it, has “a reputation for being unpleasant” – and this is the Republican Party, a party built on hate and bad behavior.
To turn one of the GOP’s favorite misogynist tropes around on them, what did Trump think was going to happen?
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
