To Dine with the Devil
Ted Cruz swallows his pride…and hopefully chokes a little
That is a picture from Jordan Peele’s avant garde follow up to Get Out, in which an imagined dominant race (the “Orange”) begins to feast on the life-force of small white children. Here you see the supreme leader of the Orange and two terrified victims who are already, obviously, in the throws of Stockholm Syndrome.
Or this is a picture of Ted Cruz’s children, (who do not have tails and knarled horns as one would assume), Joe the Giraffe and President Donald Trump. This picture should not exist. Ted Cruz’s daughters should not be next to Donald Trump. Ted Cruz should not be invited to dinner with Don and Mel for several reasons:
1. Donald Trump likes to call Ted Cruz “lying Ted”. That is a great nickname. Unless you’re a mob informant. WHO CAN TRUST YOU!?!
2. Donald Trump once threatened to “spill the beans” regarding Heidi Cruz, Ted’s wife. Trump never spilled any beans. My guess is that Trump has only ever had re-fried beans from Taco Bell and has no idea what beans actually look like. Thus he imagined he was suggesting he slather re-fried beans on Heidi Cruz. This would not be the most disgusting thing Donald Trump ever threatened to do to a woman.
3. Donald Trump suggested that Ted Cruz’s father was connected to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He is our president. Time for my morning ritual of staring blankly at a beige wall in my office.
4. Ted Cruz refused to endorse Donald Trump as the Republican presidential candidate. Donald Trump had Jenny pass a note back to Ted at recess and told him even if he invited him to his birthday party he wouldn’t come.
Obviously wholesale abandonment of dignity is nothing new in politics. The goal of governance is to get things done. However, it should make us nervous when a tight end has more philosophical fortitude than a person who sought the highest office in the land. Cruz says the night was a “social evening.” This is normal, right? You dine with people who implicate your parents in murder schemes on the regular, don’t you? This was not a social evening. It was not “Joe the Giraffe goes to Washington.” This was professor Ted’s house call.
Donald Trump wants to contract the federal workforce. He walks, lock-step, along the path of American military extremism. More than any other candidate Donald Trump recognized the historic and ongoing fetishizing the American public engages in with regard to military might. We fly fighter jets and stealth bombers over football stadiums, not Red Cross helicopters. He promised to expand and enrich the military and seems poised to make good on that promise. Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” which sounded like a vow to remove the wealthy and entitled from political power brokerage. We should have recognized the dissonance implied in such a guarantee coming from a second-generation real estate mogul. Instead “draining the swamp” simply means firing members of the hoi poloi who happen to work the for the United States government. Donald Trump needed to consult a wizard seasoned in the dark arts of government disassembly.
Ted Cruz, presumably, loves America. He simply happens to hate the American government. While running for president Ted Cruz proposed his “Five for Freedom” plan. If elected Cruz promised to initiate the eradication of the following government programs: The IRS, the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce and Housing and Urban Development. Donald Trump is apparently willing to bury hatchets to wield an ax. Republicans couldn’t seem to rally around Cruz’s vision for a emaciated government. They screwed up their courage and abandoned their ideology for the sake of electing the very essence of “vague”. The grand hope of the GOP was that Donald Trump would function as a presidential magpie, collecting the preferred elements of the party as he settled into the oval office. Or (dream of dreams) maybe serve as a pliable lump, willing to acquire whatever shape the establishment chose. Perhaps! Perhaps Donald Trump will listen to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan! Perhaps he’d make his peace with John McCain or ascend to the lucid heights of Susan Collins!
None of them came to dinner. Ted Cruz was in their seat.
Watch your neck Joe the Giraffe.
