There must be party hats, kazoos, and backslapping, slobbering self-congratulations all around at various GOP establishment watering holes all over DC, at US Chamber of Commerce, and across the land.
Trump’s candidacy is dead, the arrogant voter “insurgency” has been put down. Now, all that remains to keep our little club intact is to erase that snotty Texan, Ted Cruz.
That is obviously the prevailing sentiment of the Republican donor class and their mouthpieces, the Wall Street Journal, chief among them.
Monday’s editorial page led with a blistering opening salvo, laying siege to Senator Ted Cruz’s aspirations to take over the conservative claim to the GOP presidential nomination.
And it is a beauty, that editorial. Equal parts invective toward Cruz and his conservative voters and fantasy as they begin rehabilitating the establishment’s well-deserved reputation as classic betrayers of their own base and most every conservative principle.
The editorial describes those voters who believed the campaign promises of McConnell, Boehner, Ryan, et al, as:
“…the conservative subculture that has emerged during the Obama presidency that attributes the country’s problems–from slow growth to stagnant wages to abusive government–to a GOP “surrender caucus” that supposedly sold out or didn’t fight hard enough.”
“Supposedly”! It seems the Journal forgets how the House Republicans, led by the likes of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, told voters in 2010 that if they elected a GOP majority and thus gave Republicans the “purse strings’, Obama’s willful march toward fiscal disaster and feckless foreign policy would be stopped.
It also seems, the Journal forgot how they helped the establishment foist their “electable’ Mitt Romney on voters in 2012, their “surefire” guy to beat the president who gave us “Romneycare”, er, that is “Obamacare”.
The Journal conveniently forgets as well how the same GOP establishment came back to that “subculture” in 2014, tacitly acknowledging their grip on the purse strings they said would do the trick, just wasn’t enough to stop the diabolical Obama. BUT…if Mitch got the Senate leadership and Republicans held the House…well, look out Obama!
Anybody need a reminder…that is, besides the Wall Street Journal editorial board…how that worked out?
We won’t recount the details of the Journal editorial here, suffice to say it is insulting in the extreme to the GOP base that handed the party landslide wins in the last two mid-term elections. And, as noted, it opens the all out assault on Ted Cruz, one of the few Republicans willing to stand up to, if we might borrow an epithet from the declared ‘late’ Donald Trump, “Lyin’ Mitch’!
DLH
