Lyin’Ted, the Bushes, Et Hoc Genus Omne

The self-righteousness and smugness of Ted Cruz in refusing to endorse Donald Trump, then walking off stage in Cleveland, smirking amidst the boos, takes the mind back in time.

At the Cow Palace in San Francisco in July of 1964, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, having been defeated by Barry Goldwater, took the podium to introduce a platform plank denouncing “extremism.”

Implication: Goldwater’s campaign is saturated with extremists.

Purpose: Advertise Rocky’s superior morality.

Smug and self-righteous, Rocky brayed at the curses and insults, “It’s a free country, ladies, and gentlemen.”

They were like football coaches who still swore by the single-wing offense, after George Halas’ Chicago Bears, the “Monsters of the Midway,” used the T-formation to score 11 touchdowns and beat the Washington Redskins in the 1940 NFL championship game, 73-0.

What paralyzed the Republicans of a generation ago? What blinded them from seeing and blocked them from acting on the new realities?

Ideology, political correctness, a reflexive recoil against new thinking, and an innate inability to adapt.

The ideology was a belief in free trade that borders on the cultic, though free trade had been rejected by America’s greatest leaders: Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

The political correctness stemmed from a fear of being called racist and xenophobic so paralyzing, so overpowering, that some Republicans would ship the entire Third World over here, rather than have it thought they would ever consider the race, ethnicity or religion of those repopulating America.

The inability to adapt was seen when our Cold War adversary extended a hand in friendship, and the War Party slapped it away. Rather than shed Cold War alliances and rebuild our country, we looked around for new commitments, new allies, new wars to fight to “end tyranny in our world.”

These wars had less to do with threats to vital interests, than with providing now-obsolete Cold Warriors with arguments to maintain their claims on national resources and attention, not to mention their lifestyles and jobs.

With Trump’s triumph, the day of reckoning has arrived.

The new GOP is not going to be the party of open borders, free trade globalism or reflexive interventionism.

The weeping and gnashing of teeth are justified.

For these self-righteous folks are all getting eviction notices. They are being dispossessed of their home.

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