Congratulations to Ted Cruz for winning his fourth primary! Usually Donald Trump wins the primaries — where you go and vote, like in a real election. Cruz wins the caucuses — run by the state parties, favored by political operators and cheaters.
Until now, the only primaries Cruz has won are in Texas (his home state), Oklahoma (basically the same state) and Idaho (where Trump never campaigned).
So now, Cruz has finally won an honest-to-goodness primary. This is great news for him, provided:
(1) the general election is a caucus, and
(2) the national media universally denounce Cruz’s Democratic opponent the same way the Wisconsin media denounced Trump.
In that case, Cruz should do fine.
The Cruz-bots don’t care. They don’t care that they’re being used as a cat’s-paw by the Never Trump crowd, and that a brokered Republican convention is more likely to end with Bernie as the nominee than Cruz.
The Cruz cultists don’t even care about plain honesty, which I always thought was a conservative value. Republicans used to be appalled by guttersnipe, lying political operators like the Clintons. Now they are guttersnipe, lying political operators like the Clintons.
It’s all hands on deck to stop the only presidential candidate who wants to save America from the cheap labor plutocrats.
Cruz has flipped to Trump’s side on every important political issue of this campaign — which only ARE issues because of Trump. These are:
— Quadrupling the number of foreign guest workers to help ranchers and farmers get cheap labor: Cruz was for it, and now is against it.
— Legalizing illegal aliens: Cruz was for it, and now is against it.
— The Trans-Pacific Partnership deal: Cruz was for it, and now is against it.
— Building a wall: Cruz was against it, and now is for it.
These are all positions Cruz has changed since being a senator — most of them he’s flipped on only in the last year. I’m supposed to believe that U.S. senators can sincerely change their minds about policies it was their job to know about, but a New York developer can never change his mind about pop-offs he made more than a decade ago.
Back in 1999 — 17 years ago — when Donald Trump was considering a presidential run on the Reform Party ticket, he said this when asked about abortion by Tim Russert on “Meet the Press”: “Well, look, I’m very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject. But you still — I just believe in choice.”
Russert then asked him specifically if he’d ban partial-birth abortion. Trump said, “No. I am pro-choice in every respect and as far as it goes, but I just hate it.”
A year later, Trump wrote in his book “The America We Deserve”: “When Tim Russert asked me on ‘Meet the Press’ if I would ban partial-birth abortion, my pro-choice instincts led me to say no. After the show, I consulted two doctors I respect and, upon learning more about this procedure, I have concluded that I would indeed support a ban.”
Sometime in the intervening 16 years, Trump became fully pro-life.
You can say you don’t believe him — just as you might say you don’t believe Cruz has truly changed his mind on amnesty, the wall, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, etc. But to claim Trump is pro-choice today — present tense — is what’s known as a “lie.”
But that’s what Cruz says over and over again, including in a campaign ad — and not one of those “super PAC” ads that count even less than a retweet. A Cruz ad plays the clip from that 1999 interview where Trump says, “I am pro-choice in every respect,” repeats it three times, and then cuts to a narrator proclaiming: “For partial-birth abortion, not a conservative.”
These are the kinds of lies that used to drive conservatives crazy when the Clintons did it. Not anymore. All’s fair in smearing Trump.
Trump has said a million times that he’d scrap Obamacare and replace it with a free market system (which, by the way, he explains a lot more clearly than Washington policy wonks with their think-tank lingo). Merely for Trump saying that we’re “not going to let people die, sitting in the middle of a street in any city in this country,” Cruz accuses him of supporting “Bernie Sanders-style medicine.”
Yes, because Trump is against people dying in the streets, Cruz says that Trump thinks “Obamacare didn’t go far enough and we need to expand it to put the government in charge of our health care, in charge of our relationship with our doctors.” Over and over again, Cruz has repeated this insane lie, telling Fox’s Megyn Kelly: “If you want to see Bernie Sanders-style socialized medicine, Donald Trump is your guy.”
Trump’s alleged support for the kind of national health care they have in Scotland and Canada is another big fat lie. Trump was issuing his usual effusive praise before he drops the hammer — “It actually works incredibly well in Scotland. Some people think it really works in Canada.” Then he continued, in the very same sentence: “I don’t think it would work as well here. What has to happen — I like the concept of private enterprise coming in. … You have to create competition.”
Cruz and his cult-like followers lie about Trump wanting a health care system akin to Canada’s and Scotland’s. They lie about his supporting Obamacare. They lie about his supporting partial-birth abortion. They lie about his ever having been a Democrat. They lie about his campaign manager assaulting a female reporter.
I tried being nice after Florida, when it became clear that Trump was the choice of a majority of Republican voters, nearly choking on a column praising Cruz for his admirable flip-flops to Trump’s positions on immigration and trade. I censored loads of anti-Cruz retweets. But — as with the Clintons — you offer these Cruz-bots an olive branch and they bite off your hand.
The next thing I knew, the Cruz cult was accusing Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski of criminal battery for brushing past a female reporter. Anyone who claims this video shows a “battery” is as big a liar as the liberals who lined up to say Clinton did not commit perjury when he denied having “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky.
If James Carville and Paul Begala had a baby, it would be a Cruz supporter.
They lie about my own tweaking of Trump — I didn’t like the Heidi retweet! — amid a tidal wave of support. Trump is the only presidential candidate in my lifetime who will build a wall, deport illegals and pause the importation of Muslims. He’s the only one who cares more about ordinary Americans than he does about globalist plutocrats. Does anyone really think I’m “tiring” of him because of a retweet?
Apparently, for slavishly devoted Cruz-bots, a normal human making a small criticism of her preferred candidate is unfathomable! That fact alone proves how dishonest they are about their own candidate.
I was under the misimpression that I was dealing with adults and not swine like Carville and Begala, willing to twist someone’s words to win a momentary political advantage. Mostly, I was under the misimpression that honesty was still a conservative value.

In a truly outrageous abuse of his authority and a misuse of the law, the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Claude E. Walker, has served a subpoena on the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) demanding documents related to CEI’s research on global “climate change.” Walker is part of a network of state “AGs United for Clean Power” who have formed a grand inquisition to go after those they claim have lied about climate change—which is a contentious and unproven scientific theory.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy institute (like the Heritage Foundation) that researches and publishes studies and reports on issues it believes are “essential for entrepreneurship, innovation, and prosperity to flourish.” It is dedicated to the principles of “limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty.” CEI is well-known for its high-quality, objective research on energy and climate issues, which clearly has made it a target of Inquisitor Walker.
Although Walker’s jurisdiction does not extend outside the Virgin Islands (a U.S. territory), he had a subpoena issued through the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, where CEI is located.
The voluminous, harassing 14-page subpoena says Inquisitor Walker is investigating ExxonMobil for “misrepresenting its knowledge of the likelihood that its products and activities have contributed to and are continuing to contribute to climate change in order to defraud the Government … and consumers.” This supposedly violates the Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which is the Virgin Islands’ version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO.
The subpoena demands that CEI turn over all documents, communications, statements, emails, op-eds, speeches, advertisements, letters to the editor, research, reports, studies, and memoranda of any kind—including drafts—that refer to climate change, greenhouse gases, carbon tax, climate science, and the like, in any way related to ExxonMobil or the “products sold by or activities carried out by ExxonMobil [that] directly or indirectly impact climate change.” It covers the period between January 1, 1997, and January 1, 2007. And Walker wants donor information, too.
There are so many things wrong with this that it is hard to know where to start. First of all, the basis for the investigation is absurd. Walker is using a criminal statute designed to go after major drug dealers and mob organizations to go after a company that produces the gasoline and diesel fuel that Americans (and the rest of the world) use in their cars, trucks, boats, lawnmowers, and other equipment of every kind. And ExxonMobil and CEI are being targeted for having taken what these legal barons consider the wrong side of a scientific theory that is being actively debated and questioned.
The fact that ExxonMobil produces a relatively cheap, reliable energy source that helps power our world but is disfavored by Progressives and their political representatives like Walker seems to be what the company is really guilty of.
The root of what is going on here appears to be an effort to intimidate, harass, frighten, and possibly imprison or fine anyone who Walker and his fellow warders think is saying the wrong thing and who is standing in the way when it comes to forcing the rest of us to switch to politically correct and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar.
Given the coalition that has been formed by state attorneys general to conduct a grand inquisition against climate change deniers, this subpoena from the Virgin Islands attorney general is probably just the first assault in their quasi-religious war against unbelievers. Researchers, scientists, think tanks, universities, and anyone else who works or speaks in this area should be aware that they may soon become a target of these malicious investigations.
Fortunately, CEI has already announced that it intends to resist and “will vigorously fight to quash this subpoena.”
That is important, because if Walker and his “Axis” alliance succeed, “the real victims will be all Americans, whose access to affordable energy will be hit by one costly regulation after another, while scientific and policy debates are wiped out one subpoena at a time,” according to Kazman.
CEI will be defended by the Free Speech in Science Project, which was founded by Andrew M. Grossman and David B. Rivkin Jr. to defend “scientists, writers, businesses and others targeted for speaking out on scientific issues and policy.”
As they point out, the public needs to understand how actions like this threaten “our precious First Amendment rights,” as well as “deliberative democracy, when scientists, think tanks, and private businesses are persecuted for their views.”
Make no mistake about it. What is happening to ExxonMobil and to the Competitive Enterprise Institute is persecution. It is an affront to our grand tradition of free speech and vigorous scientific debate and should not be tolerated.