I’ll end with a little shout-out to Ted Cruz, who got booed on the floor for his speech last night in which he refused to endorse Trump. What a great honor! Of course one must say that he’s probably being purely pragmatic. As I keep saying and saying, the only conservatives who will be left standing after this disastrous election will be the Trump holdouts. (In “Beating the Saul Alinsky Dead Horse.” Scroll to the bottom for this quote.)
So what happened? Why is the (pragmatic) man of principle now saying he’ll vote for Trump after all? It all ties in with the famous Marshmallow Experiment, versions of which have been performed many times. Here’s the deal: an experimenter leaves a young child (usually preschool age) alone in a room with a plate containing one marshmallow. (I couldn’t find a picture showing just one.) He says to the child, “I’ll be back in a little while. If you leave the marshmallow on the plate, when I come back I’ll give you two marshmallows.” Then he leaves for 15 minutes. It’s an obvious test of the child’s willpower, of his ability to take the long view over the short. Hold out and you get double the reward! You’ve been promised double the reward. Just hang in there! But less than half the kids delay gratification long enough to get that second marshmallow. Their success rate is probably better than those in the Republican Party who said that Donald Trump was unfit for the Presidency but are now eating the marshmallow. Hey, the polls are tightening! He may win after all! I can just smell it! Who cares what happens in 2020? I want to be a part of the winning team right now. (At least the Cruz Cave means none of us will have to worry about whether or not we should support him in 2020, obnoxious as he is, because he’ll be gone.)
The fearless and peerless Jonah Goldberg said recently in that video you should watch that we tend to misunderstand the famous quotation which says “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The point of the quotation isn’t that the person with the power is corrupted (although that’s almost always true, too) but that the people associated with power get corrupted because they excuse character flaws in the powerful that they wouldn’t excuse in ordinary, powerless people. And here it is, playing out for all the world to see.
There are tons of good articles out there on this latest bowing of the knee, but I was much impressed, as usual, by what Jennifer Rubin of the Right Turn blog has to say:
“Cruz Slammed; 2020 Opponent Must be Delighted”