Vote for Ted Cruz — because he’s the one your political opponents fear most *UPDATED*

Sometimes, the best way to figure out what politician will best serve your values and interests is to look at what those antithetical to your interests are trying to force upon you.  In this election, the Leftist media and the decidedly non-conservative GOP are steering conservative voters either to Donald Trump or Marco Rubio.  At the same time, they are using every available tactic to destroy Ted Cruz’s candidacy.  This should tell us something, and the something it tells us is that Ted Cruz should be the conservative candidate of choice.

Let me start with the media’s manipulations. To appreciate how subtle they’re being, let me go back to Obama’s longing statement a few years ago that he wished he could go full Bulworth. For those who missed the remarkably silly eponymous movie, it stars Warren Beatty as a suicidal politician who gains success when his existential despair leads him to speak the truth — in hip-hop prose.  The movie message is that the electorate likes a candidate who not only doesn’t lie but who actually speaks the unfiltered truth.

You realize, of course, who’s the Bulworth in this election: It’s Trump, who is remarkably unfiltered when it comes to saying what he thinks at any given moment. It’s understandable that Americans, tired of politicians lying to them through out-and-out untruths or smarmy mis-statements, as well as disgusted by the fishwife scolds on the Left who shut down debate about relevant subjects by playing the PC card, find Trump’s Bulworthian pronouncements appealing.

The problem is that his invariably self-centered faux oracular pronouncements say nothing about a “President Trump.” Given Trump’s big business, big government, big Democrat background, and his florid narcissism, the reality of a Trump presidency is that it will probably look remarkably like an Obama presidency.  Trump will promote big business and big government; he’ll be led by his ego, not the Constitution; he’ll be incapable of working with the People’s representatives in Congress (which, as Obama does, he’ll marginalize); and he’ll have no learning curve even as his self-centered policies fail.

The reality that Trump won’t be a conservative president is nowhere made more clear than in the fact that the mainstream media is pushing him for all its worth. Trump gets more airtime than all the other candidates combined (something only the gaffe-prone Hillary appreciates).  Moreover, unlike Republican candidates whose coverage tends to be limited to routine slimings and direct attacks, the media lets Trump speak for himself.

As the past two presidential elections have proven (not to mention our entire cultural shift to the Left over the past four decades), the media is not stupid. It understands how to sell a product and how to destroy a product. The media is selling Trump, knowing that dissatisfied, marginalized Americans will be so charmed by his Bulworth-like honesty that they’ll fail to look behind the speeches, thereby missing the Leftist politics that he’s hiding under the demagogue’s American flag.

To summarize, the Leftist media is pushing Trump hard, and trying to marginalize Cruz and Rubio. Taking a page out of Groucho Marx’s book, whatever the media is for, I’m against it.  I disagree with the media on every political metric, so if the Leftist American media is stealthily trying to get me to vote for Trump, that’s the last thing I should do.

The GOP is no better.  This is the same GOP that has supported or refused to fight every single one of Obama’s initiatives, ranging from abetting Obama’s illegal dictates to enforce Obamacare (the GOP stopped opposing Obamacare the moment it became law), to its ineffectual opposition to the Iran deal, to its complicity in Obama’s plans to “fundamentally transform America” through immigration both illegal and marginally legal.  Keeping in mind what the GOP supports (with its actions, not its duplicitous words), I’m going to assume that its favored candidate doesn’t share my political values.

And which candidate does the GOP support? Leading into the 2016 edition, the GOP has made it clear that it fears Trump and Cruz, and desperately wants Rubio. To give Rubio his due, he is far better than Trump, Hillary, or Bernie. If he ends up being the Republican candidate, I will vote for him.  Now, though, with a better candidate available, Rubio strikes me as being just a younger, prettier Romney. Like Romney, he has a fairly conservative take on foreign policy, but is a Democrat-lite on domestic issues and a Democrat pure and simple on immigration.

(Having said that, Rubio gets kudos for going on the record in the Senate to slam Obama’s Iran deal and to spell out with frightening specificity what we can expect if the next President continues to enforce that deal.)

Because I am a wise contrarian who keeps in mind Groucho’s dictum when listening to advice from those with whom I disagree, the GOP’s enthusiastic support for Rubio knocks him out of the running for me.  The GOP is not conservative; it’s Leftist lite, and its chosen candidates in the last two elections have been disasters.  They are neither fish nor fowl, and still repel Progressives, even as they fail to excite conservatives.

And so for me, the last man standing is Ted Cruz. This isn’t a stretch for me.  That is, I’m not driven merely by contrarian opposition to the media or the GOP.  I continue to like Cruz on his own terms.

I like Cruz’s highly functional brilliance — and by functional I mean he’s not an airy-fairy Ivory Tower genius but is, instead, someone who brings his considerable intellect to the real world.

I like his devotion to the Constitution.

I like his political courage.

I like his proven management abilities, including the fact that he can work with people across the political divide, provided that doing so doesn’t compromise core conservative principles.

I like the fact that, instead of sneering down his critics’ claims that he’s arrogant, Cruz has modified his behavior so that he’s relaxed, accessible, friendly, and funny, all while keeping true to his constitutional values and, often, giving people a useful lesson about how those values benefit them too.

I like his political focus on what’s good for America, which is a marked difference from Obama’s “What’s bad for America” policy principles and Rubio’s mushy pro-American real-politik approach to foreign policy.

And, lastly, I like his elegant ability to avoid falling into the media’s traps.

Ted Cruz:  Vote for him because the media and the GOP hate and fear him, and because his virtues stand on their own merits.

UPDATE:  This is so perfect, I have to include it here: