Cleveland 2016- “Bugs” Trump vs “Elmer” Cruz – “Looney Tunes” becomes “Merrie Melodies”
Anyone, say, over forty-five years of age, remembers the Saturday morning television staples of the Warner Brothers’ cartoons. Entitled Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, now deemed too violent by the politically correct “weenies” for the precious sensitivities of today’s youth, they were once the very high point of Saturday morning television fare to aging members of the baby boom generation. Its unforgettable cast of characters included Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and, invariably, it was Bugs who got the best of Elmer. In many of the episodes, when the hunter Elmer was about to shoot the wise-cracking Bugs, the “wascally wabbit” would ask, “Eh, what’s up, doc?,” put his finger into the barrel of Elmer’s shotgun and the shotgun would backfire into Elmer’s face.
Last night’s drama at the Republican National Convention seemingly took on the same familiar plot of those long-ago classics and, despite the mainstream media carping of how Senator Ted Cruz “sabotaged” Donald Trump’s nomination, revealed the simple mastery of strategy that is “the Donald’s.”
Plagued by rattlesnake “Republi-can’ts” who are, despite insisting upon and then signing pledges to support the candidacy of whoever wins the Republican nomination, including Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz (among others in the NeverTrump sewer), still smarting from the smack-downs of their own defeats, Donald Trump once again set a trap into which all of these sore losers have stumbled- and he did so on prime-time television, without saying a word. Knowing in advance that Ted Cruz was not going to endorse the Trump-Pence ticket, and having read the speech prior to its delivery, “the Donald” allowed the Texas Senator and erstwhile rival to make a horse’s ass of himself last night and, in so doing, showed a watching world that Cruz and the rest of his NeverTrump collaborators, at long last, care more about their own bruised egos and self-interests than they do about the country, itself.
While real Republicans and real conservatives who, surprisingly, included Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and who are rallying around the Trump candidacy, because they know that a Hillary Clinton presidency will only bring disaster on this country’s short-term and long-term future, it was the hypocritical and thoroughly dishonorable Cruz who showed his true colors last night, and it was Ted Cruz who was booed off of the very stage that Donald Trump had magnanimously offered him in the first place.
In so doing, Cruz not only sealed his fate concerning any future Republican presidential candidacy, a Trump victory in November would likely end his chances of retaining his Senate seat when it comes up for re-election in 2018.
While the mainstream media will continue its mission to pan each night of the Republican convention, emphasizing the attempted revolt of Cruz supporters on Monday, stressing accusations of plagiarism of Melania Trump’s speech on Tuesday, and opining the lack of strategy on Trump’s part by allowing Cruz to speak, sans endorsement, on Wednesday, it is the strategic and calculating Donald Trump who stands to prevail at the end of this convention, tonight.
All he has to do is to follow his children’s impressive lead with a knockout speech tonight, in Cleveland, and then it’s on to victory in November.
As Bugs Bunny used to say, “eh, what’s up, doc?”
-Drew Nickell, 21 July 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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