Cruz for once Leveraged the Awesome Power of his Assholery in a Rghteous Cause.

The convention chaos after the Cruz Snub was even worse than it looked on tv, according to Vox's Libby Nelson:

"The first sign that something was wrong came when Sen. Ted Cruz told the crowd not to stay home, to go to the polls, and to vote their conscience. That’s when the Quicken Loans Arena — which was finally crowded and energized after two sleepy primetime evenings — started to get restless."

"As Cruz told the attendees at the Republican National Convention to vote up and down the ticket, the chants started to ring out: "Go home!" When it became clear that this was as close as he was going to get to an endorsement, the restive audience turned to angry: "We want Trump!"

"On the stage, Cruz was circling back to a meant-to-be-touching anecdote about the child of a fallen police officer, but from the back of the arena — where the view of his face on the Jumbotron was unobstructed — it was impossible to hear anything but the boos of the angry crowd, louder than it had been for most of the convention. I couldn’t tell you how his speech ended. Almost everything after Cruz said "vote your conscience" was subsumed in an angry roar."

"Where guests and alternates from the California delegation were sitting, people in Make America Great Again hats were booing. A decorous-looking woman with white hair stood up, yelling, waving both her thumbs down. The chants grew louder: "Trump! Trump! Trump!" "Keep your pledge! Keep your pledge!"

"Cruz was booed more lustily during his own speech than Hillary Clinton was during Mike Pence’s. From the floor, just in front of the booing crowd, it felt anarchic, as if anything could happen; security reportedly escorted Cruz's wife, Heidi Cruz, from the arena."

"After Cruz finished, fans and delegates stormed out from the stands, livid. "It was very disappointing," said California delegate Marion Ashley. "He’d given a pledge to support the nominee. Donald Trump called him Lyin’ Ted, and he proved himself right. People were chanting, ‘Keep your pledge,’ and he thumbed us the nose."

"Just past the stands, Deanna Frankowski, an Alabama delegate wearing a hat that said "Trumpette" and carrying pro-Trump signs under her arm, was hoarse. Had she been yelling? She had, throughout the convention but especially tonight. "I’m really mad," she said. "As far as I’m concerned, his political career with me is over." Cruz, she said, "was like a big crybaby … he put himself first."

"Frankowski, like other delegates, was particularly incensed by the "vote your conscience" line — a phrase that the NeverTrump movement had used in its unsuccessful quest to allow delegates to vote for whomever they wanted rather than ratifying Trump’s status as the nominee."

"Toward the end, where the other speakers would say, ‘This is why we need Donald Trump,’ he just said, ‘Vote for your conscience,’" said Nancy Weres, a California delegate. "That doesn’t mean anything."

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12245308/ted-cruz-republican-convention-donald-trump-boos

Voting your conscience doesn't mean anything. That's the real Trump campaign slogan, not Making America Great Again, which Trump plagiarized from Ronald Reagan like he rips everything off.

Trump even plagiarized The Art of the Deal. And Meredith McIver, if she exists, apparently was also involved with much of his plagiarism.

As for Ted Cruz, Josh Marshall has a great line:

"Years from today we will still wrestle with the meaning of Cruz for once leveraging the awesome power of his assholery in a righteous cause."

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/755985155395874816

Josh Marshall:

"I tried, as events unfolded tonight, to piece together in the two posts below just what happened tonight and how. At first I was certain that Ted Cruz had executed an excruciating double cross of Donald Trump, a thoroughly disreputable and dangerous man, who had also humiliated Cruz, defamed his father and denigrated his wife. We now have two contending theories. The first: by whatever means, the Trump camp allowed Cruz, under their very noses, to blow up their convention through a feat of staggering, almost incomprehensible incompetence. Somehow, with so much at stake, they didn't even read the speech. The second: the Trump campaign knowingly allowed Cruz to light his bomb and then egged the conventioneers on to an outraged chorus of boos imagining that Cruz would be humiliated and that laying bare the GOP's protracted civil war before millions would in fact 'unify the party.'

"The Trumpites are incorrigible and in some cases congenital liars. And yet it may be true. We can only fall back on Trump's Razor: "Ascertain the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts."

"The truth though is that both explanations, different as they are, amount to the same thing. The Republican party nominated a man because of his ability to dominate and denigrate opponents and summon up a plethora of demons already rumbling under the seas of Republican revanchism. The man was and is a charlatan and a grifter, the master of a Potemkin Village world rooted in narcissism and aggression which creaks and staggers under even the most measured scrutiny. Either scenario, both defying any conventional credibility, could plausibly emerge from that toxic soup."

"Indeed, while this conflagration was erupting in Cleveland another bomb, which Trump himself had lit earlier in the day, was going off on the pages of The New York Times. One can debate whether it is wise or sensible for the United States to guarantee the independence of small states on the periphery of Russia which had for centuries been either within the Russian domain or inside its sphere of influence. But we have. In his comments to the Times, Trump treated the matter like a real estate goon shaking down a distressed landlord to make an easy buck.

Trump's mix of cocky ambiguity and predation could scarcely be better primed to trigger the kind of great power confrontation that could push the world from smoldering to fire. It is no exaggeration to say that were it not for the relative confidence that Trump will be defeated in November that interview alone could trigger a genuine international crisis."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/making-sense-of-the-conflagration

True. Can you imagine Trump running the country after watching him try to run a convention?

Cruz is a thoroughly awful person. This is entirely apart from his politics. I know many people with awful politics who are wholly creditable people."

I know it. Someone on Twitter was on me tonight for praising Cruz's snub of Trump. He declared 'we'll have to disagree.' 

I never denied that Cruz is an awful person. So I don't get what we're disagreeing on. 

But this was still Cruz's finest moment. Or maybe his one fine moment. 

 "But as I noted tonight, perhaps it was only Cruz with his icy indifference to the hatred of everyone, his ravenous aggression and unalloyed devotion to himself and his benighted ideals who could land this kind of blow. Years from today we will still wrestle with the meaning of Cruz for once leveraging the awesome power of his assholery in a righteous cause. Perhaps there is a salutary bravery or solidity there I hadn't noticed, or at least a quality vouchsafed for this moment.

This is Trump. His convention would be his presidency - entertaining and hilarious if he weren't also a live wire against the fumy gasoline can set against our national home. It is quite literally a terrifying prospect. He's quite likely to lose his quest for the presidency. But he might not. He's that close to the unimaginable. And he's brought almost an entire political party along with him. We will be blessed if we can escape this with no more harm."