Ted Cruz is not the most popular man in New York today after he expanded his attack on Donald Trump’s “New York values” during Thursday’s entertaining GOP debate:
There are many, many wonderful, wonderful working men and women in the state of New York. But everyone understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro- gay-marriage, focus around money and the media….Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan. I’m just saying.
As a conservative who comes out of Manhattan, I knew exactly what he was saying and agreed. But as I watched him, I felt I could almost hear him working out the political calculation in his head: “I’m going to lose New York anyway and most people in the country agree with this…” and I couldn’t help thinking he was walking into a minefield. Indeed, Trump’s response, singing the praises of the Big Apple for its behavior during 9/11, was The Donald’s big score of the night, and you could see on Cruz’s face that he knew it.
All in all though, I thought Senator Ted had a great debate, his best so far and the best of anyone on the platform. For me, the high point was his response to a New York Times hit piece headlined “Ted Cruz Didn’t Report Goldman Sachs Loan in a Senate Race.” The Times, a former newspaper, actually tore some front page space away from its eight or nine articles eulogizing David Bowie’s pioneering androgyny to attack Cruz for this obviously innocent paperwork error and, when Fox Business news questioner Maria Bartiromo brought the piece up during the debate, Cruz’s response was masterful:
Well Maria, thank you for passing on that hit piece in the front page of the New York Times. You know the nice thing about the mainstream media, they don’t hide their views. The New York Times a few weeks back had a columnist who wrote a column saying, “Anybody But Cruz.” Had that actually — that same columnist wrote a column comparing me to an evil demonic spirit from the move, “It Follows” that jumps apparently from body to body possessing people.
So you know the New York Times and I don’t have exactly have the warmest of relationships. Now in terms of their really stunning hit piece, what they mentioned is when I was running for senate — unlike Hillary Clinton, I don’t have masses of money in the bank, hundreds of millions of dollars. When I was running for senate just about every lobbyist, just about all of the establishment opposed me in the senate race in Texas and my opponent in that race was worth over 200 million dollars. He put a 25 million dollar check up from his own pocket to fund that campaign and my wife Heidi and I, we ended up investing everything we owned.
We took a loan against our assets to invest it in that campaign to defend ourselves against those attacks. And the entire New York times attack — is that I disclosed that loan on one filing with the United States Senate, that was a public filing. But it was not on a second filing with FDIC and yes, I made a paperwork error disclosing it on one piece of paper instead of the other. But if that’s the best the New York Times has got, they better go back to the well.
What I love about this is the fact that he took the time to point out what many people still may not fully comprehend: the mainstream media are arms of the Democrat party. They are not news sources in the strict sense of the word. They are tendentious instruments of harm to Republican candidates. There is never a reason for a true conservative to respond to the New York Times and its ilk as anything but enemies of himself, the people and the Constitution. No Republican can win unless he defeats not just the Democrat candidate, but also the news media who are their first line of defense.
Trump gets this. Now Cruz has shown he gets it too… and, unlike Trump, Cruz is a principled conservative. So this is good news.
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