With Friends Like This...

Watch it and weep:

A prominent Ted Cruz supporter lit into a Donald Trump surrogate Thursday during a heated CNN segment. “Kayleigh, I don’t know you. Seriously, do you have any integrity at all?” Iowa radio host Steve Deace said to Trump backer Kayleigh McEnany as CNN host Brooke Baldwin shook her head.

Baldwin interjected to ask Deace to keep it professional as the conservative radio host continued to rip McEnany. “I am keeping it professional. She’s the one lying,” said Deace, who criticized McEnany for arguing that Cruz had silenced voters in Colorado by winning delegates elected at a convention.

“There is no voterless elections. Every delegate is elected. Including Pennsylvania,” Deace continued. “This is the biggest lie and the biggest scam from a guy that lied repeatedly in the entire campaign and whose campaign is built on a lie.” He went on to repeatedly shout at McEnany to “stop lying,” accusing Trump surrogates of misleading the American people.

“This whole thing is a scam. There are millions of Americans that watch people like you sit here and go on these shows and Scottie Hughes and the rest of this cabal of motley crew of advisers who just sit here and defend this guy and lie about him and for him every single day,” he said.

Baldwin then stepped in again to try to defuse the situation. “Hang on a second. No one comes on my show and calls anyone a liar,” she said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvRlvhhua4M

We may not have reached peak deracination yet, but we’re getting pretty close. My position all along has been to let the process play out, on the theory that all’s fair in love and war and politics. If Cruz can snatch the nomination from under Trump’s nose fair and square, great; if not, not. But the visceral anger of the anti-Trump crew never ceases to astonish me.

A lot of reputations are going down the drain thanks to this madness. And for what? To prove a point about “movement conservatism”? If this is the frothing, absolutist face of “movement conservatism,” the hell with it.