The reader is directed to this correction in the National Review:
An earlier post stated that Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign was set to unveil a series of endorsements from Cruz’s fellow senators. The report was erroneous. As of this writing, the campaign has no pending Senate endorsements to announce.
Ted Cruz’s alarm went off at 5am. He hit the snooze, rolled over, and spoke extemporaneously on the subject of religious liberty until the alarm went off again. Then he got out of bed. He took off his nighttime suit and skipped merrily to the shower. It was Endorsement Day.
Gottfried Leibniz famously theorized that we are living in the best of all possible worlds—a striking assessment from a man in a wig who lived in a world where someone else invented calculus. But Leibniz never said the world was perfect. He only said there was no better alternative. In this he joins a tradition of resignation that runs from Epictetus through Nietzsche, who wrote that it was foolish to say this world was good or bad when no other one exists. Today is Friday; thank God if you want, but I have a feeling he was going to do it anyway. Won’t you ponder the alternatives with me?
Well, that was fast: The Combat! blog team is pleased to announce the return of the comments section, after literally several of you wrote in to say you wanted it back. The people have spoken, and they will continue to speak in a designated protest zone under each post. You can all go back to threatening my brother and making in-jokes about SAT tutoring there, while posts themselves will remain the exclusive province of my ill-considered rantings. Today is Friday, and policy is for the people to respond to but not, you know, make. Won’t you gather torches and pitchforks with me?
As anyone whose words are broadcast will tell you, Americans don’t trust the media. It probably started around Watergate, when we lost faith in institutions after Woodward and Bernstein uncovered corruption that went all the way to the president. We’ve hated reporters ever since. Instead of numbly accepting the mainstream media’s lies as they penetrate our ears and pert mouths, we invest our trust in politicians, for example the brave senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.
That was his answer to a question about the debt ceiling. It’s clear why Americans no longer trust the media, with their gotcha questions about whose tax plan would bankrupt the government and which candidacies are fictional. In your ordinary American life, whom do you trust? You trust your friends. And who are you friends? They’re the people who tell you what you want to hear.
If you apply this rule of thumb, it’s easy to see why Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump all enjoy such sterling reputations for trustiness. Cruz knows we’re sick of the media talking about what he did. Carson’s going to give us all 25-point tax cuts and balance the budget. And Trump is an inherently genuine person. That’s what people want to hear—not a bunch of media elites grousing about what cannot be done.
You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I applaud Senator Cruz and his fellow Republicans for finally acknowledging that Americans have lost confidence in their reporters. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.
“There are few things I enjoy more than, on weekends, cooking breakfast with the family,” Ted Cruz says at the outset of this video in which his family will not appear. “Of course, in Texas, we cook bacon a little differently than most people.” Then he wraps bacon around the barrel of a machine gun and fires it until the bacon cooks, sort of. Then, I presume, he rides a stallion through the window of the Oval Office and knocks Barack Obama out of his chair. We haven’t gotten to that part yet. But surely this guns-and-bacon viral video will clinch the presidency for Cruz, and eventually the Chinese will be our masters. Breakdown after the jump.
