Flashy plays better than methodical in prime time, so Marco Rubio was beaming like a big winner after Thursday night’s debate in Houston. In Ted Cruz, though, I’m happy to have the candidate who looks best the morning after.
The rival senators, both attractive, articulate and wicked smart, have been frequent conservative allies. Hostilities became inevitable when they fixed their eyes on the same prize. On Thursday night, though, they were frenemies. Finally, and hopefully not too late, the pair figured out that the only sensible target for their mutually assured destruction is the real MAD man, Donald Trump — not each other.
The tag team was effective. The Donald limped away revealed for what he is, a fraud — a liberal Democrat posing as the Republican savior. For example, his ballyhooed crackdown on illegal immigration is, in reality, an amnesty plan that conveniently goes unmentioned in the position paper touted by his campaign. The real plan — as implausible for law enforcement and gratuitously burdensome for aliens as it is Iraq-like expensive for taxpayers — is to hunt down and deport 12 million people, only to . . . yes . . . bring them back into the country legally – i.e., with amnesty.
How many aliens will be brought back? Like most fraudsters, Trump gives different answers to different audiences. When he (or one of his sons) speaks to groups sympathetic to illegals, we’re led to believe they’re all returning: essentially, Americans would provide paid vacations for several million illegals before Trump welcomes them back to compete for American jobs. But Thursday night, before a crowd of Texans who live with the damage illegal immigration does, we got stingy Trump: Only “the best of them will come back” (however many that may be), but rest assured it’s going to be “through a process.” Well, yes . . . the process is called amnesty.