I would apologize, dear readers, for this, except that (1) it's not my site, and (2) I didn't post it. But I can say that it was, indeed, sorry.
Let's grind our way through the mess.
The Colorado GOP tweeted "We did it. #NeverTrump," then quickly deleted it.
A pity, as they should have proudly left it in full public view. Football players don't delete touchdown spikes, after all.
Could it be that the Republican Party machine in the State saw that Trump may win, and pulled the plug to stop it? Could it be they could care less about what the voters want? The Republican Party's will be done.
No, no (as in Bizarro World no's), and it's their party, respectively, something the Director seemed to acknowledge as recently as two days ago.
The voters didn't get to participate at all. Their voice means nothing in Colorado. This is the State that went to Santorum in the 2012 Election. The Republicans weren't going to chance a Trump win, so they took it to the State Convention, where Cruz won all of the delegates.
Bull-pucky. On March 1st, Colorado Republicans gathered at nearly three thousand precinct caucuses to select delegates to the county assemblies and district conventions. That is where Colorado Republicans got to participate and cast their votes. At the county assemblies, those delegates elected delegates to the congressional district and State conventions. All of this was laid out in the State party rules, on the State Party website, in full public view since last bleeping September. The Colorado GOP even went out of its way to help the public understand the process, publishing simplified question-and-answer fact sheets as well. It wasn't sprung at the last minute or cooked up by the "establishment" at the eleventh hour. The Trump campaign had seven months to familiarize themselves with all of it and prepare to compete in the delegate selection process. The reason why it caught them by surprise, and is doing so all over the country, is because the candidate was too lazy, ignorant, and conceited to do his homework and due diligence and too incompetent to hire professionals who knew how to organize and put together a top-flight ground game to compete for delegates beyond a first convention ballot. Hell's bells, the Trump campaign didn't put a visible paid staffer on the ground in Colorado until last week. How in the name of the halls of Erebus is that the fault of Senator Cruz or the Colorado GOP?
Or this?:
After firing the organizer initially put in charge of Colorado last week, Trump’s team hired Patrick Davis, a GOP operative from Colorado Springs, to put together a slate in an effort to win some of the delegate slots to be elected by just fewer than 4,000 party activists at Saturday’s assembly… Trump’s last-minute organizing effort did not go well. The leaflet his campaign handed out listed a slate of twenty-six delegates. But in many cases the numbers indicating their ballot position — more than six hundred delegates are running for thirteen slots — were off, meaning that Trump’s team was mistakenly directing votes toward other candidates’ delegates. [emphasis added]
Uh oh. Delegate #289, who is on Trump list of preferred CO delegates, is actually Ervin Krause -- and bound to CRUZ.pic.twitter.com/ZnWpLPSUc6
Seven of 26 names on Trump delegate list have incorrect numbers. Problem when ballots have no names, just numbers.pic.twitter.com/ZnWpLPSUc6
Or this?:
The mistakes were exposed at the worst possible moment: just as Colorado Republicans were walking on to the arena floor to take seats and prepare to cast ballots. Trump volunteers frantically printed new lists with new names and ballot numbers - but those lists also had mistakes. [emphasis added]
Trump supporters should be more than just disgusted by this burgeoning fiasco, they should be angry - at Trump for betraying the trust and faith that they've placed in him, for bilking them into believing the lies that he's "invincible," of his supposed "brilliance" and "competence" that would supposedly make him effortlessly capable of doing a WAY better job than "those idiots in Washington" when he and his brainless-trust are so incapable of finding their delegate selection asses with both hands and a flashlight missing its batteries that none of them had the foggiest idea about that part of the nomination process until Reince Preibus (assuming that all the campaigns were up to speed) offhandedly mentioned it ten days ago (which is when Paul Manafort came into the picture).
That would be the same Paul Manafort who, in trademark Trumpesque fashion, ascribed the delegate skunking (except for eight alternates) to "Gestapo tactics":
In his first Sunday show interview since taking on an expanded role in Donald Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort was quick to raise questions about the tactics Senator Ted Cruz’ campaign is using to secure delegates.
After being asked whether threatening delegates is fair game in the hunt for the 1,237 required to secure the Republican nomination, Manafort responded, “It’s not my style, and it’s not Donald Trump’s style. … But it is Ted Cruz’s style.” He then called the Cruz campaign’s methods “Gestapo tactics, scorched-Earth tactics.”
Three lies in a single paragraph, one of them slanderous. Not bad for his first official Sunday show interview.
Manafort did not back up his accusations with specific incidents....
Because he couldn't, which is also typical Trumpism.
.....but said, “We’re going to be filing several protests because reality is, you know, they are not playing by the rules.”
You know, the rules that say, "Donald Trump always wins, ergo, if Donald Trump ever loses, it can't be his fault, and must have come from 'Gestapo tactics' instead of Trump being an arrogant, complacent, overconfident, puerile sore loser. Which is, in a word, rich, coming from the same Paul Manafort whose last client was ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, the Putinoid tyrant who was driven from power in a popular uprising two years ago after his regime shot protesters (not on Fifth Avenue, to the best of anyone's knowledge). Suffice it to say, Manafort should be able to distinguish "Gestapo tactics" from being taken to delegate selection school. Or would be if he wasn't kind of fond of them. No wonder he and Roger Stone get along so well.
The bottom line in Colorado is, Ted Cruz organized, prepared, played by the rules, and ran the delegate table, and Donald Trump was too stupid to even show up. He epitomized the old adage, "Never assume anything, because when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me". The "me," of course, being Trumplicans. But that's something to which they've become hopelessly addicted.
You really can't escape this outcome or this conclusion. Heck, even Rush Limbaugh couldn't:
Now, what happened in Colorado is, I’m sorry to say, it’s not a trick. What happened in Colorado is right out in the open. Everybody’s known how Colorado runs its affairs. Everybody has known. Nobody just chose to look at it. It’s no secret that Colorado was gonna have a convention and they’re gonna choose their delegates [there in lieu of a] primary. It’s not a secret. It’s just nobody leaked it. Nobody talked about it. Nobody bragged about it. So it was left to be discovered by people who didn’t know. And it turns out that people on the Trump campaign didn’t know....
So I don’t see Ted Cruz lying and cheating his way to the convention. I see a lot of hard work. I see some people who know what they have to do, given where they are. They’re in second place in both the vote count and the delegate count. They’re serious about winning. The Cruz team is serious about winning. They have made themselves fully aware of how the process works, and they’ve been out working it for quite a while. They went into Louisiana where Trump scored a massive win but they’ve come out of there with many more delegates than, by appearances, they should have.
Ted Cruz had goals. He worked the problem ’til he got the result he wanted. What he’s demonstrating, folks, he’s demonstrating he knows how to work himself within this insider labyrinth. He knows how to navigate it. He knows how to work it. He knows how to turn it to his advantage. You have to look at this and say, “Okay, what does this tell us about Cruz, if he should become president?“ [emphases added]
What Rush left out is that Cruz did this as an anti-"establishment" outsider who is nevertheless a professional politician, which means he knows what he's doing, and that includes knowing what he doesn't know, learning it, and applying it, and also includes hiring competent staff who can get done the things that need doing to maximize the campaign's success. Or, in other words, everything Trump is not. And all of that in turn suggests that Cruz would not just be the most conservative POTUS since Reagan, but perhaps equally or even more effective as well, while Trump would get lost going to the Warren G. Harding Memorial Whoopie Nook, much less dealing with Nancy Pelosi and Chucky Schumer and Xi Jin-Ping and Vlad Putin, etc. He'd be the poodle of all of them and his ego would never permit him to know it.
Sound like any other strutting, megalomaniacal narcissists you know?
The Director concludes:
To Trump voters, this was an obvious elitist move by the party elite. A message to the voters that the party plans to do what it wants, despite what the voters want. "Take the candidate we decide to give you," seemed to be the message from the GOP. "Like it, or not." All it does is confirm to Trump Voters why they like Trump. They are angry with the Republican Party's elitism, and this is an example of exactly what they are Trump supporters.
And this is why I can't take Trumplicans seriously any more than their pompadoured pie-eyed piper. Like him, they live in a dream world where Trump is incapable of losing; like him, when he does lose, they make up slanderous bullbleep excuses about "party elites" and "establishments" instead of holding him accountable to fix his campaign's shortcomings. They don't just excuse all his faults, sins, heresies, and mistakes, but obsequiously revel in them, when, coming from anybody else, the same things would, in days gone by at least, have left them outraged. It is a personality cult indistinguishable in shape, form, and style from the one that idolatrously swooned at Barack Obama's every utterance eight years ago. And for that very reason they are incapable of stepping far enough outside of it to recognize that dismal fact.
Allahpundit made a good point recently: You can't reason people out of a mindset they never reasoned themselves into. Which does much to explain how Trumplicans' irrational anger, borne of myths and fairy tales, fortifies their functional worship of a charlatan who is the opposite of what he holds himself out to be in everything except species, nationality, and gender.
Exit quote from Ben Domenech: "There have been plenty of examples of Ted Cruz being a savvy tactician during the 2016 cycle, but this Colorado disaster for Trump was not one of them, any more than Trump irritating everyone on the abortion issue was Cruz’s fault, or Trump driving up his negatives with women to “you will never get this rose” territory was Cruz’s fault. This is another own-goal where America’s king of the deal seems uninterested in doing the actual work to make the deal happen."
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