Trump Learns That Tangling With Ted Cruz Is A Dangerous Decision

People may think of Ted Cruz as just some Texas hick, an ultra-Conservative firebrand with no brain, but they forget he’s a national college debate champion while at Princeton. Check out his resume. And he’s more than able to take on Donald Trump’s bluster

(Bloomberg) During a lengthy and heated back-and-forth at Thursday’s Republican presidential debate in North Charleston, South Carolina, Donald Trump admitted that he’s bringing up U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace “because now he’s doing a little bit better” in the polls, and insisted that Cruz receive a judgment from the courts because it would be bad for Republicans to have the issue hanging over their presidential nominee.

The Texas senator chuckled when asked to respond to Trump’s taunts that he may be ineligible to be president of the U.S. Then he swatted them away deftly. Trump, on the other end of the exchange, faced many boos from the crowd.

“I’m glad we’re focusing on the important topics this evening,” said Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother and has been a U.S. citizen since birth. He noted that Trump said last year he’s a natural born citizen.

“I don’t care. I think I’m gonna win fair and square. I don’t have to win this way,” Trump said.

Donald was sounding a bit petulant. The bigger one was the New York Values spat

“Everyone understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal … focused around money and the media,” Cruz charged. And in a nod to Trump’s home in midtown Manhattan, Cruz said: “I can frame it another way: Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan. I’m just saying.”

Just as Cruz was ready to dismiss concerns about his Canadian birth, Trump was ready to defend New York.

The real-estate mogul said he found that kind of talk “insulting.” And he seemed to show his softer side while reflecting on how New Yorkers came together after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “Everybody in the world watched, and everyone in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers,” he said. “That was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

If you’re going to tangle with Ted Cruz, be prepared for a rational, reasonable response. In this case, he made Donald whine about it being an “insulting statement”.

Meanwhile, there were discussions on other topics, rather than the back and forth squabbling. Hillary loomed large

The former secretary of state was mentioned often by all of the candidates, and the attacks were often in the form of one-liners.

“She’s under investigation with the FBI right now,” Bush said, adding that the country should avoid a situation with a president who “might be going back and forth between the White House and the courthouse.”

Rubio was much more serious when he said Clinton is “disqualified from being president of the United States” because she “mishandled” intelligence, a reference to her use of a personal email account and server rather than a government account while at the State Department. He also accused her of telling “lies” to the families of victims in the attack on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi.

During the rest of the debate, there were some other topics, such as shutting down Muslims coming in to the country, Chinese trade, immigration, and trade overall. A lot, though, was silly squabbles. It makes for interesting TV, but, are we really learning anything?

Crossed at Right Wing News.