Many conservatives are furious at Senator Ted Cruz for his flip-flop endorsement of Donald Trump. Sean Hannity, on the other hand, has placed a big, wet rhetorical kiss on Trump’s lips.
As The Washington Post noted, Cruz’s refusal to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention “got him booed offstage, but won him respect on the right.” That respect just withered. The Post wrote:
“Profoundly sad day for me,” [Glenn] Beck wrote. “Disappointment does not begin to describe. Maybe it is time to go to the mountains for a while.”
Other conservatives who had refused to endorse Trump spent the afternoon asking what they’d seen in Cruz. “I think Ted Cruz endorsing Trump at this point plays to the caricature that he is self-interested, not really principled,” wrote Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator who had just published a well-received essay on why he still rejected Trump. “Hate it for him.” An hour later, he amended his remarks: “It does become almost impossible to claim ‘self-interested Ted’ is a caricature after this.”
Steve Deace, an influential Iowa radio host who campaigned for Cruz, spent Friday afternoon tweeting that he had just seen “the worst political miscalculation of my lifetime,” and a genuine, personal disappointment.
But just as Cruz “forgot” that he was “not in the habit of supporting someone who attacks my wife and attacks my father,” because Trump had smeared Heidi Cruz’s looks and suggested Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination; and just as Trump “forgot” that he didn’t want Cruz’s endorsement and was now “greatly honored” to have it; so did Sean Hannity “forget” his attacks on Cruz for staying in the GOP primary (and potentially harming Trump) and having helped validate Trump’s smear of Cruz’s father.
Media Matters caught Hannity rewriting history on his radio show yesterday:
SEAN HANNITY(HOST): I’ve always had a caveat for Ted. I’ve always said I liked Ted Cruz I think Ted would come around. And it’s not that Ted Cruz more than anybody else probably, would have had a more legitimate reason to oppose Trump certainly more than Bush, certainly more than Lindsey Graham, certainly more than John Kasich for crying out loud. But I’ll read you his statement, and I want to say that I’ve always liked Ted Cruz, always. I love the guy as a person. I think he is—one of the reasons he did so well in this campaign is because that he is a solid constitutional conservative. But he was also hated by the establishment.
Listen to Hannity's self-serving lies below, from the September 23, 2016 The Sean Hannity Show.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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