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“Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values.” And made it sound as if this was some variation of insulting Trump about his hair.
Later Cruz kept digging, telling Megyn Kelly of “Fox News” that New York values weren’t Iowa values or New Hampshire values, as if he is suddenly as big an expert on values as he says he is on the Constitution. Finally on Thursday night he brought his cockeyed theories about the city to the Republican debate in South Carolina.
Ted Cruz, who only comes here with his hand out, has decided that the most diverse city the world has ever known is filled with people who all think alike. He sounds in these moments like as slow a thinker as we have ever had run for President.
If you are dumb enough to think that New York values are some sort of handicap in this presidential season, then you are as dumb and tone deaf as Jesse Jackson was calling the city “Hymietown,” as dumb as Gerald Ford was when he gave this paper the most famous front page in its history, the day he effectively told New York to drop dead.
Here is what New York values are: New York values are a young guy, a paralegal, literally giving somebody he doesn’t knowthe shirt off his back on a subwaybecause winter has finally come to the city and brought freezing temperatures with it. New York values are the New York taxi driver who traveled three boroughs across four days to find the guy who had left $1,400 in his cab, so he could return the money to him. You know what that really was? It was the real life of a city that Ted Cruz knows nothing about. He is simply another tourist here, one constantly on the make.
The best of this city is the best of this country, and always has been. When it was hit in a way that no American city had ever been hit, it came together and rose up together in a moment as thrilling as any America had ever seen.
This wasn’t the civil rights movement, it was a different kind of movement, to lower Manhattan. That was where the city was stronger and better than it ever had been on Sept. 12, when in the words of the great Pete Hamill, the city first got to one knee, and then began to get up. We will never know how it would have gone in another American city. We just know how it went here.
New York values? New York values are the ironworkers who carried their tools in backpacks and gym bags and, by God, walked over the Brooklyn Bridge on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, or all the way downtown from all the way uptown.
One of them I know simply said to a cop who didn’t want to let him get close to where the towers had been. And the guy said, “They need me. I cut steel.”
Earlier on Thursday Rep. Pete King came right at Cruz like some guy he’d grown up with in Sunnyside, Queens, who needed a good slap.
“Memo to Ted Cruz,” King said in a statement on Thursday. “New York values are the heroes of 9/11; the cops who fight terror; and the people you ask for campaign donations. Go back under a rock.”
Cruz is a lightweight. He always has been, however well he is doing in caucuses in the heartland. He may do well there. He is just out of his class here. It is the other party that has a donkey as its mascot. But Cruz is the one who’s a career jackass.
City to him: Get lost.