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Ted Cruz's Announcement Of Carly Fiorina As His Vice Presidential Nominee Is Not As Crazy As It Sounds By Dr. Wumi Akintide

Fans of this column will recall that I predicted more than a year ago that the 2016 American presidential election is going to come down to a rumble in the jungle between two American political dynasties: the Bushes and the Clintons.

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That was before Donald Trump threw his hat to the ring. I initially thought, like most Americans and people around the world, that his candidacy was a joke and nothing more. I felt that way in my heart because I have been a victim of a real estate salesman like Donald Trump and I would be the last person to ever support or recommend any real estate salesman for President of my village talk less of America. I would sooner support the drug lord, Mr. El Chapo of Mexico for President of the United States before I settle for a Donald Trump who can sell you a dead cockroach and would make you feel like you have hit a jackpot because the man is a consummate con artist who is going to make other countries sign their death warrant in any negotiation with America.

The day I bought my first house in New York was a day I would never forget till I die. At the closing which took place somewhere in Queens, I felt like a lamb led to the Slaughter as my lawyer, my real estate agent who found me the property and the owner or the seller and the guy who found me the company that financed the purchase all got around to finalize the closing formalities.

I became the center of attraction at the meeting not because I was happy so to do, but because the system and the proceedings put the spotlight on me as the buyer who had to bear the brunt of the deal right in front of me. I had owned a few properties before in Nigeria before my relocation to America. Owning a house or buying a house in America and Nigeria could be a little bit similar in some ways but fundamentally different in the American capitalist system where money is everything.

I discovered that day that I was the victim at that closing because every other person that showed up at the meeting including the seller, was there to collect their own slice of the pie all at my own expense. My major role at the closing was simply to sign my death warrant as they keep asking to sign one document after the other until I got tired. I did not have a chance to read many of those documents before putting my signature to them.

While the other attendees went home with checks in their hands, I went home with a bunch of keys delivered to me with a loan of $370,000 for a 2 family House and a 30 year mortgage that would have swallowed a few million from me if I survive till the end of the 30 years mortgage. I was going to have some equity on the property, the other participants told me. The quagmire I got myself into did not dawn on me until I got the first bill in the mail.

My monthly mortgage was $2,600.00. I was led to believe that my tenant who rented the other 2 bed room apartment downstairs would help me with 50 percent of the monthly mortgage and that all I have to worry about was the remaining half.

Three months after the purchase, my tenant, a single mother with a 9 year old daughter, started making late payments. She could not pay her rent when due and I had to start paying the whole $2,600.00 from my earnings with a lot of hardship. I wanted to evict the tenant but I was told by the court system in New York I could not do it because of her 9 year old daughter. I started having high blood pressure in an effort to keep up with my mortgage. All the promises and assurances given me by my real estate agent did not pan out. Americans who are voting for Donald Trump should remember me and my predicament. They are all going to be disappointed.

I narrated this little story  to tell all of you reading this that the Republicans in America are just about ready to put a snake oil salesman as their nominee for the most powerful position in the world. Lord have mercy! There is no telling what Donald Trump would turn that bully pulpit into if elected because the man knows no other way to make money and to flaunt power than to deploy unpredictability and secrecy as instruments of power. He views politics as a game and he tells you he is destroying his opponents because he wants to win by any means and the rest of us are expected to give him a standing ovation for so doing. I reject that in Jesus' name, like we say in my Church.

I have had cause to revise my initial prediction of a Hillary and a Jeb Bush run as I saw Trump go after Bush with vengeance in all the debates, saying things that no other politician in America would have said without paying a heavy price.

He eventually forced more superior candidates like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Rand Paul, George Pataki and even young and eloquent Marco Rubio to kiss the ground and to withdraw in total ignominy because Donald Trump simply came in to rewrite the rules of the game by lying and cheating and blackmailing all the other candidates but himself and manipulating the Media like no candidate America has ever seen before.

Donald Trump is not only arrogant and abrasive but intrusively and pathologically so. He is an expert at defining his opponents before they have a chance to define themselves or define him.  His crazy and ignorant supporters continued to cheer him on and the media and the moderators of the debates side with Donald Trump, and they let him dominate the air waves by giving him a free ride at the expense of the other candidates.

I blame the media as much as I blame Donald Trump and his supporters. It was a complete outrage which has seen Donald Trump leading the pack as we speak even though he is arguably the least qualified and the least informed of all the candidates, if you see what I see.

There is no name in the world that Donald Trump has not called his other opponents. He described Jeb Bush as low-energy and weak even though he had to know that Jeb was a two-term Governor of Florida and a gentleman and arguably the best candidate out of the initial 17 candidates that entered the race.

Donald Trump tarred poor Jeb with the criticisms of his senior brother’s presidency, blaming the Iraq War on the Bushes and making a mockery of an otherwise decent candidate. He got him out with sheer blackmail and insults that Jeb Bush is just too decent and polite to respond to in the same guttersnipe language of a Donald Trump. Rather than wrestle with the pig to get his hands dirty, Jeb Bush, born and raised by a former President and one of the most respected women in America, just decided to withdraw from the race altogether because Donald Trump had damaged him irredeemably. Rather than get discouraged from pursuing that line of attack, Donald Trump encouraged by the media had doubled down on the strategy because it was working for him. But it was a disservice to America.

Donald Trump labeled Ted Cruz, a senator and a brilliant Harvard trained lawyer, as “Lying Ted,” even though he himself was telling as many bogus lies like Ted Cruz every step of the way. He described Marco Rubio as “Sneaky Rubio.” He castigated him for sweating profusely on the podium because he was scared to death about becoming President. It was a big lie by Donald Trump but he told the lie, nonetheless, pretty much like Adolf Hitler used to do when he led his country into a war he had to know he could never win. Hitler said it was alright to lie as long as you believe in it and that if you keep repeating the lie, very soon people would start believing it or having some doubts about what the other side might be saying. That is precisely what Donald Trump is doing, and the media and many of his opponents are yet to forcefully call him out on it because they get good ratings from their interviews and encounters with Trump, who continues to take undue advantage of his cheap popularity with the press. He even refused to participate at one point in a debate to be moderated by Megyn Kelly and he chose to arrange another charade of an event where he became the center of attention.   

Donald Trump called Ben Carson a hoodlum who once admitted to want to hit his own mother with a sledge hammer and who once stabbed a school mate and could easily have killed the guy but the knife narrowly missed his target.

Trump asked, how could such a man be asking for your votes to be made President of the greatest country on Earth? It is unbelievable that the same Carson, a brain surgeon, and arguably the smartest candidate on that podium was forced to withdraw from the race. The genius of Donald Trump was that the same Ben Carson came back to endorse him for President and he even offered to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.

Donald Trump ridiculed Chris Christie initially as too fat and very un-presidential to be asking for anybody’s vote. The same Christie withdrew from the race to endorse Donald Trump. Can you believe that?

Donald Trump insulted Carly Fiorina as ugly just like he said that blood was oozing out of Megyn Kelly’s eyes and "wherever." It was a statement that could easily have ended the political career of another politician in America. Since he got away with that you can trust Donald Trump to say the same thing of Hillary and blame the death of the American Ambassador in Libya on Hillary or even make some insinuations that the friend of the Clinton family who committed suicide after the White Water scandal was probably having some affairs with Hillary.

Donald Trump would blame Hillary for the death of the Clinton business partner to irredeemably tarnish and embarrass Hillary. He could make such statements by putting Hillary on the defensive as a former top diplomat of America or the whole world who has to be very civil, diplomatic and guided in every statement that comes out of her mouth. Since whatever Donald Trump says on the political trail is not actionable in the law court, you can be sure that Donald Trump is going to take undue advantage of that and pay the political price in his desperation to win. There is no statement too libelous for Donald Trump to use against an opponent because the guy is a ticking time bomb. Unless the moderators set the ground rules to prohibit such guttersnipe language and cheap blackmail in the presidential debates, you can be sure that Donald Trump is going to say things like that and damn the consequences because he is empty and cannot compete with Hillary, who is a policy wonk and a brilliant attorney and experienced politician with some gravitas. If they let Donald Trump loose, he is going to say things like that in a debate watched by the whole world because an American President is not President of the United States alone as Barack Obama and all the former Presidents would tell you.  

He is already threatening to descend heavily on Hillary who is going to be the Democratic nominee. He is already calling her “Crooked Hillary” when he himself is the most crooked candidate to ever run for President in God’s own country.  I am yet to see the Media call Trump out on why he always likes to demonize his opponents and calling himself the only Saint in America and the smartest candidate who has ever run for President.

Not once have any of the moderators of the debate called him out on the series of divorce he has had in his life time and why he has filed for so many Bankruptcies’ as a very successful business man and why the RIS has audited him more than 12 times. He has got to be doing something wrong for the IRS to continue to target him like that from year to year. He has so many skeletons in his cupboard but he is always the first to point out the skeletons in other peoples’ cupboard just to distract others from asking about his own.

He takes liberty of the freedom of expression in America to get away with murder. He would like to blame the sins of Bill Clinton on Hillary and he would throw everything including the kitchen sink at Hillary who is arguably the most experienced and the best qualified candidate to ever run for President in America after 40 years in the ivory tower of politics in America as a product of Yale Law School, and as a first lady for 12 years in Arkansas and 8 years in the White House and 8 years as Senator from the Empire State and 4 years as Secretary of State of the United States.

It doesn’t get any better than that for anyone who will be President, but Donald Trump would want to reduce Hillary into a cartoon character all because the media and Americans are going to allow him to do that to a highly qualified woman who is going to become the first female President of the United States.

Let me now end this piece by explaining why it makes a lot of sense for Ted Cruz to pull the last stunt to stop Donald Trump from reaching the target of 1237 delegates he would need to clinch the Republican nomination before the Convention.

To do nothing is not the way to tackle Donald Trump who is always doing something unusual to capture all the attention and suck away all the oxygen out of all the other candidates competing with him. It makes sense for Cruz and Fiorina to take all the publicity away from Donald Trump for a change and to slow down Donald Trump.

There are only two American politicians who could really take it to Donald Trump and cut him down to size. One is a Republican and the other is a Democrat. The Republican is no other than Carly Fiorina who is so eloquent and combative and could give it to Donald Trump in a way that would get his attention. Let Donald Trump first engage in a brickbat with Fiorina, who has nothing to lose by engaging in a wrestling match with Donald Trump, whose greatest weapon is his ego. If Fiorina can hit Donald Trump where it hurts the most, she can highhandedly cut Donald Trump down to size and make a mockery of him in a heartbeat before he cruises to the nomination in pledged candidates before the Convention.

It is something that Ted Cruz himself has not been able to do because Donald Trump is just too quick for him. Donald Trump fully understands that Ted is a brilliant Harvard lawyer compared to him who graduated from the Wharton School of Business and talks as if he graduated from Harvard, Yale or Oxford or Cambridge.

I repeat that Donald Trump is an empty barrel and a bully that can easily be cut down to size if people stand up to him. Carly Fiorina can do that better than Ted Cruz and better than John Kasich or top diplomat Hillary. If Cruz and Fiorina are able to make Donald Trump lose or just win by the narrowest of margin in South Dakota Indiana and California, there is a chance that that Donald Trump may not meet the target of 1237 delegates before the Republicans hold their Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. A long time ago I predicted that Donald Trump will score something around 1200 delegates but that he would meet the target by a few votes. I repeat that Donald Trump could be stopped from making that magic number but the key to that outcome is Fiorina.

Ted Cruz therefore made a good choice even though it may appear belated, but it is the right thing to do. Ted Cruz has more to gain and nothing to lose by taking that chance. I applaud him for his vision and courage for so doing.

I would not end this write-up without give the credit to Donald Trump for his uncanny ability to pull a fast one on people, pretty much like Adolf Hitler. I call him the Houdini of American politics by beating 17 clever and solid candidates to emerge as the front runner on the Republican side.

How he did it is a legitimate question to ask. It is not because he is a filthy–rich multi-millionaire. He is really not quite as rich as he claims. I can tell you that Nigerian Dangote is far richer than Donald Trump but the guy does not make as much noise as a Donald Trump. Of course, Bill Gates and Paul Getty and even Oprah Winfrey are clearly richer than Donald Trump if you factor in their assets and liabilities, but Donald Trump needs to deceive Americans to believe he is doing this for them and not for himself and that he is spending his own money to champion the cause of Americans. If you believe that garbage you will believe anything. Donald Trump is in it for what he can get from it. Believe me. Just look at his track record and business practices and you will get my point. The guy is not even a Republican, like Bernie Sanders who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat like a Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump wants to be President to help his crumbling financial and real estate empire. If he succeeds and becomes President he is going to take back all the loans he has given to his campaign. He is a snake oil salesman and capitalist who cannot give away his money unless there is something in it for him and he is going to take it with interest dictated by him and nobody else.

Donald Trump is going to offer the White House for sale if he ever becomes President which is conceivable and even possible unless Americans see him for what he is and are ready to call him out on that before it is too late.

We on the Democratic side are working our heads off to identify Donald Trump’s Achilles heel and all his vulnerabilities just as he is doing to us as we get into the general election mode assuming he is able to finally get the nomination on the Republican side.

The Yorubas were thinking of Donald Trump when they said “Elede ma d’Oyo, sugbon aruwo a po” Donald Trump’s pig will get to Oyo Alaafin, but there would be plenty of noise along the way. Trump may eventually secure the nomination but he is going to lose the big prize. I can tell you that because Barack Obama is going to cut him down to size.  

He is talking about building walls and making the Mexicans pay for it. He is going to deport close to 12 million immigrants in one fell swoop and he is going to renegotiate the Geneva Conventions and all the previous agreements American Presidents going back to FDR, Dwight Ike Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have signed and he is going to rattle American allies all over the world so much so that many of them are very restless today about any prospect of a Trump presidency.

He is going to declare war on Islam, which is a war he can never win and a war that is going to endanger Americans and their assets all over the world if Donald Trump actually finds his way to the White House. There is a flimsy chance those forces might get him before he gets them and that is why the mere thought of a Trump Presidency is not only scary but frightening. American voters who are voting for him just don’t understand what they are getting themselves into when the rubber meets the road.

The last ditch effort by Ted Cruz to stop him from getting the nomination is exactly the right thing to do. I applaud Cruz for doing it. Whether it works or fails is not the issue. He would not be accused of not trying. The last and perhaps the most important scoop that move has done to Donald Trump is that Ted Cruz is using the Fiorina pick to stop Donald Trump from getting all the media attention free of charge as Cruz and Fiorina confront him, head on, and rattle him to abandons some of the strategies he has been planning to use against them in his desperation to clinch the nomination.

The media and the moderators of future debates are now going to be forced to ask Donald Trump a question none of them has ever asked him as to why he always likes to demonize each and every one of his opponents calling them names and projecting himself as the best negotiator in the world and by far the most brilliant candidate ever to run for President which is a big lie if you remember that his greatest nemesis ever is Barack Obama, who used sheer humor at a White House Correspondents Dinner to deflate his balloon and to cut him down to size like nobody has ever done before.

It was the same night that Barack Obama ordered the brave Navy SEALs to go capture or kill Osama Bin Laden in a nuclearized Pakistan under the cover of darkness in a flawless mission that has forever sealed and assured the legacy of Barack Obama as the Lion King among American Presidents. Obama is going to loom larger than life long after he leaves the White House.

Barack Obama won two victories that night. He killed Osama Bin Laden and he deflated the balloon of Donald Trump who felt like a bump for once in his life time as Barack Obama got under his skin reducing him to nothing but a paper tiger in that dinner. With Barack Obama looking for ways and means to preserve his legacy of 8 years in the White House, he would be out in the front campaigning for his successor in the White House to make sure that the Republicans do not undo some of his greatest accomplishments as President.

Donald Trump is going to lose to Hillary in November. Barack Obama as the incumbent President is going to use all the powers and leverage of his office to tell Americans and the whole world why a Trump presidency is likely to spell disaster for America and her global interest in the world.

I cannot wait to see Barack Obama and Bill Clinton address the Democratic National Convention in the City of Brotherly Love in Philadelphia, from where Hillary Clinton is going to march triumphantly back into the White House as the first female President of the United States on January 19 in 2017, so help us God. If you believe and agree, let your “Amen” be louder.

I rest my case.

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