Sorry for the delay in posting this. I waited for him to finish … and waited, and waited. He went on for more than half an hour in all, to the point where I thought he might lapse into “Green Eggs and Ham.” But who cares? The guy pulled off one of the great primary victories of the modern era, overcoming Trump’s celebrity and domination of the media with tireless organizational effort and analytical ingenuity. The alpha male got beat by the data geeks. It’s revenge of the nerds!

A sweet win in so many ways, not just because conservatism trumped populism — for the next week, at least — but because so many of Cruz’s enemies during this campaign deserved the bitterness of losing tonight. Trump and his “Canada Ted” wisecracks are the tip of the iceberg. How about Terry Branstad, Iowa’s crony governor, trying to sink Cruz for standing up against ethanol subsidies? (And how about Cruz winning big in Iowa on that platform?) How about Mike Huckabee doing everything he could, patently out of spite, to sink Cruz as a phony Christian among evangelicals, and coming up short? A nonfactor from the start, he dropped out of the race this evening an hour or two before Cruz celebrated. How about the various Republican lobbyist parasites who spent the last few weeks telling any reporter who’d listen that they preferred the non-conservative Trump to Cruz because Cruz might hurt their gravy train? And how about Sarah Palin spending what little credibility she had left as a conservative populist on Trump because Ted Cruz, establishment nemesis, was allegedly “more of the same”? All of these losers went all in for Trump in Iowa hoping that they could knock Cruz out and clear the populist lane for the phony conservatism who’d be better for their respective business interests than Cruz would. Cruz beat them all. Raise a glass.