So another complaint is that I haven’t said anything lately about Waffle House, not to mention nothing at all about Christmas.

I just ate at Waffle House for the first time in a while. I only go there when I have the time to eat out alone, which is, as they say, a singular pleasure.

So I had a $5 meal, which includes a beverage: Two Angus (I guess that’s an upgrade) cheeseburgers smothered in chili, hash browns, and really good coffee. On the jukebox was Johnny Cash singing country classics. The highly professional serving and cooking staff sang along with ”Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” with slight changes in the lyrics referring to what they’re proudly stuck with doing for a living.

On the Holiday season: I understand that the whole techno-professional/educational world of inclusive and diverse (as if that weren’t a contradiction!) experts and branders is prohibited by “best practices” from saying Merry Christmas. And so Happy Holidays with some wintry scene on a card is fine with me. But from the Jack Miller Center I got a card with a picture of the Liberty Bell and with the message that that’s what we should be thinking about during this season. I’m not going to do that.

I just got interviewed by a leading French news agency on Donald Trump. The reporter was perplexed that I said something positive about Trump’s rhetorical skill in the Washington Post. The reporter: But he’s so simple. (And so American conservatives are so simple.) My response: It’s not like Obama’s message about change and such wasn’t simple!

Here’s what Trump says: ”A country is a country.” That means there’s a distinction between American citizens and everyone else. The job of the president is to get good deals for American citizens. Under Obama — who brands himself the oxymoronic “citizen of the world” — we’ve been losing across the board. And more exactly, we we’re losing under Bush too, because we were too humanitarian or about the building of other nations in our interventions. Returning America to its exceptional greatness requires learning from the failures of the last two loser presidents. That’s more of a message than the Obama 2008 had.

It’s true, of course, that most of what Trump deduces from his first principles is wrong or excessive. His immigration policy would be hateful and cruel, if implemented. And there’s no reason to believe he knows enough or is disciplined enough to be president. He’s no conservative. Those who call him a moderate really refer to the net result of the mixture of extreme views in various directions.

I also said that Trump’s savvy development of the brand that “I can say anything and get away with it” is in reaction not so much to political correctness in the narrow sense as to the over-scripting of all the other candidates. Nobody is more or better scripted than Cruz. Listen to what he says when someone objects that he really did switch his immigration views from 2013 to 2015.

What about the most recent debate? The overwhelming fact for me was the tag team of Trump and Cruz working to take out the two guys from Florida. So, although I’m not saying I support him, I found myself root, root, rooting for Rubio (well, not quite Bush).

Cruz’s surge depends so much on the blocking of that YUGE TRUMP GUY opening up big holes that give him lots of unchallenged running room. It also depends upon his people spreading the word to Evangelicals that Ben Carson doesn’t believe in Hell.