WATERLOO, COULDN'T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO.

J. Christian Adams at PJ Media:

Ted Cruz Won

Tell us about it, Mr. Adams.

Deal-making and compromise have pushed the country toward fiscal catastrophe. Only Cruz and his supporters stood fast, and Americans noticed.

I'll say they have! The debacle even seems to have more kindly disposed the people toward the ACA. But how is this good for Ted Cruz?

Second, now is the time to wreck Obamacare. Some in the GOP think they can win a couple of elections over the next few years and unravel the program once the GOP gains the White House. This ignores the shrinking attention span of the body politic. It also ignores the fact that many in the GOP are part of the problem. 

So, you can't count on the ADD American People, the Democrats, or the Republicans: What's left?

What about support to delay Obamacare’s implementation? That’s a ploy to save Obamacare. 

Pay attention who is calling for a delay. Partisans like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), John Stewart, Wolf Blitzer and Robert Gibbs know a delay today means preservation tomorrow. That’s why they support it. It is the modern Rope-a-Dope. Muhammad Ali famously employed his Rope-a-Dope to delay the fight, wear down, and eventually knock out his opponents. Focusing on Obamacare’s delay, and not its destruction, is an effort to preserve Obamacare.

They're just late to the party: The Tea Party Republicans already tried to save Obamacare by delaying it a year weeks ago. They couldn't do it, yet Obamacare miraculously persisted. Some people think that's because it's a federal law, passed by Congress and signed by the President, but to Christian it's clearly a form of witchcraft.

Some in the GOP were annoyed by Ted Cruz leading the fight to defund Obamacare. They claimed that if Cruz didn’t muddy up the debate, the failures of Obamacare would have been cleanly on display during the program’s rollout. Right. 

The failures have only gotten worse now that the shutdown is over. 

So have at it. Let’s see if they’re right. 

The failures of Obamacare couldn’t be worse. Obamacare has become a punch line, a joke, a catastrophic catastrophe, squared. So have at it. Prove that a shutdown-less environment could lead to killing off the program. Go win the narrative you said you could win.

This actually sounds, in a whining way, like an admission of total defeat -- that even if the world understands Obamacare to be a failure because the website doesn't work, it will still go on making America socialist or whatever. In closing Christian grows still more cryptic:

But we may learn that the Cruz-led fight focused the nation on the failures of Obamacare in a way that no pundit or consultant will be able to match. If the Cruz-less narrative fails to win the field and end Obamacare, then Cruz wins yet again.

So, the nation gets a health care program, and Ted Cruz gets to tell people he tried to stop it. Another such victory... but let that wait until Obama or somebody proposes a national minimum income. Then we can do this all over again.

UPDATE. In comments, Spaghetti Lee:

This is like Reverse Wingnut Zeno's Paradox or something. 

The trend in this instance may be traced to Jonah Goldberg's post-collapse invocation of the "it just doesn't matter" scene from Meatballs. Goldberg seems unaware that the happy denouement of that film was created by screenwriters, not fate.