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Within hours of Liz Cheney, now a candidate for the Senate in Wyoming, announcing her support of Ted Cruz’s filibuster, Senator Mike Enzi, who Cheney is primarying, took to the floor of the United States Senate and declared he stood with Ted Cruz.

Pat Roberts, the elderly Senator from Kansas who may soon be getting a stiff primary challenge, stiffly stood on the floor of the United States Senate to show he too stood with Ted Cruz.

Rand Paul, after NBC News reported he may disagree with Cruz’s filibuster threat, went to the floor of the Senate and stood with Ted Cruz.

Meanwhile, John Cornyn and Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander and other Republican Senators are leaking attacks against Cruz on background. They complained to reporters about Cruz suggesting they were cowards. They did so off the record and in the shadows.

Mitch McConnell, instead of standing with Cruz on the floor of the Senate, participated in a teletownhall in which he told listeners the only way to stop Obamacare was for him to be Senate Majority Leader. [update: this information came after the initial post]

Ted Cruz and Mike Lee will not get the forty-one votes they need to sustain their filibuster. They will be betrayed by Republican senators who are willing to fund Obamacare while claiming to vote against it. But in this filibuster and in their brilliant strategy, they have exposed Republicans who will not fight. They have exposed Republicans who are so desperate for their own reelection they will say or do anything when they could not bother in off years. They have shown Republicans that there are Republicans who are willing to stand up to Barack Obama and to the cowards within their own party.

They have also exposed a lot of people on the outside as frauds. To be sure, there are conservatives who have legitimate reasons to disagree with this strategy. But there are a whole lot who have been exposed as finger lickin’ frauds — willing to put their finger to the wind of beltway opinion to chart their course.

The Beltway Republican pundits bellyaching over Cruz and Lee fighting the fight others promised to fight is just a fart in the maelstrom of conservatives united against both Democrats and the finger lickin’ frauds within the Republican Party who talk a good game then fold like cheap suits.

Many of the Republicans who told conservatives to be good team players for Romney have shown that they will say and do anything to cut deals to undermine conservatives during this fight. Cruz and Lee are exposing them.

Cruz and Lee have brought anticeptic sunlight to the fight within the Republican Party. They are the men in the arena. If Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and with them Marco Rubio and others win this fight, they will be triumphant. But if they lose, at least they “shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Had Cruz and Lee not done this, the ending position for the Republicans would be far worse than what it would otherwise be. Had conservatives not pushed Congress to the brink on the debt ceiling, sequestration would never have happened. Because Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and their House counterparts have shown just how far conservatives are willing to go now, House and Senate Republicans know they cannot cave for table scraps.

But they have, in this, been exposed as willing to otherwise settle or table scaps.