The establishment media and Iowa Caucus losers Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio have been savaging Ted Cruz and his campaign team for the tactics that helped Senator Cruz win the Hawkeye State’s first-in-the-nation election contest.

But we think that Republicans, and especially conservatives, should celebrate the fact that they have a candidate and a campaign team in the race that are smart, technologically savvy, in the moment, right on the issues and ruthless enough to use every issue and advantage they can identify to win.

First, let’s knockdown the ludicrous charge by Donald Trump (repeated to our disappointment by our friend Sarah Palin) that Cruz engaged in some kind of “fraud” in Iowa.

After we got done laughing at the idea that repeating a rumor about another campaign amounted to actionable ‘fraud” we watched the respected Judge Andrew Napolitano take apart the legal argument on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show The Kelly File.

Judge Napolitano pointed out that the Iowa caucus wasn't an election and wasn't run by the government.

"This was a contest within a private group called the Republican Party of Iowa," Judge Napolitano said, explaining that means that the general laws that would apply to an election don't apply in this case.

He added that politics is a rough-and-tumble world, and courts are not going to second-guess words that are used during a campaign, such as a Cruz campaign staffer's statements about Carson ending his presidential bid.

As for the Cruz campaign mailer, Judge Napolitano said that there is no way to prove that it coerced people to vote, let alone vote for a particular candidate.

"No lawyer would take the case," Judge Napolitano stated, concluding that there is "no legal basis" for Trump's claims of voter fraud.

"End of the story."

This isn’t the first time that Trump has been shown to be totally clueless about election law, and manipulating election laws to their advantage is a favorite tactic of both Democrats and the Republican establishment – remember conservative State Senator Chris McDaniel's defeat in the Mississippi runoff? No conservative should back a candidate who is so ridiculously vulnerable and weak on that front as is Donald Trump.

Consider the tactics used against John McCain by George W. Bush supporters in South Carolina back in 2000.

South Carolina was George W. Bush’s “firewall” a state the Bush family had assiduously worked for two decades starting in the 1980’s when South Carolina native Lee Atwater was George H.W. Bush’s political consiglieri.

McCain arrived in South Carolina hot off his New Hampshire 19-point-upset victory over George W. Bush expecting to win the veteran-friendly Palmetto State as Bush had dropped 50-points in the polls.

The first hit on McCain was an e-mail—alleging that “McCain chose to sire children without marriage”—from Richard Hand, a professor at Bob Jones University, Bush’s very first campaign stop, on February 2.

Next was an anonymous racist smear saying McCain had fathered a “Negro” child; not only untrue, but the child in question was a Bangladeshi orphan that the McCains had adopted after Cindy McCain did a relief mission with Mother Teresa’s organization.

As McCain’s deputy campaign manager, Roy Fletcher, put it, “I’ve seen the worst form of racist sons of bitches in the world in David Duke, but this was unbelievable.”

Then the rumors that Cindy was a drug addict started, and after that, as Vanity Fair later reported, there were other whispers as well: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,” or was mentally unstable from his captivity, or was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P. And after McCain met with the homosexual advocacy group the Log Cabin Republicans, McCain was labeled the “Fag Army” candidate.

Many of the vile rumors were spread through “push-polling” a tactic that is defined as phone calls solely intended to spread false, damning information. Some states have laws regulating push-polling, but with little effect. The American Association for Public Opinion Research investigates public complaints about push-polls, but can rarely trace who’s behind it. People who get push-polled seldom ask who’s calling or get a call-back number, so who is behind them can be hard to trace, and none of the campaigns that benefit ever admit to push-polling.

And more to the point, it was all more or less legal under South Carolina law, and no one in the Republican establishment cried foul, fraud or threatened to sue when McCain was vaporized in that vile onslaught of racist and patently false negative campaigning. As Mr. Dooley, Finley Peter Dunne’s 19th Century Irish-American philosopher of all things practical put it, “Sure, politics ain’t bean-bag. ‘Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists ‘d do well to keep out iv it.”

On the “dirty tricks” scale with 11 being the Bush campaign’s 2000 trashing of John McCain in South Carolina, 10 being the Watergate break-in, and zero being the (losing) campaign of a former political consulting client of mine who refused to even name his opponent in any speech or advertising and ran a content-free campaign based on his many civic good works, the actions of the Cruz campaign in Iowa rate at about a point five.

I embrace and applaud Ted Cruz’s campaign because, much as the Iowa losers would like to make it otherwise, Hillary Clinton is going to run a smart, technologically savvy, in the moment, ruthless wedge-issue-driven campaign and trying to defeat the Clinton machine using the rules of etiquette as taught at a little girls’ finishing school is a sure formula for defeat.