“A Crass Political Stunt”: Christians Enraged With Cruz Over Pro-Israel Comments
Christian writers are incensed with Sen. Ted Cruz, and argue that the Texas senator is putting politics before his fellow religious brethren.
Cruz was the keynote speaker Wednesday evening at a dinner put on by In Defense of Christians, a group dedicated to raising awareness about persecuted Christians in the Middle East. During his speech, the Texas senator argued that Christians have “no greater ally” than Israel. Soon after, heckling from the crowd cut off his remarks, and an address that started by emphasizing the unity of Christians ended with shouting and disagreement.
“If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you,” Cruz told the audience as he walked off the stage.
Much of his pro-Israel conservative base would have had no problem with these comments, so Cruz may not have expected a backlash. But the response among key Christian thinkers and writers was fierce and immediate.
Cruz was accused of ignorance about the dynamics of Middle Eastern Christianity; of suggesting that he would not stand with Christians who didn’t agree with his political stance on Israel; even of orchestrating a crass stunt on the backs of persecuted Christians.
“Sen. Ted Cruz suggested that holding the same political views on Israel was more important than the fellowship we share as Christians,” Mollie Hemingway, a senior writer at The Federalist, a conservative website, told The Daily Beast. “We shouldn’t fight the global persecution of Christians only if the victims share our political views.”
Added Mark Tooley, the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy: “Must overseas Christians pass a political litmus test, even if it further endangers them, to gain American support and sympathy?”
Jeff King, the president of the watchdog group International Christian Concern, said that Cruz was “off-topic and rude” (the crowd was rude too, King added), but mainly did not understand the nuances of the persecuted Christian minority groups he was addressing.
“They can’t be pro-Israel where they live, because they will get the snot beaten out of them or worse. If you don’t understand the dynamics going in… you’ve got to question what he was thinking,” King said. “He just doesn’t understand the reality of Middle Eastern Christians.”
Others went so far as to question whether Cruz purposely went to the conference as a stunt, that he was aware of the dynamics and wanted to show that he would support Israel in front of an audience where this would be unpopular.
“He used arguably the most persecuted and powerless minority in the world, Middle Eastern Christians, who are supposed to be his brethren in Christ, as a prop for a self-aggrandizing political stunt,” said Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a Catholic writer, in The Week.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was particularly scathing, pointing out that Cruz’s “co-religionists are being murdered.”
“[B]y making a statement at *this* event, he basically flipped the bird to people and churches that are dying right now,” he tweeted.
Some conservative websites weighed in in support of Cruz, but may have overstepped in doing so—with two websites implying that the Middle Eastern Christians present at the event were not Christians at all.
Both Breitbart News and Townhall wrote defenses that put the word “Christian” in scare quotes—as if those who heckled Cruz might not appropriately be termed so. Breitbart has since taken down the quotation marks.
Christian writers were mixed on whether Cruz’s remarks could have an enduring political effect.
“There are potential repercussions—particularly if this becomes a trend. To be sure, there is often a stark dichotomy between so-called opinion leaders and rank and file believers. But there’s a reason they’re called leaders,” Daily Caller writer Matt Lewis, who was critical of Cruz’s speech, told the Beast. “The folks who have voiced concern about his actions buy ink by the barrel and paper by the ton, and people turn to them for interpreting events. There is always the potential for this sort of thing to trickle down.”
Countered Tooley, “Religious persecution has rarely been major issue in electoral politics.”
Democrats might also seek to capitalize on Cruz’s statement. Michael Wear, a strategist who led White House evangelical outreach during President Obama’s first term, said that Republican “voters will be looking for a candidate who can support Israel without demeaning an audience gathered to defend persecuted religious groups, a cause Senator Cruz has now distracted from in order to defend himself.”
Catherine Frazier, a Cruz spokeswoman, told the Beast that the senator will continue to speak out on behalf of religious minorities everywhere, and has made a point of bringing public attention to persecuted Christians in particular.
“He does not agree or stand with those who do not believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state,” Frazier said. “But that does not change his passion and priority for standing with persecuted Christians across the region and across the world.”
In the meantime, however, Cruz’s remarks appear to have at least temporarily shattered Christian solidarity on the issue of persecuted Christian minorities.
“Fighting persecution of Christians is a unifying message among voters, particularly on the right,” Hemingway said. “For better or worse, Cruz’s political speech may have broken that unity.”
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, September 12, 2014
“Oil And Gas”: The Combustible Mix Of Ted Cruz And The House GOP
Congress will have to act fairly soon to approve a new stopgap spending measure, called a “continuing resolution,” to prevent a government shutdown at the end of the month. Leaders in both parties and both chambers seem fairly optimistic – especially now that President Obama has postponed an announcement on immigration executive actions – that an ugly fight can be avoided.
But as we learned during the Republican shutdown last fall, congressional leaders don’t always get what they want.
Sen. Ted Cruz again met with a small group of House Republicans late Tuesday night, this time to discuss over pizza a conservative strategy on the continuing resolution.
While many of the Cruz meetings have seemed to lack a specific agenda or resolution, members trickled out of Tuesday’s nearly two-hour meeting repeating a similar refrain: We want a new expiration date on the CR.
The House GOP leadership seems to have adopted a let’s-not-screw-this-up-again strategy. They’ll advance a “clean” spending measure that will keep the government open through mid-December, then act again during the lame-duck session that will follow the midterm elections. No muss, no fuss.
Cruz isn’t sure he likes that plan. The far-right Texan, for example, yesterday suggested members use “any and all means necessary” to prevent President Obama from using his executive powers to further address immigration policy. In the context of the continuing resolution, that presumably means Cruz would like to see measures added to the spending bill to tie the president’s hands – and if those measures aren’t there, then the spending bill should be blocked, regardless of the consequences.
The senator and his allies also have concerns about the length of the CR and a possible extension of the Export-Import Bank.
Whether their concerns have the traction necessary to shut down the government again is another matter entirely.
The fact remains that most House Republicans appear eager to spend as little time as possible on Capitol Hill before the elections. The goal, in general, is to keep the government’s lights on and get back to the campaign trail. Luckily for the GOP, most voters no longer seem to remember last year’s ridiculous shutdown, and so long as Republicans don’t do it again, they probably won’t face any real consequences for their actions at all.
And so when Cruz interjects to argue that he and his far-right cohorts should do it again, it’s a tough sell for the Texas Republican.
Still, strange things happen when Cruz and House Republicans huddle for private meetings.
As we discussed earlier in the summer, Cruz met privately with a group of House Republicans in late July to urge them to ignore their own leadership and oppose their party’s border bill. Less than a day later, House GOP leaders were forced to pull their preferred legislation – too many of House Speaker John Boehner’s members were listening to Cruz, not him.
It’s part of a growing pattern. Last September, for example, Boehner presented a plan to avoid a government shutdown. Cruz met directly with House Republicans, urged them to ignore their own leader’s plan, and GOP House members followed his advice. A month later, Cruz held another meeting with House Republicans, this time in a private room at a Capitol Hill restaurant.
This year, in April, the Texas senator again gathered House Republicans, this time for a private meeting in his office. In June, less than an hour after House Republicans elected a new leadership team, Cruz invited House Republicans to join him for “an evening of discussion and fellowship.”
In July, as Congress prepared for some 11th-hour legislating before their month-long break, Cruz and House Republicans met to plot strategy, and a week later, they huddled once more.
The Texas Republican doesn’t seem to get along with other senators, but he spends an inordinate amount of time huddling with House Republicans who actually seem to listen to his advice.
This time, though, the odds are against Cruz’s success. Will the House GOP majority really move towards a government shutdown – two months before Election Day – in the hopes of blocking executive actions on immigration that haven’t even been introduced? The fact that Cruz and his allies would consider such a tactic is itself remarkable, but he’s nevertheless likely to lose this round.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 10, 2014
“Absurd Revisionist History”: Ted Cruz Is A Chip Off A Crazy Old Block
Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s recent foray into 9/11 trutherism has revived questions about how his fringe politics could affect his son’s presidential ambitions. But Rand Paul isn’t the only White House aspirant with a political anchor in the family.
During an August 21 meeting of the Western Williamson Republican Club, Pastor Rafael Cruz — father of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) — attempted to explain that black Americans “need to be educated” about the real history of the civil rights movement, and that “the average black” doesn’t understand the minimum wage.
Cruz ran into trouble recounting a recent conversation that he had with a black pastor.
“I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that civil rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,’” Cruz told the group, as reported by BuzzFeed. “‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”
“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum-wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same?” he added, referring to the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board member. “If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.”
Cruz’s assertions are riddled with factual inaccuracies. For starters, casting conservatives as the real heroes of the civil rights movement requires an absurd revisionist history (nevermind the fact that Republicans didn’t actually control the Senate in 1964).
Cruz is similarly off base on the effects of increasing the minimum wage. Both professional economists and recent history strongly dispute the notion that guaranteeing workers $10.10 per hour will cause unemployment to “skyrocket.” And, contrary to Cruz’s warning, “the average black” would actually disproportionately benefit from such an increase.
Additionally, Pastor Cruz’s riffing on the intelligence of “the average black” probably won’t help Republicans if they choose to revive their disastrously failed outreach to minorities before the 2016 presidential election. And that could be a problem for Senator Cruz.
Ted Cruz has made no apologies for his close personal and professional relationship with his father, who has been described as a “power broker” within the senator’s political organization. He has even used a Senate aide to book his father’s paid speeches, like the one given to the Western Williamson Republican Club. That means that, if Senator Cruz does pursue an oft-rumored presidential bid, he will have to answer for his father’s radical rhetoric. After all, not many serious presidential candidates have close advisors who believe that the California drought is the result of a United Nations plot to confiscate private property, or that the president is a secret Muslim who will force the elderly to undergo “suicide counseling,” or that evolution is a communist lie, among many other outrageous conspiracy theories. Cruz would have a difficult enough time convincing the electorate that he is mainstream enough to serve as president; his father’s regular outbursts will only make it harder.
Pastor Cruz believes that President Obama was “brainwashed for 18 years” by listening to the sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. What does that mean for Ted Cruz, who has been listening to his father for a lifetime?
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, September 3, 2014
“A Continuing Slide Toward Degeneracy”: When Will Ted Cruz Tell His Old Man To Get A Grip?
One of the things that makes U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) fascinating is the lift his career has given to the religio-political stylings of his father, the Rev. Rafael Cruz, director of Purifying Fire Ministeries, a spiritual warfare outfit from suburban Dallas. Now you’d think Cruz the Younger would be sufficiently right-wing to please most conservative palates. But no: he regularly sends the old man out to fire up crowds and say things most Republican orators only hint at. Robert Costa explained their relationship as follows about a year ago:
Cruz has kept his father, a 74-year-old pastor, involved with his political shop, using him not merely as a confidant and stand-in, but as a special envoy. He is Cruz’s preferred introductory speaker, his best messenger with evangelicals, and his favorite on-air sidekick — a presence who softens his edge….
This summer, father and son have also been traveling together throughout the country, speaking to conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere. Their roadshow has enthralled many on the right and startled Cruz’s potential 2016 rivals. No one else in the emerging GOP field has an ally like the charismatic elder Cruz….
There was Rafael Cruz in Des Moines, Iowa, last month, speaking to ministers at the Marriott hotel and collecting business cards in the lobby; a month later, he was in Ames, Iowa, pacing the stage at a conservative summit and drawing cheers for his broadsides against President Obama. His fiery speech at a FreedomWorks event in July drew heavy praise from talk radio.
Rush Limbaugh especially loved how Rafael Cruz compared the president’s “hope and change” message to Fidel Castro’s appeal decades ago. “This guy is knocking it out of the park!” Limbaugh exclaimed.
Conservative leaders agree. Bob Vander Plaats, a top Iowa conservative who hosted the Cruz duo last month, calls Rafael Cruz’s speeches “inspiring” and says the image of a father and son laboring together resonates with values voters. Former senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who now runs the Heritage Foundation, is another admirer. He has worked alongside Rafael Cruz this month to rally against Obamacare.
Trouble is, Rafael Cruz has a tendency to say things many of us consider kinda cray-cray. I first really paid attention to him when he spoke at the 2013 Family Leader Summit in Iowa:
He dated the slide towards national degeneracy to the 1963 Supreme Court decision banning school prayer, the “massacre of 55 million babies” to Roe v. Wade, and the introduction of full-on socialism in America to the administration of Jimmy Carter (!), held in abeyance solely by the mobilization of Christians on behalf of Ronald Reagan.
Soon after that David Corn of MoJo got interested in Rafael Cruz and easily dug up some rich examples of the old man espousing up-front Christian Nationalist Dominionism and calling the President of the United States a Marxist determined to exterminate religious belief. Confronted with the cray-cray, Ted Cruz’s office blandly indicated Rafael didn’t speak for his son. And best I can tell, the Ted ‘n’ Rafael tag team road show went on exactly as before.
Now a new video of Rafael Cruz has popped up wherein he tells a conservative audience in Texas about his encounter with an African-American “Democrat” pastor in Bakersfield, California, as an example of the dreadful ignorance of black folks who–believe it or not–don’t understand that “government handouts” have enslaved them; that legalized abortion is a racist genocidal conspiracy aimed at people of color; and that the Republican Party is responsible for all civil rights legislation. The money quote that’s getting picked up here and there comes from Cruz’ characterization of a book by black conservative journalist Jason Riley:
Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same? If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.
Now you might think this doesn’t rank among the top ten most offensive things Pastor Cruz says every time he opens his mouth. But there’s something about the effortless and absolutely self-convinced way he says outrageous things that makes it a bit startling the first time you are exposed to his act.
The funny thing is that you’d figure Rand Paul was the potential 2016 candidate with the most significant Daddy Issues. If Rafael Cruz keeps it up, and there’s zero reason to think a zealot like him won’t, Ted Cruz may have to spend more time defending him than he’d like–or have a quiet son-to-father talk followed by some dog-whistle training for the Reverend.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 3, 2014
“Ted Cruz, Legislative Innovator”: What’s Bad For The GOP Can Be Good For Little Teddy
Congress, it is said, is divided into “work horses” and “show horses.” The former try to make laws, while the latter worry more about whether they can get on TV. Plenty of members try to be both, but there are a surprising number that don’t even bother legislating. And these days, being a show horse offers a much clearer path to one day running for president. It’s still technically possible to spend a few decades crafting a legislative record and working your way up the leadership ladder, then eventually get your party’s nomination, like Bob Dole did. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to inject yourself into a few controversies, make some notable speeches, and take a trip or two to Iowa. Do that, and like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz (or Barack Obama), you can run for president in your first term.
Cruz, however, is doing something completely new. He may not bother to introduce any bills, but he is creating a new kind of legislative innovation. Perhaps for the first time in American history—I can’t think of any precedent, and knowledgeable people I’ve asked can’t either—we have a senator who has taken it upon himself to lead revolts in the House in order to undermine his own party’s leadership there.
Last year, Cruz held private meetings with Tea Party members in the House, urging them to keep the government shut down in the vain hope that they could destroy Obamacare as the price of ending the crisis. And this week, he was at it again:
The beginning of the collapse of House Speaker John A. Boehner’s border bill came Wednesday evening, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gathered more than a dozen House Republicans at his office in the Dirksen building on Capitol Hill.
It was there, as Boehner (R-Ohio) held his own meetings on the other side of Constitution Avenue, that Cruz heard that the speaker didn’t have enough votes—and realized that if his House allies held firm, he could rupture the fragile coalition supporting the measure…
He agreed that Boehner was distracted and said they should stick to their principles. The freshman senator also reminded them to be skeptical of promises from House leaders, particularly of “show votes”—legislative action designed to placate conservatives that carry little, if any, weight.
That quiet assurance was enough to persuade the conservatives to effectively topple Boehner’s plan, at least on Thursday, by balking when he said he would hold a largely symbolic standalone vote on Obama’s program.
We shouldn’t overstate the impact of Cruz’s involvement; it’s likely that Boehner’s immigration plan would have failed even if this meeting hadn’t taken place. But once again, Cruz has used his influence with House conservatives to help undermine Boehner and engineer a debacle for Republicans.
You might wonder at the strategic wisdom of that, but what’s bad for the GOP can be good for Ted Cruz. If we assume that his primary goal is mounting a presidential campaign, Republican unity isn’t something to be desired. You know what Republican unity gets you? Candidates like Bob Dole and Mitt Romney: establishment figures who get the nomination because it’s their turn and they seem like the best chance the GOP has of winning. Cruz is going to be the candidate of the far right, and the only way he could possibly prevail in a nomination fight is if it turns out to be a complete mess, with multiple factions engaged in bitter recriminations that fail to resolve themselves. If there’s a compromise candidate, it isn’t going to be Ted Cruz; if there’s a bloodbath, he stands at least a chance of being the last one standing.
I think it’s highly unlikely that Cruz could get the GOP nomination. But if you think about his actions in terms of stoking the GOP division and dismay that give him a shot, they make a lot more sense.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 1, 2014
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