“A New Level Of Immaturity”: Ted Cruz Manages To Get Even More Repulsive
OK, Sen. Ted Cruz showed me: I accused him of hypocrisy for his Nelson Mandela praise last week – praise that horrified his racist wingnut Facebook fans – and he followed up by attending Mandela’s memorial service this week.
That’s nice. But far from getting into the “What Would Mandela Do?” spirit of the day, he made headlines by walking out on the speech by Cuban President Raúl Castro. President Obama, meanwhile, is being torched by the right for shaking Castro’s hand, and even seeming to “bow” to the Communist leader; can’t some tall conservatives, at least, explain that what we saw was a tall man greeting someone shorter? Nah.
Of course, Cruz couldn’t pull off his walkout with quiet dignity. ABC News broke the story, and its headline reads “Cruz says he walked out of Mandela service when Raul Castro spoke.” Get that? It appears Cruz wasn’t spotted walking out, he announced it, with a hectoring statement from his spokeswoman to ABC: “Sen. Cruz very much hopes that Castro learns the lessons of Nelson Mandela. For decades, Castro has wrongly imprisoned and tortured countless innocents. Just as Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, Castro should finally release his political prisoners. He should hold free elections, and once and for all, set the Cuban people free.”
I can very much promise you that Ted Cruz has not learned the lessons of Nelson Mandela.
Communist Cuba did indeed help the African National Congress and Mandela always expressed his gratitude. Castro had as much right as Obama to speak at the service. In fact, one lesson of Mandela applies to Cuba today: We should stop seeing the world in Cold War terms – which is what led the U.S., particularly Ronald Reagan and the American right, to support Mandela’s jailers and their apartheid rule — and realize that we can do more to support democracy in Cuba by engaging with Castro than by walking out on him.
Also: Are we supposed to think it’s a big deal that Cruz won’t endorse Steve Stockman against “liberal” Texas Sen. John Cornyn (he of the second most conservative voting record in the U.S. Senate, which is saying something). Because it’s not. “As the senator has said many times, he will likely not get involved in any incumbent primaries,” Cruz’s communications director told Jonathan Martin. (That’s a promise he made to mend fences with his GOP colleagues after his government shutdown fiasco.)
Of course, anyone who cared about either the state of Texas or the state of the Republican Party would “get involved” in that race. They’d stand up and say Steve Stockman isn’t fit to be a rodeo clown, let alone a U.S. senator, and endorse Cornyn. If Cruz’s staying neutral is supposed to represent a new maturity, I’d hate to see what’s considered his juvenile behavior.
Well, we’ve already seen it. But still, what a low bar for Ted Cruz’s “maturity.” Even Rand Paul is backing his Kentucky colleague Mitch McConnell over his 2014 Tea Party challenger – and Matt Bevin, said challenger, isn’t a racist nutjob. If Cruz won’t support Cornyn, that’s because he’s hoping he can get an edge on Paul with the racist nutjob vote in 2016. Good luck with that, Sen. Cruz.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 11, 2013
“A Right Wing Non-Plan”: Ted Cruz Reveals He’s A Thin-Skinned Wuss, Hypocrite And Policy Lightweight
Sen. Ted Cruz pretends to be a tough guy, but mostly he spends his time trashing Democrats in front of adoring right-wing crowds and conservative journalists. On Wednesday he sat down with CNN’s Chris Cuomo – you didn’t expect him to go to MSNBC, did you? – and showed himself to be incredibly thin-skinned when pressed just a little on how he would replace the Affordable Care Act he wants to repeal. It was an interesting window on Cruz’s temperament as well as his cynical, threadbare “policy” agenda.
Cuomo asked Cruz how he would replace the law he inveighs against, and as usual, Cruz dodged the question and kept on inveighing instead. Cuomo followed up. “You don’t think that you have a responsibility as a U.S. senator to do better than that, in terms of offering a solution for what to do next?” he asked.
And Cruz shot back: “Well, I appreciate your trying to lecture me in the morning.”
Cuomo didn’t leave it there.
“No, no, no, not at all, Senator. I’m worried, same as you, anybody who looks at the situation has worries.”
So Cruz tried to turn the tables. “If you’re worried, did you speak out for the 5 million people who have lost their health insurance?”
Cuomo had an answer: “Absolutely — we’ve been covering it doggedly. The problem is, I don’t have the power to fix it. You do. That’s what a U.S. senator does, is you sponsor law. You know this. It’s not a lecture, it’s a concern; I’m asking, what are you going to do about it?”
Apparently Cruz isn’t used to being grilled. Cuomo got him to share what passes for an answer from conservatives these days: “Let people purchase health insurance across state lines.”
Wow. That’s what Princeton and Harvard Law degrees get you: a warmed-over right wing non-plan that’s been around forever. As Ezra Klein reported back in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office looked at it in 2005 and found it didn’t reduce the number of uninsured and would only save the federal government $12 billion over the next eight years. (By contrast, the CBO says the ACA will reduce the deficit by $41 billion in 2013 alone.)
The CBO also found that allowing people to buy insurance plans across state lines would “make insurance more expensive for the sick and cheaper for the healthy, and lead to more healthy people with insurance and fewer sick people with insurance.” Other than that, it’s a terrific idea.
Of course, insurers like Cruz’s non-plan because it would mean a boon for the states that provide the least regulation and thus encourage the “cheapest” but least protective insurance policies. Rather than insuring states’ rights and competition, which conservatives pretend to like, it would, in effect, create a national insurance-regulation standard, as states then raced to the bottom to compete. Of course, a state’s “rights” usually diminish, for conservatives, whenever that state decides to give its citizens more power and its corporations less.
So in just one morning, Ted Cruz was revealed as a wuss, a hypocrite and a policy lightweight. The last one doesn’t matter on the right, but the first two won’t wear well in a presidential race. Kudos to Cuomo for not accepting Tea Party platitudes as a substitute for governing proposals.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, November 20, 2013
“The Ted Cruz Armageddon Is Coming”: For Now, He’s On Probation
Did you catch Ted Cruz’s numbers in that Pew poll that came out this week? You may not have, because there were a few other things going on. So take a guess as to his favorable ratings among Tea Party people. I can tell you that 18 percent expressed no opinion, so the numbers add up to 82. So, 65-17, 68-14? Could he possibly have topped 70?
He sure could have. It was 74-8. Eight! It used to be 47-10 in a prior poll. In other words, a lot of people who weren’t able to form an opinion of him now can, and it’s swooning. Among non-Tea Party Republicans, as you’d imagine, a rather different story: It’s 56-44 (everyone has an opinion!). That’s favorable, but it ain’t 74-8. And in these numbers, among dozens of other auguries, we see the Armageddon that’s coming in the GOP between now and 2016. What on earth are the establishment Republicans going to do about this man?
Examine with me a few more numbers, from an earlier Pew survey taken over the summer. That one found that while Tea Party people make up 40 percent of Republican voters, they make up 49 percent, or roughly half, of those who vote in every primary. Got that? OK.
So now put the two surveys together: Half of the most loyal Republican voters approve of Cruz at 90-percent levels (74 is nine-tenths of 82). Still think he couldn’t win the nomination?
You better believe he can. The chance that he could win a presidential election is as close to zero as any plausible candidate’s chance could be. I think he tops out at around 180 electoral votes. But the nomination? Not. Impossible. At. All.
So I ask again: What are the establishmentarians going to do? What, for example, can Mitch McConnell do? Not a whole lot. Individual senators are pretty autonomous. Remember when liberals were screaming during the health-care debate, “Why doesn’t Obama give Ben Nelson the Johnson Treatment?” Because the Johnson Treatment doesn’t work anymore, least of all on the serenely messianic, of which Cruz is definitely one.
Can a group of establishment senators break him, as a previous cohort, led by Margaret Chase Smith, broke Joe McCarthy? They can try, and that might make some difference. Their success will depend to a great extent on where the right-wing media decide to land. Will Roger Ailes and the rest of them do what’s right for the party and the country, or for the ratings and the bottom line? Why do I not want to know the answer to that question?
Much will hinge on what happens in 2014, in the coming crisis negotiations and then in the elections. If Cruz overreaches in January, they’ll polish him off. He is presumably smart enough to know that he’s on probation. So my guess is that as the January deadline approaches, Eddie Haskell will start bringing the teacher some apples. He’ll behave. Oh, he’ll mis-behave just enough to signal to the peanut gallery that he’s still Eddie Haskell; the world’s Eddie Haskells can’t help themselves. But he’ll keep it in line. And if he’s very smart, he’ll do those little, sugary things that senators value so much—the hand-written note when the wife’s checked into the hospital, that sort of thing.
He’ll spend the rest of 2014 guiding the Tea Party like Columbus on the Santa Maria. Rand Paul will be back there on the Niña, and farther back, Marco Rubio on the Pinta, straining to catch enough wind to keep up. But everyone will know who’s holding the compass.
The elections will be crucial. If the GOP loses control of the House because of perceived Tea Party looniness, Cruz will be blamed and held accountable. As for the Senate, it’ll be just slightly more nuanced. We’re seeing now that all these Tea Party people are going to challenge establishment Republicans. If some of them win their primaries but lose the general to a Democrat—if, say, Nancy Mace, the Citadel grad, beats Lindsey Graham but then loses in the general, giving South Carolina its first non-racist Democratic senator since Fritz Hollings, who’s probably the only non-racist Democratic senator the state has ever had—Cruz will, again, be blamed and held accountable. But say Mace wins, and a few others do too, even if the GOP doesn’t take control of the Senate. And say the Republicans hold the House. That’s a slightly ambiguous result. But any ambiguous result is easy for a demagogue to spin into a great victory. It’s precisely the kind of thing demagogues do best.
If the results a year from now don’t give the establishment the excuse it needs to bury him, Cruz will be off to the races. And then, Armageddon will come. To whom will the establishment hand the silver cross and vial of holy water? Chris Christie? Jeb Bush? South Dakota Senator John Thune, who offends no one (not yet, anyway) and who quietly voted for the deal to reopen the government and avoid default?
This will be a war. And it just might be a war the extremists will win. Establishments have power and money, and it is true that Republican voters have typically, after all the noise, gone in the establishment direction (McCain, Romney). But the insurgents have been advancing the beachhead, and unless they’re pushed back once and for all, it’s only a matter of time. But an epic battle looms. I cry for what these maniacs are doing to my country, but at the same time I plan on enjoying every minute of it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 18, 2013
“Captain Of The USS Republican”: Raking In The Money, Ted Cruz Discovers The Fringe Benefits Of Failure
The recent political turmoil in Washington was multifaceted and involved quite a few personalities, motivations, and working parts. No one person was ultimately responsible for the entire nightmare.
But if we were to focus in on one main culprit, it’s safe to say Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) would lead the list of suspects. He spent the August recess demanding his party follow his shutdown plan; he offered leadership to House Republicans; the right-wing senator even made himself the public face of this fiasco with a 21-hour speech that served no legislative purpose, but made it easy for Ted Cruz to celebrate his fondness for Ted Cruz.
The freshman Republican became so notorious that when he campaigned for Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia a couple of weeks ago, the gubernatorial hopeful didn’t want any photographs taken of the two of them together.
But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. Cruz led his party into a ditch and drew the ire of Republicans who blame him for his misguided crusade, but the far-right Texan appears to still be in the midst of a long con.
If you were curious, talking on television for 21 straight hours is very lucrative. Over the last quarter, Ted Cruz’s still-young political action committee pulled in $797,000 during the period that included his extended C-SPAN advertorial. It’s nearly twice what Cruz pulled in the quarter prior. […]
His October report, which covers July 1 to September 30, notes that his PAC has $378,000 on-hand after the nearly $800,000 haul, money that will be used to support conservative candidates and issues close to Cruz’s heart.
Cruz isn’t making many friends among his Senate colleagues; he has no prospects for actually passing bills; and he’s cultivated a public reputation as a dangerous extremist. This may seem like a poor combination, but the senator clearly doesn’t see it that way.
While pushing his party over a cliff, Cruz has also positioned himself as a guy capable of winning straw polls, quickly raising a lot of money, and collecting a massive new database of conservative donors and activists – which may come in handy if a certain someone intends to launch a bid for national office in a couple of years.
Cruz’s party shut down the government and caused a debt-ceiling crisis for reasons that still don’t make any sense, leading to a surrender in which Republicans gained nothing. In fact, it was worse than nothing – the GOP has seen its support collapse, ending up with a deal that could have been better for the party had it been less ridiculous weeks ago.
But from Cruz’s perspective, these developments, while unfortunate, are a small price to pay for advancing his personal ambitions.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 17, 2013
“An Alternate Bizzaro Universe”: Ted Cruz’s “American People” Remain Imaginary And Elusive
Give Ted Cruz this much: He remains unbowed in the face of both substantive defeat and public opinion, which he ceaselessly claims to have on his side.
For example, yesterday Cruz addressed the press (the man seems to only communicate in formal speeches – can you imagine dining with him?) on the shutdown and its conclusion, declaring the whole thing a massive expression of the will of “the American people.” He said:
Unfortunately, once again, it appears the Washington establishment is refusing to listen to the American people.
It is unfortunate that Washington is not listening to the people.
And I want to commend the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives has taken a bold stance listening to the American people.
Months ago, when the – when the effort to defund “Obamacare” began, official Washington scoffed – they scoffed that the American people would rise up. They scoffed that the House of Representatives would do anything, and they scoffed that the Senate would do anything.
We saw, first of all, millions upon millions of Americans rise up all over this country. Over two million people signing a national petition to defund “Obamacare.” We saw the House of Representatives take a courageous stand listening to the American people …
As I have argued before, it raises the question of precisely which “American people” Cruz is speaking for, because it’s not the ones who are answering pollsters. For example, an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Monday found that 74 percent – 74 percernt! – of Americans disapproved of the way Congressional Republicans were handling the budget negotiations, an 11 percent increase from a few weeks earlier. That came after an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last week found only 24 percent of those surveyed approving of congressional Republicans – a result which Republican pollster Bill McInturff (who along with Democrat Peter Hart conducted the survey) said made it, “among the handful of surveys that stand out in my career as being significant and consequential,” along with polls taken in the wake of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Lehman collapse and the last debt ceiling crisis. (Cruz tried to “unskew” the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, but was unsuccessful.)
Further, polls have shown that Obamacare has become more popular and that the intensity among its opponents has ebbed. And while polls show that more Americans disapprove of Obamacare than like it (though those numbers are deceptive if you don’t take out the people who disapprove because the law doesn’t go far enough), surveys also show that most Americans prefer to have Congress work to improve the law rather than repeal or defund it, a la Cruz.
And all of this after polls showed overwhelming numbers of Americans disapproved of shutting down the government in order to win policy concessions from the other side … which brings me to Cruz on Fox News last night. “But we’ve also seen a model that I think is the model going forward to defeat Obamacare, to bring back jobs, economic growth, to abolish the IRS, to rein in out-of-control spending,” he said. A model going forward – that’s right folks, Ted Cruz enjoyed this shutdown so much that he wants to do it again.
Presumably he’ll claim then to be acting in the name of the American people as well. Ted Cruz was elected from Texas, but it’s clear he really hails from some bizarro alternate universe. Where else could Obama winning a comfortable re-election and poll after poll after poll showing that Americans like neither shutdowns nor the party behind the specific shutdown that just ended all add up to a by-any-means-necessary mandate to pursue Cruz’s narrow right-wing agenda?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 17, 2013
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